Original Text: "How To Be Successful"
Author: Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI
Compiled by: Zombit
I watched thousands of entrepreneurs and thought a lot about how to make a lot of money or create something important. Often, people start out wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 of my thoughts on how to achieve this exceptional success. These ideas will be easier to achieve for people who have achieved a certain level of "success" through privilege or hard work and hope to transform it into "extraordinary success" through further efforts. But much of it applies to everyone.
Let yourself continue to grow
Compound interest is magic, look for it everywhere. The exponential curve is the key to wealth generation.
A mid-sized business that grows 50% in value each year can become huge in a very short time. There are very few businesses in the world that have true network effects and extreme scalability. But as technology develops, more and more companies will have these characteristics, making it worth spending a lot of effort to find and create them.
You should also become an exponential curve - you should have your life follow an ever-increasing trajectory. What's important is progressing toward a career that has a compounding effect—progress in most careers is relatively linear.
You don't want to be in a career where the difference between someone with two years' experience and someone with twenty years' experience is thin - your learning rate should always be at a high level. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should produce more and more results. There are many ways to gain this leverage, such as capital, technology, brands, network effects, and managers.
Focus on taking your success metric (whether it’s money, status, impact on the world, or something else) by another level. Be willing to spend as much time as possible between projects looking for your next project. But I personally would hope that it (referring to the project) will be a project that "if successful, will make the rest of my career seem insignificant."
Most people are encumbered by linear chance. Learn to be willing to let go of small opportunities and focus on potential step changes.
I think the greatest competitive advantage in business—whether for a company or an individual's career—is the ability to think long-term and have a broad perspective on how different systems in the world fit together. A distinctive feature of compound interest growth is that the further into the future, the more important it is. In a world where few actually hold a long-term view, the market generously rewards those who do.
Trust the index, wait patiently, and be happily surprised.
Possessing almost excessive self-confidence
Confidence is very powerful, and almost all of the most successful people I know are confident to the point of being delusional.
Start developing this self-confidence early on and trust yourself more and more as you increasingly demonstrate that you have good judgment and can consistently deliver results. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in yourself, it will be difficult to give yourself a unique perspective on the future. But this is how most value is created.
I remember when Musk took me to visit the SpaceX factory many years ago. He went into great detail about the manufacturing process of each component of the rocket, but what struck me most was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending the big rocket to Mars. I came away thinking, "Well, that's the standard of faith."
Managing your own morale—and the morale of your team—is one of the biggest challenges in most careers. This is nearly impossible without a huge amount of self-confidence. And unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to bring you down.
Most highly successful people have at least once had a very correct vision of the future at some point, when people thought they were wrong. Without this foresight, they will face more competition.
Confidence must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any kind and actively avoid it. Now I try to always assume the criticism is valid and then decide whether to act on it. Seeking the truth is difficult and often painful, but it is the key to differentiating self-confidence from self-deception.
This balance can also help you avoid appearing conceited and unrealistic.
Learn to think independently
Entrepreneurship is difficult to teach because original thinking is difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this – in fact, it often rewards the opposite behavior. So you have to develop this ability yourself.
It's fun to think from first principles and try to generate new ideas, and finding ways to communicate these ideas to people is a great way to improve this ability. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.
"I will fail many times, but I will eventually get it right once" is the mindset of entrepreneurs. You have to give yourself plenty of opportunities to try your luck.
One of the most powerful lessons is that you can find solutions in seemingly unsolvable situations. The more times you do this, the more you'll believe it. Courage comes from getting back up again after being knocked down.
Proficient in "Sales"
Confidence alone is not enough – you must also be able to convince others of what you believe.
All great careers are sales jobs to some extent. You must promote your plan to customers, potential employees, the media, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some level of charisma and evidence of the ability to execute.
Improving your communication skills—especially written communication—is a worthwhile investment. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure you are thinking clearly and then use simple, concise language.
The best way to become a great salesperson is to sincerely believe in what you are selling. Selling something you truly believe in feels good, while selling a false product feels bad to yourself and others.
Improving your sales ability is like improving any other skill—anyone can get better with intentional practice. But for some reason, maybe because it doesn't feel good, many people think it's a skill that can't be learned.
Another big sales tip of mine is to be there in person when it counts. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to fly. While this was often redundant, on three occasions it resulted in turning points in my career that otherwise might have turned out completely differently.
Make risks easier to bear
Most people overestimate the risks and underestimate the rewards. It's important to take risks because you can't always be right - you have to try a lot of things and adapt quickly as you learn.
Early in a career, it's often easier to take risks; you don't have much to lose and potentially a lot to gain. But once you get to a certain point, you should try to make the risk more bearable. Look for small bets that only cost you 1x if you fail, but make 100x if you succeed. Then make a bigger bet in this direction.
But don’t save money for too long. A problem we see a lot at YC is with founders who have been at Google or Facebook for a long time. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation for always succeeding, it becomes difficult to give up these things (and people have an amazing ability to always raise their standard of living to be as high as next year's salary) ). Even if they leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy and human to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term achievements.
But when you're not on the treadmill, you can follow your instincts and spend time on things that could turn out to be really interesting. Trying to keep your life simple and flexible for as long as possible is a powerful approach, but there are obviously trade-offs.
focus
Focus is a multiplier at work.
Almost everyone I meet could benefit from spending more time thinking about what to focus on. Finding the right job is more important than how long you work. Most people waste most of their time on irrelevant things.
Once you find what you need to do, complete your few priorities quickly without stopping until you reach your goal. I have never met a slow person who was very successful.
work hard
By working smart or hard, you can outperform 90% of the people in your field, which is still a big accomplishment. But getting to 99% requires a combination of smarts and hard work - you'll be competing against other very talented people who have great ideas and are willing to work hard.
Extreme people achieve extreme results. Working hard comes with huge life trade-offs, and deciding not to do so is a completely rational choice. But it has many advantages. As in most cases, momentum builds and success begets more success.
And working hard is often really fun. One of the greatest joys in life is finding your purpose, accomplishing it with excellence, and discovering that your impact is significant on something larger than yourself. A Y Combinator founder recently said he felt happier and more fulfilled after leaving a big company and striving to pursue his greatest impact. Hard work should be praised.
In some cases, hard work has become a bad thing in some parts of the U.S., and I don't quite understand why, but that's certainly not the case in other parts of the world - the energy and drive shown by entrepreneurs outside the U.S. can make It quickly became the new benchmark.
You have to find ways to work hard without burning yourself out. People will find their own strategies, but what almost always works is to find work you enjoy and people you enjoy being around.
I think people who pretend you can be wildly successful without working hard most of the time are being misled. In fact, work endurance appears to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
Another thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work accrues like interest, and the sooner you start, the more it will pay off. It's also easier to devote yourself to work when you have fewer other responsibilities, such as family.
act boldly
I believe that it is easier to build a difficult startup than an easy one. People want to be part of something exciting and find fulfillment in their work.
If you're solving an important problem, you'll have an endless supply of people wanting to help you. Make yourself more ambitious and don't be afraid to do what you really want to do.
If everyone else is starting meme companies and you want to start a gene editing company, go for it and don’t doubt it.
Follow your curiosity. Things that are exciting to you are often exciting to other people too.
Determined
The big secret is that you can bend the world to your will an astonishingly high percentage of the time - most people don't even try and just accept the way things are.
People have a huge capacity to achieve things. Self-doubt, giving up too early, and not trying hard enough prevent most people from reaching their potential.
Ask for what you want. You usually don't get it, and rejection is often painful. But when it works, it works surprisingly well.
Those who say, "I'm going to keep at it until it works, and no matter what the challenge is, I'm going to solve it," will succeed in the end. They were persistent enough to give themselves a lucky chance.
Airbnb is my benchmark. They have many stories that I don't recommend trying to replicate (using the nine-slot three-ring loose-leaf pages kids used to store baseball cards to store maxed-out credit cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, and powerful vested interests The groups fight constantly, etc.), but they manage to survive long enough until luck is on their side.
To be determined, you must be optimistic—a personality trait that can hopefully be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimist.
Raise the bar for competition
Most people understand that a company is more valuable if it is difficult to compete. This is important and obviously true.
But this also applies to you personally. If what you do can be done by someone else, eventually it will be done by someone else at a lower cost.
The best way to raise the bar for competition is to build leverage. For example, you can do this by building a strong personal brand, building personal relationships with people, or becoming great at the intersection of several different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to find some way to achieve this.
Most people will do what most people in their environment will do. This copycat behavior is usually a mistake - if you do the same thing as everyone else, you won't be hard to replace.
Build a network
Great work requires a team. Building a network of talented people—sometimes tight, sometimes loose—is an essential part of a great career. The number of really talented people you know will often be the limiting factor in what you can accomplish.
An effective way to build a network is to help others as much as possible. Doing this over time is the source of most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m often surprised by how often good things happen to me now because I helped a founder ten years ago.
One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for taking care of the people you work with. Share the benefits generously and eventually it will come back to you tenfold. Also, learn how to assess what people are good at and place them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I’ve learned in management, and I haven’t read many books on it.) You need to have a reputation for being able to push people until they achieve more than they expected, but not letting them Burned out.
Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don't let them stop you from doing what you want to do. “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs all the time, and it almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to compensate for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members, rather than just hiring people who are good at the same things as you.
An especially valuable part of networking is being good at spotting undiscovered talent. Learn to quickly discover intelligence, drive, and creativity; these abilities will become much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is to meet a lot of people and keep track of who impresses you and who doesn't. Remember, focus on seeking speed of progress and don’t place too much emphasis on experience or current achievements.
Whenever I meet someone new, I always ask myself “Is this person a force to be reckoned with?” This is a great heuristic for discovering people who might accomplish great things.
A special case of networking is finding a famous person willing to bet on you, preferably early in your career. The best way, unsurprisingly, is to help in any way you can. (But remember, you have to return the favor at some point!)
Finally, remember to spend time with positive people who support your ambitions.
Get rich by owning things
The biggest economic misconception of my childhood was that people get rich through a "high salary." While there are some exceptions - such as entertainers - almost none of the people on the Forbes list in history made their fortunes from paycheck to paycheck.
Most people get truly rich by owning something that quickly increases in value.
This could be part of a business such as: real estate, natural resources, intellectual property or something similar. But no matter what, you need to have an equity in something rather than just selling your time. Time can only expand linearly.
The best way to quickly increase the value of something is to make the most things people want.
internal drive
Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress others. This is bad in many ways, here are two important reasons.
First, you'll work on consensus ideas and a consensus career track. You'll care a lot - more than you realize - about whether others think you're doing the right thing. This may prevent you from doing really interesting work, and even if you do, others will imitate it.
Second, you often miscalculate risk. You will be very focused on keeping up with everyone else and not falling behind in the competitive game, even in the short term.
Intelligent people seem to be particularly susceptible to this type of externally driven behavior. Being aware of this helps, but not much - you may have to work very hard to avoid falling into the copycat trap.
The most successful people I know are primarily intrinsically driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel the need to achieve something in the world. After you've made enough money to buy the things you want and achieved enough social status that it's no longer fun, intrinsic drive is the only force I know of that will continue to push you to higher levels of performance.
This is why the question of a person's motivations is so important. This is the first thing I try to understand about a person. Proper motivation is difficult to define as a set of rules, but you know it when you see it.
Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks. YC was widely ridiculed in its first few years, and few thought it would succeed. But they think it would be great for the world if it works, they like helping people, and they firmly believe their new model is better than the existing model.
Ultimately, you will define your success by doing excellent work in areas that matter to you. The sooner you start in that direction, the further you can go. It's hard to be wildly successful doing something you're not obsessed with.
Note: Response to my comment on HN
One of the biggest reasons I’m excited about basic income is that it will unlock a huge amount of human potential and allow more people to take risks.
Before that, if you weren't naturally lucky, you had to crawl for a while before you could afford to take the plunge. It's even harder if you're born into extreme poverty :(
Clearly it is an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I’ve seen enough people born into extremely adverse circumstances end up being amazingly successful to know that it’s possible.
I have a profound realization that if I hadn't been blessed with luck, I personally wouldn't be where I am today.
This article, taught by OpenAI founder Sam Altman: How to achieve success, first appeared on Zombit.
