How To Be Successful (via Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator)

I read Sam & YC blog lots of years in a row… this Sam’s post “How To Be Successful” is smth that I want to re-post here with my own comments.

1. Compound yourself

It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric — money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, 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.

I think 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.

My long-term vision.

I have no doubt that in 21st century we will live in more open, diverse & sex-positive world and be more educated and intelligent about relationship forms and sexual behaviour. We as a humans are all unique, with our own fantasies and sexuality. We all want have deep and meaningful relationships, with different level of sexual attraction.

Today’s society just can’t go back to the centuries, where sex was completely tabooed, just because it’s a too complicated topic to discuss and to manage. We are not humans from those centuries.

I see my mission to make our world more conscious of different forms of harmonic relationships and sexuality. Fortunately, I have my own 10y story of relationships, different experience and I still learning.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Managing your own morale — and your 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 you are, the more the world will try to tear you 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. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.

Self-belief is smth that you believe on (and do), that has very long-term effects.

This is why I study history of relationships and sexuality. For example, one of my fav’s — “Sex in the cultures of the world” by Zbigniew Lev-Starovich, “Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us” by Jesse Bering, “Marriage and Morals” by Bertrand Russell etc.

3. Learn to think independently

One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.

Think independently — I think this is one of the most important skills in 21st century.

4. Get good at “sales”

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

Working on it!

5. Make it easy to take risks

It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. 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. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

I’ve shifted away from the service agency business and put myself in the non-comfort zone. I can’t say that I always love this mode, but my vision & mission helps me on my way.

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

This one is extremely important!

7. Work hard

One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. 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 think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

No comments on this! Work hard, play .. as you like to play!

8. Be bold

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

Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

Being bold & follow curiosity is quite different skills. Being bold comes from all kinds of life & work experiences, and curiosity is the vehicle.

9. Be willful

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 you want. You 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.

Make things happen!

10. Be hard to compete with

The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake — if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

Great advice!

11. Build a network

I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.

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

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.

Great advice!

12. You get rich by owning things

This can be a piece of business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.

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

Great advice!

13. Be internally driven

The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

I think this is a very important point, we should not be driven by external factors nor popular trends. What drives us always comes from internal desire.