'How to be successful': 13 thoughts by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman wrote a blog on how to be successful. Here are 13 points by him.
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Compound yourself
"Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation."
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Have almost too much self-belief
"Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion."
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Learn to think independently
"Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own."
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Get good at “sales”
"All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelise your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc."
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"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."
Make it easy to take risks
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Focus
"Focus is a force multiplier on work. Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours."
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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."
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Be bold
"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."
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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."
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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."
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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."
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You get rich by owning things
"You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value. This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. "
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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. "