Summary of Sam Altman’s “How To Be Successful”
Compound yourself
You should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory
Each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
Focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric — money, status, impact on the world, or whatever
I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
Long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together.
Have almost too much self-belief
Believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong. If not, they would have faced much more competition.
Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.
Learn to think independently
Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this.
You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution.
Get good at “sales”
Getting good at communication — particularly written communication — is an investment worth making
Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill — anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice
Make it easy to take risks
Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time — you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.
Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.
Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
Focus
It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours.
Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on.
Work hard
Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.
You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.
Be bold
I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.
If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.
Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.
Be willful
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time — most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out”, and mean it, go on to succeed.
To be willful, you have to be optimistic — hopefully, this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.
Be hard to compete with
Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with
If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.
The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields.
Build a network
Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with — sometimes closely, sometimes loosely — is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.
An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments.
One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x.
Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.
You get rich by owning things
Almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.
You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value
But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.
The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
Be internally driven
Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people.
The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world
Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.
