How To Be Successful
Author: Sam Altman, Founder of OpenAI
Translator: Zombit
I have observed thousands of entrepreneurs and have thought a lot about how to accumulate a large amount of wealth or create significant things. Usually, people start wanting the former but eventually hope to achieve the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts I have on achieving this kind of extraordinary success. These ideas are more easily achievable for those who have already reached a certain level of “success” through privilege or hard work and wish to further transform it into “extraordinary success”. However, most of the content is applicable to everyone.
Table of Contents
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Continuously Grow Yourself
Have an Almost Excessive Confidence
Learn to Think Independently
Master “Sales”
Make Risk Easy to Bear
Focus
Work Hard
Act Boldly
Stay Determined
Raise the Bar of Competition
Build a Network
Get Rich by Owning Things
Internal Motivation
Note: My comment response on HN (Hacker News)
Compound interest is magic, seek it everywhere. The exponential curve is key to generating wealth.
A medium-sized company that grows in value by 50% each year can become huge in a short period of time. There are very few companies in the world that truly have network effects and extreme scalability. But with the advancement of technology, more and more companies will possess these characteristics, and it is worth putting in a lot of effort to find and create them.
You should also become an exponential curve – you should make your life follow an upward trajectory. It is important to develop a career that has compounding effects – most careers progress relatively linearly.
You wouldn’t want to be in a profession where there is little difference between someone with two years of experience and someone with twenty years of experience – your learning speed 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 leverage, such as capital, technology, branding, network effects, and management.
Focus on increasing the indicator of your success (whether it’s money, status, impact on the world, or other) by one more level. Be willing to spend as much time as possible searching for the next project between projects. But personally, I hope it will be a project that “if successful, will make the rest of my career seem insignificant.”
Most people are burdened by linear opportunities. Learn to be willing to give up small opportunities and focus on potential step changes.
I believe the biggest competitive advantage in business – whether for a company or an individual career – is the ability to think long-term and have a broad perspective on how different systems in the world interact with each other. A notable characteristic of compounding growth is that the further future becomes more important. In a world where almost no one truly holds a long-term view, the market will generously reward those who have a long-term perspective.
Trust in the power of compounding, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.
Confidence is very powerful, and almost all the most successful people I know are confident to the point of being almost delusional.
Cultivate this confidence from an early stage, and as you continue to prove that your judgment is good and that you can consistently deliver results, you will believe in yourself more and more. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in yourself, it’s difficult to have a unique view of the future. But this is how most value is created.
I remember many years ago when Musk took me to visit the SpaceX factory. He gave a detailed explanation of the manufacturing process of each component of the rocket, but what impressed me the most was the absolutely certain expression on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. When I left, I thought, “Hmm, this is the standard of belief.”
Managing your own morale – as well as the morale of your team – is one of the biggest challenges in most careers. It’s almost impossible without a lot of confidence. Unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to bring you down.
Most highly successful people have had a very accurate vision of the future at some point, when people thought they were wrong. Without this kind of foresight, they would face more competition.
Confidence must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate any form of criticism and actively avoided it. Now I try to always assume that criticism is correct and then decide whether to take action. Seeking the truth is difficult and often painful, but it is the key to distinguishing between confidence and self-deception.
This balance can also help you avoid appearing arrogant and unrealistic.
Entrepreneurship is difficult to teach because original thinking is difficult to transmit. Schools are not designed for this – in fact, they often reward the opposite behavior. So you have to cultivate this ability yourself.
Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is interesting, and finding someone to discuss these ideas with is a good way to improve this ability. The next step is to find simple, quick ways to test these ideas in the real world.
The mindset of an entrepreneur is “I will fail many times, but eventually I will succeed.” You have to give yourself many opportunities to try your luck.
One of the most powerful lessons is that you can find solutions in seemingly unsolvable situations. The more you do this, the more you will believe it. Courage comes from being knocked down time and time again and getting back up.
Confidence alone is not enough – you must also be able to persuade others to believe what you believe.
All great careers involve some degree of salesmanship. You must sell your plans to customers, potential employees, the media, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, a certain level of charisma, and evidence of execution capability.
Improving communication skills – especially written communication skills – is a worthwhile investment. My best advice for clear communication is to first ensure that your thinking is clear, and then articulate it in simple, concise language.
The best way to become an excellent salesperson is to genuinely believe in what you are selling. Selling something you truly believe in feels good, while selling a fake product feels bad for both yourself and others.
Improving sales skills is like improving any other skill – anyone can get better through deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it doesn’t feel good, many people believe it is an unlearnable skill.
Another great sales technique of mine is to personally appear at important times. When I first started out, I was always willing to take flights. Although it was often unnecessary, there were three times when it led to turning points in my career that would have been completely different otherwise.
Most people overestimate risks and underestimate returns. Taking risks is important because it is impossible to always be right – you have to try many things and adapt quickly through learning.
Taking risks is often easier in the early stages of a career; you don’t have much to lose and there may be a lot to gain. But once you reach a certain level, you should strive to make risks easier to bear. Look for small bets that only lose 1x when they fail, but can earn 100x when they succeed. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
But don’t save money for too long. At YC, one problem we often see is founders who have worked at Google or Facebook for a long time. When people become accustomed to a comfortable life, predictable work, and a reputation for always succeeding, it becomes difficult to give up these things (and people have an amazing ability to raise their standard of living to be as high as next year’s salary). Even if they leave, the temptation to return is strong. Prioritizing short-term gains and convenience over long-term achievements is easy and natural.
But when you’re not on the treadmill, you can follow your intuition and spend time on things that could become very interesting. Trying to keep your life simple and flexible for as long as possible is a powerful approach, although there are trade-offs, obviously.
Focus is a force multiplier in work.
Almost everyone I’ve met could benefit from spending more time thinking about what to focus on. Finding the right work is more important than how long you work. Most people waste the majority of their time on trivial matters.
Once you find what you should be doing, commit to quickly completing your few top priorities without relenting until you reach your goals. I have not encountered a slow-paced person who has been very successful.
By working smart or working hard, you can surpass 90% of people in your field, which is still a great achievement. But to reach the top 1%, you need a combination of intelligence and hard work – you will be competing with other highly talented individuals who have great ideas and are willing to work hard.
Extreme results come from extreme people. Hard work comes with significant life trade-offs, and choosing not to do so is a completely rational choice. But it has many advantages. As in most cases, momentum accumulates, and success attracts more success.
And hard work is usually really enjoyable. One of the greatest joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact is meaningful in relation to something bigger than yourself. Recently, a YC founder expressed feeling happier and more fulfilled when they left a big company and pursued their highest impact. Hard workIn certain cases, working hard has become a negative thing in certain areas of the United States. I don’t quite understand the reasons behind this, but it is clearly not the case in other parts of the world – the energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US has allowed them to quickly become the new benchmark.
You must find a way to work hard without burning yourself out. People will find their own strategies, but one method that almost always works is finding a job you enjoy and people you enjoy being with.
I believe those who pretend that you can achieve great success without working hard most of the time are misleading. In fact, it seems that work endurance is one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
Another idea about working hard is to start doing it early in your career. Hard work accumulates like interest, and the earlier you start, the more it pays off. It is also easier to fully commit to work when you have fewer other responsibilities, such as a family.
I believe that doing a difficult startup is easier than doing an easy one. People want to be a part of something exciting and find fulfillment in their work.
If you are solving an important problem, there will be a constant stream of people willing to help you. Allow yourself to be ambitious and don’t be afraid to do what you truly want to do.
If everyone is starting a meme company and you want to start a gene-editing company, then go for it and don’t doubt yourself.
Follow your curiosity. Things that excite you tend to excite others as well.
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will in an amazingly high percentage of the time – most people don’t even try, they just accept the status quo.
People have the capability to accomplish things. Self-doubt, giving up too early, and not working hard enough hinder most people from reaching their potential.
Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, but rejection is often painful. However, when it works, the results are surprisingly good.
Those who say, “I will persist until it succeeds, no matter what challenges come my way, I will overcome them,” will ultimately succeed. They have enough perseverance to give themselves a chance at luck.
Airbnb is my benchmark. They have many stories, and I don’t recommend trying to replicate them, but they managed to survive long enough for luck to be on their side.
To have willpower, you must be optimistic – I hope this is a character trait that can be improved through practice. I have never seen a very successful pessimist.
Most people understand that a company becomes more valuable if it is difficult to compete with. This is important and obviously true.
But it 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 of competition is to create leverage. For example, you can excel by building a strong personal brand, establishing personal relationships, or becoming excellent at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you must find some way to achieve this.
Most people do what most people in their environment do. This imitation behavior is usually a mistake – if you do the same things as others, you will not be hard to replace.
Great work requires a team. Building a network of talented people – sometimes close, sometimes loose – is a necessary part of a great career. The number of truly talented people you know often becomes a limiting factor in what you can achieve.
An effective way to build a network is to help others as much as possible. Doing this over a long period of time has been the source of most of my best career opportunities and three out of my four best investments. I am often surprised at the frequency of good things happening to me because of helping a founder ten years ago.
One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation as someone who takes care of people they work with. Generously sharing benefits will eventually come back to you tenfold. Also, learn how to assess what people are good at and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned in management, and I haven’t read many relevant books.) You need a reputation for being able to push people to achieve beyond their expectations, but without burning them out.
Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Recognize your weaknesses and find ways 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 often hear from entrepreneurs, and it almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to compensate for weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things as you.
A valuable part of building a network is being good at discovering undiscovered talent. Learn to quickly identify intelligence, drive, and creativity – these abilities become much easier with practice. The simplest way to learn is to meet a lot of people and keep track of who impresses you and who doesn’t. Remember to focus on the rate of progress rather than overvaluing experience or current achievements.
Whenever I meet someone new, I always ask myself, “Is this person an irresistible force?” It is a good heuristic for finding people who might accomplish great things.
A particular aspect of building a network is finding a well-known person willing to bet on you, preferably early in your career. The best way, unsurprisingly, is to go above and beyond in providing help. (But remember, you will have to pay it forward at some point!)
Lastly, remember to spend time with positive individuals who support your ambitions.
One of the biggest economic misconceptions of my childhood was that people get rich through “high salaries.” Although there are exceptions – such as entertainers – almost none of the people on Forbes’ rich list throughout history have gotten rich through salaries.
Most people get rich by owning something that appreciates rapidly.
This can be part of a company, such as real estate, natural resources, intellectual property, or something similar. But regardless, you need to have an ownership stake in something rather than just selling your time. Time can only scale linearly.
The best way to make something appreciate rapidly is to create something that most people want.
Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress others. This is bad in many ways, and here are two important reasons.
First, you will be working on consensus ideas and consensus career paths. You will care a lot – more than you realize – about whether others think you are doing the right thing. This can prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, others will imitate it.
Second, you will often miscalculate risks. You will be very focused on keeping up with others and not falling behind in the competitive game, even in the short term.
Smart people seem particularly susceptible to this external-driven behavior. It is helpful to be aware of it, but it’s not very helpful – you may have to work hard to avoid falling into the imitation trap.
The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel a need to accomplish something in the world. Internal drive is the only force I know that can keep pushing you to higher levels of achievement after you have earned enough money to buy what you want and have enough social status that it’s no longer interesting.
That’s why a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The correct motivation is hard to define with a set of rules, but when you see it, you know it.
Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks. YC was widely ridiculed in its early years, and almost no one believed it would succeed. But they believed that if it did succeed, it would be good for the world. They liked helping others and firmly believed their new model was better than the existing one.
Ultimately, you will define your success by doing excellent work in an area you believe is important. The earlier you start in that direction, the further you can go. It is difficult to achieve great success by doing something you are not passionate about.
One of the biggest reasons I am excited about basic income is that it will unleash a lot of human potential and enable more people to take risks.
Before that, if you weren’t born lucky, you had to crawl for a while before you had the capital to try something. It’s even more difficult if you were born into extreme poverty ๐
Clearly, the unequal distribution of opportunities is an incredible shame and waste. But I have witnessed enough people who were born into extremely unfavorable circumstances and eventually achieved amazing success, so I know it is possible.
I am deeply aware that if I wasn’t born lucky, I personally would not be in the position I am today.
