13 Thoughts On How To Achieve Outlier Success

Source: How To Be Successful - Sam Altman

Contents

Compound myself
Have almost too much self-belief and self-awareness
Learn to think independently
Get good at “sales”
Make it easy to take risks
Focus, Work hard, Be bold, Be willful, Be hard to compete with, Be internally driven
Build a network
I get rich by owning things

Usually, people start off wanting to make a huge amount of money and end up wanting to create something important.

Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success.

Everything here is easier to do once I’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success.

1. Compound myself

Exponential curves (compounding) are the key to wealth generation. Look for them everywhere.

Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will. It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.

Be an exponential curve myself. Move towards a career that has a compounding effect.

Don’t be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty — my rate of learning should always be high.

As my career progresses, each unit of work I do should generate more and more results.

There are many ways to get this leverage, such as

capital

technology

brand

network effects

managing people

Add another zero to whatever I define as my success metric — money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. Take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing, which, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.

The biggest competitive advantage in business — either for a company or for an individual’s career — is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together.

One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.

2. Have almost too much self-belief and self-awareness

The most successful people believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.

Cultivate self-belief early. As I get more data points that my judgment is good and I can consistently deliver results, trust myself more.

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

Managing my own morale — and my team’s morale — is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-belief. And unfortunately, the more ambitious I am, the more the world will try to tear me down.

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.

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. This balance also helps me avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.

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

3. Learn to think independently

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School generally rewards the opposite. So I have to cultivate it on my own.

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. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.

“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. I have to give myself a lot of chances to get lucky. One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that I can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times I do this, the more I will believe it. Grit comes from learning that I can get back up after I get knocked down.

4. Get good at “sales”

Self-belief alone is not sufficient — I also have to be able to convince other people of what I believe.

This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.

Getting good at communication — particularly written communication — is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure my thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.

The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what I’m selling. Selling what I truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful.

Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill — anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice.

Show up in person whenever it’s important.

5. 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 — I have to try many things and adapt quickly as I learn more.

It’s often easier to take risks early in my career; I don’t have much to lose, and I potentially have a lot to gain.

Once I’ve gotten myself to a point where I have my basic obligations covered I should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets I can make where I lose 1x if I’m wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

Don’t save up for too long, though. It’s easy — and human nature — to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment. But when I am not on the treadmill, I can follow my hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping my life cheap and flexible for as long as I can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

Spend 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.

Once I’ve figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting my small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. Slow-moving people are not very successful.

7. Work hard

I can get to about the 90th percentile in my field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both — I will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

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.

And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding my purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that my impact matters to something larger than myself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated.

I 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 I like doing with

people I enjoy spending a lot of time with

Work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of my career.

Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier I do it, the more time I have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when I have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when I’m young.

8. Be bold

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 I’m making progress on an important problem, I will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help me. Let myself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what I really want to work on.

Follow my curiosity. Things that seem exciting to me will often seem exciting to other people too.

9. Be willful

A big secret is that I can bend the world to my will a surprising percentage of the time — most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential. Ask for what I want.

I usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.

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. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way.

To be willful, I have to be optimistic — hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice.

10. Be hard to compete with

Companies and individuals are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with.

The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage.

Personal relationships

Strong personal brand

Getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields

and many other strategies

If I’m doing the same thing everyone else is doing, I will not be hard to compete with.

11. 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 I know often becomes the limiter for what I can accomplish.

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can over a long period of time.

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 10x.

Learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles.I want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.

Everyone is better at some things than others. Define myself by my strengths, not my weaknesses.

Acknowledge my weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop me from doing what I want to do.

“I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for my weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things I am.

A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent.

Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice.

The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress me and who doesn’t. Remember that I am mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.

A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on me, ideally early in my career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of my way to be helpful. (And remember that I have to pay this forward at some point later!)

Remember to spend my time with positive people who support my ambitions.

12. I get rich by owning things

I 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

But somehow or other, I need to own equity in something, instead of just selling my time. Time only scales linearly.

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.

13. Be internally driven

The most successful people are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world.

After I’ve made enough money to buy whatever I want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force that will continue to drive me to higher levels of performance.

This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but I know it when I see it.

Eventually, I will define my success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to me. The sooner I can start off in that direction, the further I will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything I’m not obsessed with.