Sam Altman's Keys To Success

By Josh Bobrowsky

Sam Altman is the founder of OpenAI, one of the most valuable and game changing companies the world has ever seen.

His blog post is one of the most profound and thoughtful lists I have read on what it takes to become successful, I hope you enjoy it.

Here is a summary of his blog post from 2019 “How To Be Successful”:

1. Compound yourself

• Find a way that you can grow at an exponential rate

• Avoid careers that stagnate after a few years

• Look for ways to add a 0 to your goal of success or 10x your success

• Take a long term view

2. Have almost too much self-belief

• Believing in yourself is powerful

• Cultivate your own belief in self early and use data to reinforce it

• Contrarian ideas is where success lies, you have to believe in yourself over the crowd

• Have insane conviction

• Balance self belief with self awareness

• While believing in yourself avoid coming across as entitled if possible

3. Learn to think independently

• School is not set up to teach independent thinking for entrepreneurship

• You have to give yourself a chance to get lucky- Fail many times but be really right once

• Powerful lesson: Figure out what to do in situations that appear to have no solution

• “Grit comes from getting back up after you have been knocked down”

4. Get good at sales

• Self belief must be combined with the ability to convince others (this is sales)

• All great careers have some form of sales

• Sales involves: Inspiring vision, communications, charisma and evidence of ability to execute

• Getting good at written communications is important

• Show up in person when it is important, getting on a plane to show up in person has changed his trajectory

5. Make it easy to take risks

• People over-estimate risk, and under-estimate rewards

• Risks are important, impossible to be right all the time

• Adapt quickly

• Look for small bets where if you lose its 1x and if you win its 100x

• Don’t save up too long or get too comfortable with a salary

6. Focus

• Focus is a force multiplier

• Focus on working on the right thing rather than hours worked

• Move fast, slow moving people are rarely successful

7. Work hard

• You can get to top 10% by working smart or hard but to get to the top 1% you need to do both

• Extreme people get results

• Momentum compounds, success begets success

• Figure out how to work hard without burning out

8. Be bold

• Let yourself grow more ambitious with your success

• Follow your curiosity

9. Be willful

• You can make things happen

• The ability to push through challenges is often what makes people successful

• You have to be optimistic

• I have never met a wildly successful pessimistic person

10. Be hard to compete with

• Be able to do things few others can accomplish

• Best way to do this is build up leverage: Personal relationships, personal brand or getting good at multiple fields

• If you are doing the same thing everyone else is doing you won’t be hard to compete with

11. Build a network

• Teams are the key to success

• Doing your absolute best to help others will lead to being around great people

• Build a reputation for taking care of those around you

• Be generous with sharing the upside

• Put people in roles they are great at

• Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses

• Spotting talent is easier with time and practice

• Spend time with positive people who support your ambitions

12. You get rich by owning things

• Salaries rarely make you rich, you get rich through ownership

• Ownership can be in anything that rapidly increases in value

13. Be internally driven

• Don’t let the opinion of others determine what drives you

• Don’t focus on keeping up with other people

• Do the things you find important to impress yourself not others

• Y combinator was wildly mocked at first, but later went on to be a great success

• You can’t let other’s opinions define your success

• Define your own success

Conclusion

These are some of the best tips I have read on how to build a path toward success from one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our generation. Feel free to read the words directly from Sam, I highly encourage it. How to Be Successful

This is a great recipe for success, and while it may not work for everyone, it is a good baseline to think about.

Cheers

Josh Bobrowsky