How To Be Successful | Sam Altman

Appreciation

Importance

Date Added

9.1.25

TLDR

13 tips on how to achieve outlier success. e.g., believe in yourself to the point of delusion, be willful, choose intentionally what you focus on, self-compound.

2 Cents

I plan to revisit this on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. As with all great life advice, I think it's super dense and difficult to apply despite being easy to understand. I suggest others do the same :)

#11.16.25

13. Be internally driven

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.

Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.

#9.1.25

Because there's so many great points, I'll just draw out two current favorites that I'll focus on:

I've thought in the past that taking even an entire day out of every week to do a daily review and figure out what I should work on for the next 6 days would be worth it, because I'd rather have 6 days be in the right direction than 7 days in a worse on.

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.
I need to cold email more and act as if I could get what I want. Almost always, I don't get the conversations or opportunities I want not because I get rejected but because I don't even ask. That seems like a failure mode I should and could avoid.

9. Be willful

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.

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.