How to Be Successful

How to Be Successful. An essay by Sam Altman, from January 2019.

Compound yourself

Sam Altman has watched thousands of founders. From that, thirteen thoughts on outlier success. The first: compounding. Look for it everywhere.

Most careers grow in a straight line. Aim for an exponential one, where each unit of work yields more than the last: through capital, technology, brand, networks or people.

Let small opportunities go; chase step changes. Try to add a zero to whatever you measure success by. Almost nobody thinks long term, so the market rewards those who do.

Almost too much self-belief

The most successful people he knows have self-belief bordering on delusion. Without it you can't hold contrarian ideas, and that is where the value is.

His benchmark: Elon Musk on a SpaceX factory tour, talking about sending big rockets to Mars with absolute certainty on his face.

But balance it with self-awareness. He now listens to criticism assuming it is true, then decides whether to act. Truth-seeking separates belief from delusion.

Learn to think independently

Original thinking is hard to teach; school rewards the opposite. So cultivate it yourself: reason from first principles, trade ideas with people, test them fast and cheap.

The entrepreneur's way: fail many times, be really right once. Give yourself lots of chances to get lucky. Grit is what you learn each time you get back up.

Get good at sales

Belief alone is not enough; you have to convince others. Every great career becomes a sales job: customers, hires, press, investors. Clear writing is worth the investment.

Sell what you genuinely believe in; snake oil feels awful. Sales is learnable with practice. And show up in person when it matters: three plane trips changed his career.

Make it easy to take risks

People overestimate risk and underestimate reward. You can't be right every time, so try many things. Find bets where you lose one x if wrong and make a hundred x if right.

Do not wait too long. Founders who spent years at Google or Facebook find comfort hard to leave, and lifestyle grows to match next year's salary. Keep life cheap and flexible.

Focus

Focus multiplies everything else. Almost everyone would do well to think harder about what to focus on. Working on the right thing beats working long hours.

Once you know, be unstoppable on your small handful of priorities, and quick about it. He has never met anyone very successful who moves slowly.

Work hard

Smart or hard gets you to the ninetieth percentile. The ninety-ninth needs both, because you are competing with talented people who also work a lot.

It is often fun: finding your purpose and excelling at it. To avoid burnout, pick work you like, with people you like. And do it early, because hard work compounds.

Be bold

A hard startup is easier than an easy one. People want to join something that matters, so an important problem gives you a constant tailwind of helpers.

If the crowd is building meme companies and you'd rather do gene editing, do that. Follow your curiosity; what excites you usually excites others.

Be willful

The world bends to your will surprisingly often. Most people never try. Ask for what you want: usually you won't get it, but when it works, it works very well.

People who truly mean to keep going until it works almost always do. Airbnb survived maxed-out credit cards in a binder and dollar-store cereal, until luck arrived.

Be hard to compete with

Companies are worth more when hard to compete with. So are people. Whatever you do that someone else could also do, they eventually will, for less money.

Build leverage: relationships, a personal brand, or skill at the intersection of several fields. Doing what everyone around you does is a mistake.

Build a network

Great work takes teams, and the talented people you know become the limit on what you can do. The way to build that network: help people, for years.

Be generous with upside; it comes back tenfold. Put people where they are great. Define yourself by your strengths, and hire for your weaknesses.

Get good at spotting undiscovered talent. Look for rate of improvement, not credentials. The test he applies to anyone new: are they a force of nature?

You get rich by owning things

As a child he assumed people got rich from high salaries. Almost nobody on the Forbes list did. Selling your time only scales linearly.

You get rich by owning things that grow quickly in value: a piece of a business, real estate, intellectual property. To make those, build what people want, at scale.

Be internally driven

Most people are externally driven: they work to impress others. So they chase consensus ideas and misjudge risk, afraid of falling behind. Smart people are prone too.

The most successful are internally driven: they need to make something happen. Once money and status stop being fun, it is the only force left.

His benchmark: Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham. YC was mocked for years, but they believed it was good for the world. Wild success needs obsession.

In short

Compound yourself: choose work where each year builds on the last.

Believe almost too much, be bold, and keep going until it works.

Focus, work hard early, and make yourself hard to compete with.

Help people, own things, and be driven from the inside.

The original says it better than this. Read it: blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful