Source: Chuangyebang
Editor’s Note
After Musk, who will be the world's new generation of technology leader?
If you do a survey in the United States, 90% of people will choose OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman. Bill Gates said that the company's latest product, ChatGPT, is "no less significant than the birth of the Internet."
Altman, 38, has had a career that has been full of surprises. At the age of 19, he dropped out of Stanford University's computer science department to start his own business. At the age of 26, he and his entrepreneurial partner sold the company for $43 million, becoming financially independent. At the age of 29, he invested in and managed the largest startup incubator in the United States, YC, which expanded tenfold in five years. At the age of 30, he co-founded Open AI with Musk and others, becoming one of the world's top entrepreneurs.
In the eyes of Paul Graham, founder of YC and godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Sam is a very courageous leader and pioneer. "If Sam Altman is thrown onto an island of cannibals, he will become the king of the island in five years."
This article is a blog written by Altman when he was about to take over as CEO of OpenAI in 2019. Through exchanges with a large number of entrepreneurs and technical talents during the YC period, Altman summarized his entrepreneurial secrets. The title of the article is plain, "How to be successful", but every word is precious and is still regarded as a benchmark by the Silicon Valley venture capital circle.
The following is a compilation of the original work by Chuangyebang.
Compounding Growth
Sam said that compound interest has magical power and exponential curve is the key to creating wealth. If the value of a medium-sized enterprise increases by 50% every year, it will become a giant in a few years.
There are not many industries in the world that truly have network effects and are highly scalable. But technological advances make this possible, and you can take the time to discover and create such opportunities.
The same is true for personal careers. Most career development trajectories are linear, but success requires choosing a career with a compounding effect. There are many ways to achieve this goal, including leveraging capital, technology, brand, network effects, and engaging in management work.
Absolute confidence
Sam said that the most successful people he knows are ridiculously confident.
Why? Because success is about transcending mediocrity, and reverse thinking is needed to create the greatest value. And it is difficult for people who are not confident in themselves to have reverse thinking ability.
One challenge for a startup CEO is to inspire morale for himself and his team. Without self-confidence, this task is almost impossible to accomplish. The greater one's ambition, the more setbacks one will suffer. At this time, one can only rely on self-confidence.
Confidence can easily lead to arrogance. How can we overcome it?
Sam's approach is to force himself to assume that these criticisms are correct, and then adjust the plan based on this. Entrepreneurs must learn to maintain a balance between self-confidence and self-awareness, and avoid being out of touch with others due to overconfidence.
independent thinking
The entrepreneurial process requires original thinking, which is difficult to teach in school, so you can only learn it by yourself.
Sam highly praises Musk's "first principles". Musk suggests that everything should be based on "first principles", starting from the essence of the problem, coming up with new ideas, and trying to find simpler and faster ways to solve the problem through communication with others.
In addition, Sam has two major experiences. First, for entrepreneurs, failure is commonplace. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change. After more failures, success will appear.
Second, if you push yourself into a desperate situation, inspiration will often come. This can be understood in reverse, lack of inspiration may be because the problem is not difficult enough. Sam said that inspiration often comes from pressure, and he has proven this time and again and firmly believes in it. (See "The death row inmate of the gold mine, the burst of creativity, just because he was forced into a desperate situation" by Chuangyebang)
Focus on sales
Confidence alone is not enough, entrepreneurs need to have the ability to convince others.
Sam said that no matter what job you do, the essence is sales, selling yourself. If you are a boss, you need to sell yourself to investors, media, and partners. If you work for others, you need to sell yourself to your boss and sell your products to customers.
A good salesperson needs to meet four conditions: good ideas, strong communication skills, a little personal charm, and execution. But the premise of good sales is to have absolute confidence in the products you sell.
Sam has some special insights:
*Written communication skills: Think things through and write them concisely.
*Sales, like most skills, can be honed. The longer you do it, the better you get at it.
*It is very important for the CEO of a startup to participate in “selling”.
Stay focused
Focus can make work more efficient.
Sam said that the people he knows spend a lot of time figuring out what to focus on, and their results are very good. This shows that doing the right thing is more important than working hours. Most people spend their time on unimportant things.
Once you figure out what to do, act fast and focus on the few most important things. Successful people are fast movers.
work hard
If you have one of the two, intelligence and diligence, you can surpass 90% of the people. But if you want to surpass 99% of the people, you must be smart + diligent, because your competitors are often such people.
Sam has two points of view: First, only by doing things to the extreme can you achieve extraordinary results.
Second, entrepreneurship cannot maintain a balance between work and life. However, diligence has a compound interest effect, which often brings one amazing return after another, which can generate great joy in life.
Sam believes that if hard work is to generate compound interest, it also needs to start as early as possible. The earlier you start working hard, the longer you will profit and the more profit you will make.
Of course, hard work cannot overdraw your body. How to balance? Sam said that everyone has their own tricks, but one thing that is definitely reliable is to do what you like with people you get along with.
Be more willful
As long as you are willful enough and persist, the world may change according to your will.
Most people either don’t dare to try, don’t work hard enough, or give up too early, resulting in their potential not being realized.
Sam believes that Airbnb is a good example. No matter what difficulties it encountered, CEO Brian Chesky was able to persevere and finally waited for the day when luck would come.
How can you stay stubborn and determined? Sam's advice is to stay optimistic. Optimism is a character trait that can be gradually improved through practice. After all, almost no one who is successful in business is pessimistic.
Build a network
The ceiling of a person's career often depends on how many outstanding people he can gather around him.
How to build a personal network? Sam has three suggestions:
*Help others as much as possible
Most of Sam's work and investment achievements came from the help of noble people, and these people were often people he had helped inadvertently in the past.
*Maintain a good reputation
This includes: treating everyone you work with well; generously sharing resources with others; recognizing talent and making good use of people, allowing everyone to fully display their talents.
* Make friends with positive, like-minded people
Discovering talents is an effective way to build interpersonal networks, and the method is to socialize more. In addition, we should not be limited to others' past work experience and current achievements. We need to pay attention to whether this person has potential and whether the potential can be stimulated in a short period of time.
Whenever he meets a new person, Sam asks himself, "Does this person have extraordinary abilities?" For those who are eager for talent, this question is worth thinking about.
To get rich, you have to "own things"
Sam said that the Forbes list tells us that, except for some artists, few people get rich by salary. Earning a salary means selling your time, and the wealth gained by time can only maintain a slow linear growth, and it is impossible to grow explosively.
Sam believes that only by owning "something" that can appreciate rapidly can one become truly rich, whether it is a business, real estate, natural resources, or intellectual property.
The best way to quickly increase value is to produce large quantities of something people want. Entrepreneurship is one way to do this.
Have internal drive
When Sam recruits, he first looks at whether the person has internal motivation.
He believes that most people's work motivation is mainly externally driven, and these people do everything to make outsiders think they are great.
This mentality is harmful. First, it will cause you to care too much about what others think at work, and follow the crowd and stick to the old ways. Second, it will lead to misjudgment of the situation, for example, it is easy to focus on the main competitors instead of customers.
Sam believes that most successful people are self-driven. They do things to satisfy themselves and they feel it is their responsibility to change the world. When a person has money and status, the attraction of these two will gradually disappear. Only internal motivation can push a person to climb higher.