Sam, the founder of OpenAI, founded the location service provider Loopt in 2005 when he was 19 years old. It was acquired in 2012 at a valuation of US$43 million. He became the president of YCombinator in 2014. In 2019, he officially took the post of OpenAI, which he co-founded with Musk. It was this year that he wrote a blog - how to Be Successful / How to be successful. I compiled his 13 points and my thoughts:
1/ Choose non-linear growth Compound yourself Sam believes that outstanding people or companies should start a business that allows them to grow with compound interest, so that their growth becomes faster and faster, and their advantages become greater and greater. Linear life is scary, you can predict where you will be and what you will be doing 30 years from now. The challenges in the early stage of life may be very small, but you will encounter leaping opportunities (wind outlets/noble people), and you will persist in making yourself grow exponentially.
2/ Be absolutely confident. Have almost too much self-belief. Create a positive cycle of solving difficulties -> building confidence -> solving greater difficulties -> gaining more confidence. As an entrepreneur, if you don’t believe in yourself, it will be difficult for you to find your direction among the crowd and move forward firmly. We may fail many times, but as long as we have one huge success, we are a good entrepreneur.
3/ Learn to think independently Being a good student in school is actually very simple - just do what the teacher says and you will get good grades. But entrepreneurship itself is complex and changeable. Although you can learn from excellent people, you still have to make your own judgment and thinking in the end. Try to let yourself think independently and find a way out of the dilemma. If you do it too much, you will become more comfortable.
4/ Get good at “sales” Simply believing in yourself is not enough. The more critical next step is to let others believe in yourself. This is sales. Many good careers actually have a sales component, and the same goes for being an entrepreneur - you need to sell yourself to investors, employees, and customers to get them to join you and support you. The key to selling well is to believe in what you're selling and practice it.
5/ Make it easy to take risks. Most people overestimate risks and underestimate rewards. Even if they see the rewards, they are unwilling to take risks because they are used to a more comfortable life and success in familiar fields. But crossing classes requires risks, especially those things that succeed a hundred times in return. This is the case with entrepreneurship. By lowering your desires and giving yourself more room for choice, you can take risks more easily.
6/ Stay focused Focus is the amplifier of a person’s potential. The most successful people actually have a very similar action framework: think about which things are the most critical to accomplishing the goal, and then focus frantically on these few things to quickly achieve some results, and develop like a snowball in the right direction. This process requires concentration and thinking about what to focus on.
7/ Work Hard You can work smart or work hard to reach the top 10% in the industry, but only by doing both can you reach the top 1%. Working hard is a necessary condition for success for most people, but you also need to know how not to burnout/collapse. The best way to stay energized at work is to find something you really enjoy.
8/ Make bold decisions Be Bold In fact, it is easier to get help from society and everyone’s support to build a difficult startup than to build a simple startup. When everyone is working on a simple project, you may be bold enough to truly pursue what you imagine. If you are confident, capable and hardworking enough, many people will unconsciously want to help you help yourself. God will help him
9/ Be Wilful Most people will not wake up and realize that we can actually change the world. They tend to doubt themselves, give up too soon, or not try hard enough. If you boldly pursue what you want, you may fail painfully, but if you succeed, the rewards will be huge. Only by being stubborn and optimistic can you get to the end. Maybe the pessimists are right, but the optimists are the ones who succeed.
10/ Find your unique competitiveness. Be Hard to Compete With You will find that a company that is difficult to compete will have a higher valuation, and the same is true for people. If what you do is easy for others to imitate, then there will be someone cheaper to do the same thing in the future. The solution is to find your unique competitiveness: interdisciplinary knowledge, cross-field experience, personal connections, and personal brand can all help you.
11/ Build a Network No matter what others say, there is no lone wolf in starting a business. Even the core part of your job is to build a network of investors, customers, and teams. Do four things well: 1. Be altruistic and loyal to your teammates 2. Find your core strengths and use your team to make up for your shortcomings 3. Be good at discovering undervalued talents 4. Surround yourself with good and positive people
12/ Assets determine wealth You Get Rich by Owning Things People often have the illusion that you will become rich if you work hard. But it is difficult to become rich by simply going to work or doing business and selling your time in exchange for money. The way to get rich is to own real assets - companies, real estate, intellectual property, etc. The easiest way to get rich is to find a pain point that remains unsolved for most people and then solve that need on a large scale.
13/ Be Internally Driven Many people’s efforts are driven by the outside world - always comparing themselves to others and hoping to gain recognition from others. But this will lead us to always follow the crowd when choosing a direction, and to take the path that most people want to take, even though it may not be suitable for us. It also causes us to often be afraid to take risks and fear being left behind. In fact, the smarter people are, the easier it is for them to fall into this trap.
Recommend friends to read the original English text. The original sharing makes us feel like we are talking to him personally. Blogs are really a magical thing. In the Internet age, you can go into a person's heart by swiping your mouse and swiping your phone, and listen to his voice talking to you.
https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
