How to Be Successful
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
If you don't think you're doing what you should be, or think you could be doing So Much More, or that you have wasted potential, then maybe you're not successful yet, even if you're doing better on paper than some people who do view themselves as such.
Even a boring thankless job for me is where many of my peers dream they could be.
That said, there is something to having risks be actual risks. A friend of mine who has been much more successful than I have decided to take out a huge second mortgage on his house to start his own business (at the time it was an ISP and he spent nearly all of the money he pulled out on building out his data center and network). I advised him against it, after all if it failed he would lose his house. But his response was sobering, it was "Chuck, I need to know that if I fail I'll lose my house to keep my feet to the fire of not failing." Gutsy? Stupid? He made it work and is "retired" to his own boutique winery. Would I be as impressed if he had failed? I suppose it would depend on what he did after he got through that.
I didn't face any big financial loss, I had no mortgage, debt or capital requirements in the business. Just my own living expenses.
But I really, really, really didn't want to fail. That would mean moving back in with my parents and getting a job.
It really worked. If I had had enough money that I could have been in modest comfort indefinitely, I don't think I would have gotten off the ground.
I see a lot of people who would like to start a business. And they make some efforts here and there. But they have a decently comfy life, and they don't seem to have that drive that motivates you through the tedium, the tiny initial results, the lag between effort and something tangible. I consider it a virtual guarantee of failure.
"Young man, I could probably ask you the same question." The young man looked puzzled. The rich man continued, "Do you feel as though you have enough money?" "Well, sure, I suppose, but it would be great to have more."
"How does it feel--feeling that you have enough money and more would be a luxury? I've never once felt that way, so I can't stop until I feel that way, too."
Devoting your life to getting above some very high percentile in money is not the best use of your only life for most people, in my opinion, but as long as they're not stealing it, it's okay with me if others want that for themselves (and I don't feel entitled to a share of it.) I think we all should take seriously the responsibility to support ourselves and to help others who can't, but beyond that, there are countless forms of success that are as worthy as "owning lots of valuable things".
The topic is more about attributes of people who do large scale endeavors. Success should not be used in this context.
I've met simple people, with not much money or education, although they are successful to me cause they managed to create a nice family and have a happy life. Something that usually its hard for people working towards their careers 24/7.
Hesiod once wrote 'Moderation in all things'. That personally is my moto. I don't have to have done something that is out of this world to be successful. I can be successful enough by valuing my own time, raising my kids in a proper manner and generally being happy. If I am happy, I am successful.
Notorious B.I.G. - may he rest in peace, has a great song which IMHO is pure wisdom when it comes to money - "Mo' money, mo' problems"
So be -content- with what you have. And being content is an art form - easier said than done.
Eventually if you want to scale yourself in the exponentiation formula you become a vc, vs grist for the founder mill.
You only have so many 1% 5 year adventure chances to do a startup before you find your 50 and dont have much to show for your life.
If each have a %1 chance of success, it's very likely that the 6 adventure person wouldn't have much to show at the end of it.
Ending up an equivalent of mr. bullet ball is horrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leHwNiXgnh0
Because of survivorship bias, you usually never hear about these people.
Many people also try only 1 or 2 adventures, and if unsuccessful go into normal employment. But you jump off the 'potential exponentiation train' that sama describes by doing that, and you've lost out on 5-10 years of potential compound savings growth, which for many who can work at FANG instead means a million or two.
You also get to learn a lot and do fun stuff at FAANG employers too.
With that said I think it's missing a hugely important area -- which is mental and emotional health.
One of the things I've noticed in friends who have incredible business success, and have noticed in myself during periods of greatest productivity, is that successful people are able to keep their emotional state in check.
They don't get rolled easily by criticism or praise, they don't get dragged into short term thinking or fake crisis, and they don't let an emotional state push them into saying or doing something that they'll regret, or will blow up a relationship, or give away info in a negotiation.
I think it's up in the top 3-4 attributes of those who are able to fit the description described in the article.
The first big step in Emotional Intelligence is being able to understand and regulate your own emotions, and it's the first step for a reason.
Kids who passed the famous marshmallow test (were able to resist the impulse to eat the marshmallow when unsupervised) were far more successful in later life
I have two brothers who occasionally get very angry, cut off relationships on whims and sabotage themselves through acts of defiance and misplaced protest, and neither of them is very 'successful' (however you define it). There is definitely a link.
Unfortunately the marshmallow test as a predictor of later success is debunked. It's part of the replication crisis in psychology. Half of the psychology we learned may be wrong. People just aren't that straightforward.
We also know people with high time preference/ delayed gratification are wealthier.
So now - what is controlling for parental wealth doing? It's removing this genetic component.
Social science is confounded by genetics all the time, once you start to look for it.
On the other hand, becoming the POTUS is presumed to be the definition of "successful" (cf some comments on here yesterday) and Trump is all of those ^ things and more.
-- never put yourself in the position to go bankrupt
-- stay in the game - keep your overheads down to the minimum practical for you
-- learn to program so you can implement your own ideas without need for a cofounder or need to pay for anything more than hosting and a domain
-- just keep banging out your ideas into products until one catches on.
-- try to bootstrap and if possible avoid raising capital - it's too distracting and costly and dilutes your time massively
-- do your very best to avoid employing anyone until you really can't avoid it
-- don't get a cofounder if you can possibly avoid it - it can lead to arguments and business failure... if you really need help, bootstrap till you can employ someone
-- repeat until success or giving up, not because you're forced to stop
That said, I'd add to this the idea of thinking in terms of "Return on Capital Invested" where your time and effort are a from of Capital. IOW, it's important (IMO) to figure out how to direct your attention towards the efforts that are most likely to yield the outcomes (whether financial or otherwise) that you seek. The problem, of course, is that you don't know in advance how things will play out. So you have to experiment, but once you begin an experiment the big question becomes "do I keep going on this, or redirect my effort to something else which has a higher probability of success?" (for however you define "success").
If you are building it on the side even just making a few hundred dollars per month is going to completely change things for you, and give you the freedom to explore more risky ideas. We may not have a universal income, but with hard work and dedication ("showing up is half the battle"), I believe anybody here could build a side business to supplement their income in a meaningful way.
Good list in general. But identifying a market and seeking to serve it is a better recipe.
You still want to get stuff out there and test it rapidly. But having some idea as to whether a product will be useful is a good idea.
I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.
Read more - it's extremely funny and wise: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11505/11505-h/11505-h.htm#THE...
And of course people can argue all day about what is "being successful", since you could mostly put it as a matter of taste depending on what one finds satisfaction in, in life. It is indeed true that someone who doesn't have the same frame of reference for success as the author will have a harder time finding useful information in such a book/article, but that doesn't mean that because the measure of success can vary from person to person, it doesn't exist at all.
When such an article or book talks about that, there is a meaning behind those words that is conditioned by the cultural context in which it is used (as materialistic as it can be) and obviously this is pretty much never meant to be understood as "how to act as to be able to formulate statements that match 'I successfully did .*'", which is how this quote feels like to me...
When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.
"It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating." (...)
"You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." "
And the article then ends with:
"At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?"
Although there are people like Gilbert Strang, making his excellent courses (e.g. Linear Algebra) available online, which over a million people around the world have watched and benefited from, and helping to create a world with an amazing variety of free online course videos available in all subjects. That is success for a teacher, I suppose. And we're asked to believe (in this culture) that making a lot of money is or could be in any worthy sense a greater success..
Let's take this to its logical conclusion though. Is the happy drunk a success?
Success is defined by your culture, not yourself. It's an intrinsically social property, whose value is determined by your worth to others. Defining your own success is akin to deluding yourself.
This advice need not come from a rich person.
The answer is to be surrounded with deep and valuable human relationships.
Being a successful human, on the other hand? Is it measured by one’s own satisfaction with life? By one’s impact on the society? By the number of offspring one produces? It’s all very confusing.
I am not sure these viewpoints are reconcilable.
As opposed to financial success.
[0] http://www.anielski.com/real-cost-eliminating-poverty/
[1] One of the goals of the UN is to end extreme poverty by 2020, a very worthy goal, but this is going one step beyond that and ending global poverty, in all its forms, forever.
It's hard nowadays to define such thing with so much information around, moulding what a "successful" life should look like, how should it feel and where should it be lived.
It's up to us to define what we care about and how to measure our happiness.
As always, good reading material: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-...
As a non-profit founder I found the advice useful. If you think the incentives of the world are such that doing something important is basically the same goal as making money, then that's great, but I don't think so.
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
Do you have any alternatives or are you just venting your frustration?
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite will be very meaningful. But for some people, simply stating that can be the difference between them declining the invite outright, accepting it and it being a hardship and causing undue stress/friction for them, or accepting it and enjoying themselves. The same sorts of scenarios exist both professionally and personally, and being cognizant of them can bring a lot of success in life.
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
As a side effect, if we widen our view of success, there will be more place up in the 99.9%...
My dad is extremely successful in his field of expertise, one of the top experts in the world, but he hasn’t been able to turn that into financial success for his family. At the same time, he’s an incredible husband and father.
In many ways he’s inspirational, a great source of wisdom and a role model for me. If he was able to turn his talents into wealth it would have acted as a multiplier for him, his family and those around him.
Looking at his bank balance, he’s a total failure. But knowing him, and the person he is, how dependable, persistent and stoic he is, he embodies a lot of what I think leads to success in the broader sense.
[edit] a word
I'm having trouble reconciling this point. How can you continuously increase your effectiveness exponentially in a particular role? Take being a developer for example. Seems like the progression of skill is usually linear (with some variability). Is Sam saying that investing in becoming a great engineer ins't effective if your ultimate goal is to be extremely successful? I feel like this is overly reductionist. Maybe being an engineer for your entire career isn't going to lead to that massive success, but spending part of your career cultivating that skill does provide indirect benefits that can help you become super successful. For example, being able to rapidly prototype an MVP when you are testing product ideas. Building a business is the high-leverage action that could lead to massive success, but the years you spent cultivating your technical ability could be what enabled you to be able to build the MVP in the first place. Or maybe it allowed you to recognize good technical talent if your first engineering hires. I think exclusively focusing on tasks that provide orders of magnitude improvement is too direct and superficial of an answer. I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts.
For me, I've put a lot of effort into both breadth and depth, and that's where, for me, a (maybe not exponential but) super-linear growth comes from. When you dive deep on a broad set of topics, you start seeing relationships between them that others don't see. But that takes a lot of dedication to diving into a diverse set of things, and go deep on it.
For example, 10 years into your career as an entrepreneur, you'll have a network (and possibly financial assets, and possibly an existing successful business, plus vague intangibles like 'wisdom' and industry insight) which all lets you be vastly more effective than someone who is equally skilled but still in their first couple years.
I don't think Sam is telling you not to build any particular skill, but rather to put yourself on a path where, 10 years down the line, you'll be able to use those skills in a way that other folks can't compete with, thanks to the other assets/resources/multipliers you've built up for yourself, and the fact that you're playing in an area where there is a) the potential for scale and b) you own the upside if it works.
Caveat: I have no idea, just my interpretation of the article.
Not to mention some very keen, obsessed younger developer could easily replicate what you're doing.
However if you followed all of Sam's advice to the letter you could remain relatively unsuccessful despite all that advice. That's what survivorship bias is about: there's a significant luck component to success.
Well, yeah, the whole point is that we don't know how many people did those same things and then failed to complete a marathon.
There's no trick to it, you need to work and get lucky. Emphasis on the getting lucky. We don't need 1,000 thinkpieces from people who are already successful.
Give me an article from a person who can reflect on why they're not successful. That will be more interesting any day of the week.
I doubt it. I'm not successful because I haven't even put in the work these articles lay out. And I definitely haven't gotten lucky. I assume millions of dollars definitely won't come my way until I at least do the part of the equation in my control.
Doesn't sound like a very interesting article to me.
Pretty much everyone gets lucky eventually though. You might never hit a home run, but if you go to bat enough times then sooner or later you're going to get hit by the ball and walked to first.
He's in a much better position than most any of us to avoid survivorship bias in this. I see people once their business succeeds. He's there observing people early on, so he gets to witness both the successes and the failures.
I've been trying to find solutions myself - I'm trying to use some strategies listed in this book: The inner game of tennis, by Timothy Galloway, and I'm seeing positive results so far. He talks about 2 versions of self: self1 - the doer and self2 - the judgemental self, which is constantly evaluating self1, and adversely affect self1's potential. He has some useful suggestions on how to limit the impact of self2, and I found those pretty helpful so far.
It's hard to be your successful when you're not the best version of yourself.
You might find (books like) Albert Ellis' New Guide to Rational Living useful - I did! It's about observing and recording your recurring thoughts, particularly ones that make you feel bad, and replacing them with more accurate, helpful ones - stopping the self-sabotage. It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves without noticing. We're trained to be nice to others, without including ourselves in that. I used to do a lot of extremely negative, paralyzing self-talk - saying nasty things to myself I'd never dream of laying on someone else; sounds like you do this too, maybe. This falls under "How to love yourself", something I had to learn to do. Louise Hay has a great 12-point list of things under that heading, stuff like "Treat yourself like you'd treat someone you really love." Then as you get older, you realize you aren't so terrible, and others aren't so great..
I think 'self-belief' comes naturally with untangling that stuff, and otherwise isn't always a good sign, e.g.
"Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." ...I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images#id00026
Then you aren't outside your comfort zone enough because when you are, there will be NO DOUBT you've grown.
Do you know what the difference between a shitty golfer (like me) and a slightly better golfer (like my brother) is? Maybe 25 rounds of golf per year. If I played 25 MORE rounds of golf, I could beat him solidly.
Do you know what the difference between say Tiger woods and the very best Amateur golfer in the world is? A thousand rounds of golf. Ten thousand?
Point 1: Down here in the land of the unwashed masses of basically average developers like you and I, you can make noticeable strides by just consistently working a little harder. You can make leaps and bounds by consistently working A LOT HARDER.
Point 2: Once you start advancing past people, it gets harder and harder to advance past people. There's only so much room at the top, in every possible hierarchy. Check out some Jordan Peterson on Competence Hierarchy.
And I guess....
Point 3: The only real way to be successful is to be comfortable in your own body. I have some bad news for you buddy, this part of the article is complete horse shit.
"The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more."
Cultivate what early? Delusion? Self confidence? \eyeroll
Success means actually liking yourself and nothing more. Some people call this CONFIDENCE. Same exact thing.
How do you become confident? Achieve. How do you achieve? Apply your knowledge. How do you get knowledge? FAIL AT THINGS How do you fail at things? Try new things.
By the way "success" is such a stupid word. I have worked very, very closely with someone who has $100M in the bank. I was his computer guy for all his properties around the world and guess what? He's jealous of another guy we know with $1B in the bank.
Success != Money Confidence != Money
Success == Confidence
OH and guess what shows up when you have confidence?
Only everything you want.
3 years? Fuck. It sounds like you're on track for a long and successful career. Not everyone peaks early. Give yourself a break, spend a little more time networking and a little less time on your hard skills and you'll probably find greater opportunities for ground breaking things through relationships than through your skills.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. - Theodore Roosevelt
Relative metrics will show if you really are better than most other people. Absolute ones will show whether or not you can, in fact, do X to some standard.
I do not suffer from Imposter Syndrome. That's why. I find measures that show me what I can do, and to heck with all the sturm and drang from most people.
It does feel like shoehorning people into fitting some particular "pattern" that the author believes to be the "secret" to obtain said goal.
I always find it surprising that such short (relatively) articles, choke full of relatively difficult to apply advice gain a mass following and plenty of readers.
It does remind me of the rather stupid advice that depressed people get every day: "pull yourself up!" Amazing how we do seem to forget the complexity that riddles our minds.
Most people don't have any real access to capital, and most people's labor is totally alienated from its actual value. For most people, advice to "Work Hard" amounts to "Sacrifice More So Your Boss Can Get Richer".
Also, as far as "working hard", Americans are an extreme outlier: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product.... Maybe if Sam is hearing pushback against "Work Hard" as good advice, it's because Americans already work harder than other people in advanced economies for a lower quality of life (meaning less access to healthcare, less paid vacation, less self-reported happiness, etc).
Sam's a smart guy and knows all of this already, so it's baffling why he would include such a stupid throwaway line in this essay.
1. Write articles about huge success. 2. Inspire people to loose their lives trying to get rich. 3. If some of them start getting lucky by pure chance, convince them to share a large part of their business for small amount of money. ... 5. PROFIT!
- Work hard
- Have your sales point ( why should they do business with you and not with someone else, who does the same. The sales point doesn't have to be related to the thing you are selling / consulting on. They have to improve your overall image. Nothing else). I seem to be able to sell better in person, than anyone i ever saw ( but the work takes time...).
- Grow your network or know people who have the network
- Filter your network. Don't spend time on people who will never be in your niche. I filter it to simple: business. ( doing computers in the past, they were the most understanding clients) and no websites ( personally, i only create them for friends)
- Take risks
- Spend money when you can outsource, because your time is expensive.
- Have a long term plan, which niche are you growing into. If you have been "doing everything and nothing", than what has been the most profitable with the least amount of time spend.
- Prioritize, because your time is expensive
- A plan can take time to come together. Sometimes links ( helping someone out 2 years before, pay out later in the future). Don't be afraid to help them remember, when you helped them in the past.
- Don't be scared to drop clients. Especially if they are extremely rich/have no good business, they will consume all of your time and question every invoice you send.
- Don't partner up for doing a cloud application for "free"/"low-fee" in return of being a partner. Most cloud applications fail.
- If you are a developer, your "online-business" will probably fail in online marketing ( the chance is big). Get a plan how you would grow the business, before you have clients. Don't count on online marketing for it.
- Solve problems or iterate on solutions for existing problems
- Money earns money, if you use it
I think the article could be improved by considering more carefully who the advice is intended for, and tailoring the advice to them. The advice for a bright young college graduate should be different from the advice for a five-time failed entrepreneur or someone who has plateaued in middle management at 50.
But there are other good ways to be an outlier success than just being a businessperson. I was reminded of Hamming's "You and Your Research" which offered similar advice for academics. (Ironically, a copy is also hosted by paulg. http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html)
There are many points of similarity, so many that I start to wonder if sama was intentionally recasting its advice for businesspeople.
- be an independent thinker
- be courageous
- work is like compound interest, you need both hard work and talent
- work on small things that could grow to be big things and where you have some angle of attack
- have a network of people.
- be connected to what your colleagues do, but not a trend-seeker
- be emotionally committed
- be a good salesperson
- know your strengths and weaknesses
====
But there are some points of difference, like
- you'll do better work in spartan surroundings
- tolerate ambiguity. Believe in your idea enough to go forward, doubt it enough to consider alternatives
- make your work something that can lift others up to do more than you did
- Use the resources of the organization, don't fight it
- Don't be too rebellious or outwardly nonconformist
If you're lucky enough to be born with a good wetware and an advantageous set of mental characteristics, you can tweak something here and there, build on top of it and become "successful". If you're nowhere near, there's very little you can do to change it.
Take "be internally driven" for example. This shit is almost impossible to intentionally cultivate unless you're just lucky enough to be born this way.
You can call it "loser mentality", but even that is ultimately defined by your genes.
An accurate description of reality is both less flattering and seemingly less useful to others. But it does at least have the virtue of being real.
IMHO there are three major factors in changing the world:
#1 High general intelligence and ambition (genetics)
#2 Highly educated well-off parents (environment)
#3 Support of powerful people (opportunity)
You probably can't do much without at least one of these factors. Most people that do big things have all three working in their favor.
We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling:
For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples.
and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?
No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.
If I suddenly became black, and nothing else about me changed, studies have shown I'd likely be treated differently by police, potential employers, medical facilities, etc.
Recognizing that fact may make it easier to combat. Perhaps the next time I interview a woman I might be more conscious of the fact that what I'd perhaps have seen as "assertiveness" or "confidence" in a male candidate is being noted as "pushy" or "bitchy" in the female one, and back off from that assessment somewhat.
It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
In the end though it only hurts those who believe in it because those who believe in it also believe that it is a waste of time to work hard, be innovative etc because it will only lead to failure. So they never try. People also use it as a way to justify why they are poor or unsuccessful...not their fault...it is the privileged that made them poor! Their other political views will mainly focus on "economic justice" like more regulations on successful businesses, higher taxes for the rich, welfare programs for the poor (basic income basically a dream come true in their eyes) and so on.
Seems to be a very popular view these days among young people.
This is a completely incorrect idea of what people are arguing privilege means.
Privilege is a step up on the ladder. It doesn't get you the whole way, and someone without that bonus step can still get up the ladder, but it changes the difficulty somewhat.
Survivorship bias at its best: https://xkcd.com/1827/
1. worked extremely "hard" for 20 years 2. sacrificed relationships/family/living life 3. found moderate/average success, but never caught a break
>Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks
that could easily take 10+ years?
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
Some people are defective. It's just the truth.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).
Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.
For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
This is a recent blog post I wrote:
http://www.greshm.org/blog/life-is-just-a-game/
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
Any chance for an edit?
What most people don't understand is that UBI is not about giving free money. It's about giving the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to survive and shine in this unequal world.
Sure a certain percentage of the crowd will take advantage and be a "dole bludger" but these are persistent even in unemployment benefits schemes.
If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:
http://www.greshm.org/blog/tax-revenue-is-meaningless/
http://www.greshm.org/blog/the-wrong-thing-to-tax-is-money/
http://www.greshm.org/blog/theres-only-one-way-to-pay-for-a-...
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.
But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.
By giving people the freedom to spend their time how they choose, they'll at least have the option of doing something useful.
We can probably do even better than that, but basic income can at least help us clear this low bar.
Andrew Carnegie, a Scotish Immigrant, was born in a one room cottage; in the last 18 years of his life he gave away more than 300 million
But yeah, being born with some wealth to sustain you is a huge help.
Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire..
Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"
The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit.
When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful.
Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class.
I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network.
I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds.
Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.
The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process.
I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking.
I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job.
Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly.
So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!
This is what really gets to me. Those companies will go bankrupt, the investors will lose out, the employees will get laid off, and the founder will have paid himself $300k/yr for those 5 years of fiddling around with nonsense and playing with other people's money, as he goes off to the next venture and spouts platitudes of success. There's absolutely no connection anymore between actual business success. Gaining "funding" is seen as the end all be all goal, and anything after that is just whatever.
And I think the reason you see less diversity here comes down to a class divide in moral values. No working class person can possibly even comprehend thinking like that. It comes off as completely sociopathic. Yet there is a class of people who are perfectly comfortable doing it, and we just let them for whatever reason. It starts to make you understand where class based revolutions have come from in the past.
Best thing is to take the learnings, enjoy the journey towards potential success and try not to become emotionally invested into the end goal. It's super hard I know.
The power of sheer will is underrated imo. A long time ago, before technology (beyond sticks and stones) people did some incredible things to survive. They must have because we are here. I mean, chasing down deer for days, surviving in extremely harsh conditions, undergoing hunger and pain and injury and coming out the other side alive. We still have that capacity to some extent but most people don't believe this and stop at first discomfort.
Will seems almost magic sometimes, at least in my limited life experience. We do have incredible capacity to bend the world to our vision but it usually goes unfulfilled.
I wish I could will great success for myself but alas, although I think I'd enjoy being FU wealthy, it really seems like more trouble than it's worth. I don't want to deal with managing a bunch of resources and people. Don't want that sucking down my life. Don't want the responsibility, it seems a bit like a prison. So I do what interest me in places I feel good about until it doesn't anymore and usually skate by in relative comfort. I'd like to change this and reprogram my approach, but not sure how to go about it. I don't know if it's nature or nurture or what the situation is but I've noticed some people have incredible drive to materially succeed and best everyone else around them. However I like smelling the roses and casually enjoying my time on the planet. Maybe there's a pill I can get for this?
ugh.. I guess this comes down to what you define as "successful" but another option is to be content in the present, and not anxious and desperately wanting the future, when you imagine everything will be better than it is now. When you treat life this way, it becomes just a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.
Regularly get your vitamin levels checked and make sure to get adequate Vitamin D3
Regularly get your hormone levels checked for any imbalance.
Exercise, breathe, sleep well, and eat healthy.
I'm all over the place in my work over the past 10 years. I've worked on projects in several different disciplines (biotech, accelerators, consulting, environment). I tend to make forceful starts, but then drive myself off course either running out of money and getting a job or lack of a long term vision.
How do I resolve this?
Economist? Engineer? Lawyer? Doctor? Dentist?
I'm an economist, and i've always wondered if people with 2 years of experience can be better than those with 20+ years - if they're smart enough.
What does he mean by this?
That goes straight to the concept of scalability. Usually we talk about it in terms of businesses scaling or benefiting from economies of scale, but this is talking about scalability on a personal level. Not to be understated.
1. Do something wrong
Remember that you have to be exceptional to reach outlier success. You won't be unusual if you do what everyone thinks is the correct path. When you feel strongly about something, be unwilling to change or compromise. If you're not doing anything that's considered "wrong", you won't be exceptional, and you probably won't succeed.
2. Have many advantages
Have a high IQ. Have the ability to easily work hard. Have at least reasonably favorable social conditions (no debt, some money from family). To be exceptional, you need every advantage you can get. If you don't have many advantages, then you should really consider whether you can compete with people that have them.
I don't think it's right to encourage everyone to try for outlier success. By definition, you need to be an outlier to reach it. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe you are an outlier, then the odds are better than you might think.
Finding and accentuating strengths was a big focus of my previous employer, Rackspace. They used a program based on Strengths Finder [1] to determine your “strengths” and even had them displayed on your corporate ID badge. Their management philosophy was based on putting people in positions based on their strengths.
It seemed a bit hokey at first and it had its problems but it was pretty refreshing compared to the typical corporate environment that espouses working harder to overcome your weaknesses.
This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.
For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"
I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).
The best way to own things is to leave Google/Facebook: What??? I know this is an entrepreneur blog, but what happened to the sentence ,,If you want to be rich don't start a startup''?
Most of my friends who are rich are working (or worked) at Google/Facebook and just accumulated assets over time (until they had enough money to stop working).
All you need is start accumulating assets as early as possible and get to 15-20x of your salary (at most 10 years if you're really frugal, more if not that frugal). Don't be afraid of not having much cash left if you have a stable job.
0. Being curious
1. Thinking for yourself
2. Thinking about your thinking
3. Tweaking your thinking in the light of new discoveries
4. Associating yourself, as much as you can, with people who they themselves follow 0,1,2,3
The world is very complex. No one truly knows what they're doing. Our models of the world are just local approximations
All these books and essays ultimately boil down to "what worked for me, plus a million other things I'm not mentioning because they're not as glamorous, and a ton of luck: it could happen to you too!"
Yes there is hard work in becoming successful but a ton of it is luck: being in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, with the right people... This talk, peddling luck, expresses what I mean: https://vimeo.com/53494258
I totally understand that not all places on the Earth are conducive to entrepreneurial ambitions. Some places are downright hostile. I wish we had some mechanism to help those from such places.
What is this a reference to? What parts of the US? It's not backed up by a citation.
This is not the first time Altman has dropped a not so subtle cultural/political jab without any data to back it up.[1]
[1] "It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year." http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
"Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones.
First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway."
I'd say "they do what they do because they are motivated by other peoples expectations".
It's almost like there's no road map to success.
Here's my list, and its only one item.
"Be able to sustain yourself. To do that, find any profession where the income > expenses."
I learned that's the single, most important thing to being successful. If you can keep that up, everything else is just icing on the cake.
Those are all positives directions but I also think about what attributes are really important. I think working longer in a single industry is more important than working hard for a brief amount of time inside. Most of the opportunities comes later as you are deeper inside and just staying till that point is important.
For example, you might not want to be bold and have too much self-belief without being able to work hard, think independently or making it easy for yourself to take risks. If anything, try to do all of them, or be wary of how you pick and choose from the list.
Being "rich" and being on "the Forbes list" are two very different standards to aim for. (Neither of which has much to do with being a good/happy person or living a good/happy life.)
Philosophical question, why did you write such an article? What do you hope to accomplish?
Now the criticism:
Surely it must have occurred to you that at least some people out there are trying hard doing most things that you listed, and still not making it? What are you doing about it? The last I looked at YC funding, I saw that the figure is simply too low ( under $3000 a month) an incentive for a person with a stable salary to get into any venture.
Most of what you have written is indeed good - but statements like: "Be hard to compete with" - are laughable. Stop making an ass of yourself with such articles, you can do better ( I mean it). Have it proof read by someone smart, before you put it out.
To others:
Users throwaway000021, saberience, neilk, voiceclonr, distant_hat, ah765, mcilai, beatpanda and johan_larson have all made astute observations.
Do you think programming is like this?
1. by capitalizing on your strengths, and 2. by capitalizing on the weaknesses of others, and 3. by knowing which way is easier.
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
I think that there's a sampling bias here; in fact, that bias is even pointed out in the paragraph: > At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders.... I.e., this is an observation about FAANG employees who become YC founders.
But the fact is, very few of those drive/motivated Google/Facebook employees leave and become YC founders. So this observation is an observation about a very small subset of the people who choose to stay at GoogleFacebook.
I know a lot of people at the FAANGs who are there because they are primarily motivated by technical and scientific problems. The FAANGs -- and esp their research divisions -- are exceptionally good places to work for people who get meaning and fulfillment from technical excellence.
Also, such companies offer alternative roads to personal success, like climbing up the corporate ladder and getting wealthy with stock options. Probably not all bad, especially if you can identify with the corporation's vision and feel you're doing something useful.
2. Do what interests you
buys more Bitcoin
2. Be born into a successful family so that you will actually have the ability and inclination to take risks the way I say you need to.
...
14. Take care of your family.
Imagine if Obama wrote "How to Be a Successful Presidential Candidate" and every 2016 candidate read it and adopted it to a tee. We'd still have dozens of failures and only 1 success.
If success were really a formula, then we'd all be successful. We can't all get into harvard, we can't all be wealthy, we can't all be movies stars. We can't all win the game of musical chairs.
It's like the "how to become a millionaire" books. If we all followed their advice, nothing would change because the market has only room for X number of millionaires. And if it worked and we all became millionaires, being a millionaire would become meaningless.
At the end of the day, hard work, contacts and luck leads to success. The older I get, the more I realize that the latter two is far more important than the first criteria.
It's also a deceptive tactic people use to compare apples to oranges. We have to compare today with today and even more importantly, we have to frame money within the zero-sum context of power. Money and power are interchangeable and viewed in this context, wealth is a zero sum game.
> we have to frame money within the zero-sum context of power.
You can't just throw this out there. Why? In what way is power is zero-sum?
I don't really find your example of homeless people with smart phones all that convincing. Everyone knows being homeless is horrible.
It's not even that I entirely disagree with what your saying. I'm somewhat firmly planted in the vague middle area right now. But I would like to see the arguments better supported.
you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time
Even if it's just owning some index funds, equity in things that grow and compound over time is the easiest way to wealth I can think of.
I disagree on both counts. To use an overly relevant analogy, the market is not so efficient that successful startups cannot be built (and planned in advance of becoming successful), and it is possible for everyone in the world to become more competent and skilled and for this to just make everything better (e.g. better products for everyone).
You can have new insights that are generally true, and everything isn't zero sum.
In regards to Sam's advice. His advice is correct but people are interpreting it too strictly. Sam's advice is basically the baseline rules...as in you need to do this stuff AT LEAST to have a chance at being successful. This writing is not "do this stuff exactly and you will be successful 100% guaranteed".
The truth is....execution is the hard part and that's why most people fail. Building an amazing product that people love is hard. It really comes down to that...but if you want to be successful then that's what you need to do.
And I disagree with your sentiment. When people think that X, Y and Z will lead to success and they do X, Y and Z and they fail, that produces a mentality of failure and frustration and why people give up.
Understanding what success really is and how hard work, contacts and luck play a role in it actually frees people to take risks and try again and again. Unbridled and childish optimism is why so many people fail and that leads to a mentality of failure.
And no. Sam's advice isn't necessary nor sufficient for success. There have been plenty of successful people ( extremely successful ) who didn't follow his advice.
Also lets think about where sam even got these ideas from...he basically sits down with a bunch of other YC partners to discuss what they've notice as being "success traits". I don't think sam is just pulling these ideas out of his head so he can write a best selling "success in a box" type of book.
I've read a lot of Sam's work and I think he is 100% spot on and honestly I would consider him to be one of the few people giving advice on startups that is just the straight up truth about how to be successful. You need to have a genuinely good idea, convert that idea into a product that people love and monetize it (eventually). Execution on this is hard of course but if you do manage to do it then you will be successful.
So I don't see the response as the mentality of failure, but more of a warning about the "How to Be Successful" market that's out there. While I agree poor execution is abundant, I think "hard work, contacts and luck leads to success" is spot on. A lot of timing is just luck. If I could perfectly execute a model-T or Amazon.com its doubtful I will be successful because that's yesterday's problem and being first to market has many advantages.
I don't read this as a guide on how to be wildly successful as much as sober insight on how to reach a high level in your specific domain.
See Paul Graham's essay on wealth, specifically the subject about the pie fallacy. "...although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history." [1]
While we might all become richer collectively, we will never feel more successful unless we have someone to compare ourselves to.
Couldn't that someone be one's ancestors, or even one's past self?
A few examples come to mind. One is the craft beer scene. Microbreweries often adopt a collaborative business model with other breweries in their area, rather than being cutthroat and trying to run each other out of town. When a town becomes known for having a thriving beer scene, it attracts more customers in total, to the benefit of all the breweries there. It widens the proverbial pie. Thus, by association with that scene, all the individual businesses become more successful than they would have been otherwise. And in that case I'd say success is about more than money - name and quality recognition, and building a dedicated fan base would probably factor into it as well.
Of course there are limits to that model, such as a local market becoming too saturated, but I think it's a good example of success being a more nebulous term than only being dependent on defeating others.
It's time we stop pushing this STUPID narrative that software can make you rich if you are just willing to throw your user's interests out the window and "work harder". That is not how this works.
On top of that developed economies tend to grow slower - we may all be millionaires by early 70s standards with our fast cars and air travel, but I don't think in 50 years we will be millionaires by today's standards - there simply won't be that much growth in the future.
Investment supposes this is not true because wealth is not an evaluation of liquidity. The hardest thing to realize is that that's poor people thinking and you're already behind if that's how you operate (ie the vast majority of the world, including me).
To illustrate my point: can you imagine everyone living off passive income today?
As opposed to comments like yours which are completely pointless. Yes, not everyone can be in the 99th percentile. But the people who do, didn't just get randomly picked out of a hat. They got there by leveraging as much advice/wisdom as they could get your hands on, and then executing on it. And that's exactly the audience this article is targeting. Completely free of charge.
If you aren't interested in being in the 99th percentile, then don't read articles like these. Why waste your time writing comments that contribute nothing of value whatsoever. It's the equivalent of me walking into a sports bar and yelling at everyone about how pointless sports are.
Did you read the blog? This is essentially the tl;dr without a defeatist attitude.
Extremely well-said. Skill and hard work are (typically) necessary, but not sufficient conditions for major financial success. You also need a strong network or luck, and usually both.
As I grow older, this becomes more and more evident. I wish that I had spent more time as I was younger expanding my network. As for luck, well, that's out of my hands...
For example, in many Asian novels, power, wealth and opportunity is seen as an often vicious 0 sum game. Clans only have enough resources to put into 1 person. The throne of the kingdom only has enough space for 1 king, and it's a vicious fight to the top. There's only 1 space left for the exam and there's millions of people applying.
In the US, there is always the theme of you can find something better out there. Just move west. Opportunity is out there. You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
One thing Americans take for granted is the vast number of undeveloped resources and new opportunities America has had for the past 300 years that has shaped their thinking to be the way it is. Opportunity and exploration was abundant every century of US history - 1700s with the pilgrims, 1800s with the move west, 1900s with the reset of the world economy due to both world wars. You can make a claim that the least opportunistic time of the US is the modern era, which might be why we currently have so much complaints and unrest.
In contrast, I think China's relatively well developed historical and social maturity (it's at least 5000 year rich history) has embedded the thought of the 0 sum game into it's culture. Western Europe also seems to have similar themes. Would love if people from those backgrounds could share their perspective.
I'm sure this is to my benefit. If suffering comes, I chose to use it to make myself stronger, more determined and focused. i close to learn. and instead of rushing to optimize for their objectives, I get to really create my vision.
Everytime they reject me, I like to think about how I will make a point of how much of a broken system I think it is, when I eventually get successful.
I can't help but feel this advice runs contrary to communitarian ideals, to the point that were we all to follow it, not much would get done.
The best Engineers I have encountered surely have 'always been learning' but it had little to do with careerism, or 'trying to shape the world', rather just plain curiosity. Outside of that they'll have had 'normal' careers, more or less satisfied with the work to be done ahead of them. Why? Because it makes them happy to be contributors, doing their jobs well, getting a decent income, possibly raising their families etc.. There is a lot of mundane work be done even in the most creative of environments.
When Steve Jobs said 'you should try to nudge the Universe forward' my first thought was 'which way is forward?' - meaning that lack of at least some kind of moral impetus (of course a very difficult, grey thing) it's hard to know.
It's a very self oriented treatise, specific to the accumulation of power and influence of the individual, while effectively externalizing the 'other', and of course, all those aspects of life which are not very well described in terms of 'career' , 'money' , 'power' etc..
I'm trying to find an example of someone doing something 'purposeful' but who also had such 'compounding' effects: Ingvar Kamprad. Founder of IKEA.
He wanted to make reasonable design, available to the masses for a reasonable price, and his 'small compound rate' spread over a life seems to have built something that I think will outlast most of the FAANGs. And maybe there's some 'good' in there as well.
Thanks Sam, fine words for young entrepreneurs maybe, but let's try to keep this in context.
The world is very big, diverse, full of all types - if the Valley wants to 'win' in the next phase of evolution, it's going to have to figure out how to promote ideals that aren't just suited to the 1%, but everyone else as well.
Trying to do this while maintaining that creative/exceptionalism will be hard, but there's no way around it.
You can't be 'irreverent feisty antagonists upstarts' and 'managing major parts of the economy and influencing global affairs' at the same time.
Better yet the content of the post is 20,000 chars on a single line inside of a 558 line HTML doc. :/