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How to be Successful?

January 22nd, 2024 (9 months ago) • 4 minutes

Some of my notes and key takeways from How to be Successful by Sam Altman that I will look back in the future.

I am trying to build and ship more things this year (progress on twitter) so that I can be more successful outside of work and have something to look forward to. These advices are very applicable to me and I hope it will help you too.

1. Compound Yourself

  • I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But 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.

2. Self-Belief

  • If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

  • The more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to tear you down.

3. Think Independently

  • I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not.

  • 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.

4. Get Good at “Sales”

  • Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making.

  • Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works.

5. Take Risk

When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary).

  • It’s easy—and human nature—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.

  • Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works.

6. Focus

  • It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

7. Work Hard

  • One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself.

  • Find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.

8. Be Bold

  • Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

9. Be Willful

10. Be hard to compete with

  • 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.

11. Build a network

  • An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can.

  • Develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you

  • Have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.

  • The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t.

12. You get rich by owning things

  • You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

13. Be internally driven

  • 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.