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38-year-old OpenAI founder's self-description: My secret to success.

2023-02-08 11:38

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Original title: "ChatGPT Founder Altman's Self-Description: Why Did I Succeed?"

Original source: Chuangyebang

"Editor's Note": After Musk, who will be the global new generation of technology leaders?

If you conduct a survey in the United States, 90% of people would choose Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI. Bill Gates said that the company's latest product, ChatGPT, is "no less significant than the birth of the internet."

38-year-old Altman has had a career of opening up all the way. He dropped out of the computer department of Stanford University at the age of 19 to start a business; at the age of 26, he and his entrepreneurial partner sold the company for $43 million, becoming financially free ever since. At the age of 29, he invested in and managed YC, the largest startup incubator in the United States, which grew tenfold in five years. At the age of 30, he joined forces with Musk and others to co-found Open AI, becoming one of the world's top entrepreneurs.

According to Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Sam is a bold leader and pioneer. "If you threw Sam Altman onto a cannibal island, he would become the king of that island in 5 years."

This article was written by Sam Altman in 2019, just before he was about to become the CEO of OpenAI. Through his interactions with numerous entrepreneurs and tech professionals during his time at YC, Altman summarized his secrets to success. The title of the article, "How to be successful", may seem plain, but every word is a gem and it is still regarded as a guiding principle in the Silicon Valley venture capital community.

The following is a summary by Chuangyebang of the original work.

Compounding Growth

Sam said, compound interest has magical power, and the index curve is the key to creating wealth. A medium-sized enterprise, if its value grows by 50% every year, will become a giant in just a few years.

In the world, there are not many industries that truly have network effects and high scalability. However, technological advancements have made this possible, and you can spend time discovering and creating such opportunities.

My personal career is no exception. Most career paths are linear, but success requires choosing a career with compound interest. There are multiple ways to achieve this goal, including leveraging capital, technology, brand, network effects, and engaging in management work.

Absolute Confidence

Sam said that the most successful people he knows are those who are excessively confident.

Why? Because success is about surpassing mediocrity, and it requires reverse thinking to create the greatest value. However, people who lack confidence in themselves find it difficult to possess the ability of reverse thinking.

For CEOs of startups, a challenge is to inspire their own and their team's morale. Without confidence, this task is almost impossible to complete. The greater one's ambition, the more setbacks they will face. At this time, only self-confidence can help.

Self-confidence can easily lead to arrogance. How to overcome it?

Sam's approach is to force himself to assume that these criticisms are correct, and then adjust his plans based on this. Entrepreneurs must learn to balance their confidence with self-awareness to avoid becoming disconnected from others due to overconfidence.

Independent Thinking

Entrepreneurship requires original thinking, which is difficult to teach in school and can only be learned through self-study.

Sam highly admires Musk's "first principles". Musk suggests starting everything from "first principles", starting from the essence of the problem, coming up with new ideas, and trying to discover simpler and faster ways to solve problems through communication with others.

In addition, Sam has two major insights. First, for entrepreneurs, failure is commonplace. Quantity leads to quality, and with more failures, success will eventually emerge.

Second, when you push yourself into a corner, inspiration often comes. This can be understood in reverse, that a lack of inspiration may be due to the problem not being difficult enough. Sam says that inspiration often comes from pressure, and he has repeatedly experienced this and firmly believes it. (See "The Death Row of the Gold Mine, Creativity Explodes, Only Because of Being Pushed into a Corner" on Entrepreneurship Times.)

重视销售

translates to

Value Sales

in English.

Just being confident is not enough, entrepreneurs need to have the ability to persuade others.

Sam said, no matter what job you do, the essence is all about sales, promoting yourself. As a boss, you need to promote yourself to investors, media, and partners. As an employee, you need to promote yourself to your boss and promote products to customers.

A good salesperson needs to meet four conditions: good ideas, strong communication skills, a little personal charm, and execution ability. However, the premise of doing good sales is to have absolute confidence in the product you are promoting.

Sam has several special insights:

*Written communication skills: Think through things clearly and write them concisely and clearly.

*Sales, like most skills, can be honed. The longer you do it, the better you become.

*Startup CEOs need to participate in "picking orders". This is very important.

Stay Focused

Focus can make work twice as efficient.

Sam said that the people he knows spend a lot of time figuring out what they should focus on, and their results are very good. This shows that doing the right things is more important than the length of time spent working. Most people spend their time on unimportant things.

Once you have figured out what needs to be done, take quick action and focus your energy on a few of the most important things. Successful people are quick to act.

Efforts at work

If you excel in intelligence and diligence, you can surpass 90% of people. However, to surpass 99% of people, you must have both intelligence and diligence, as your competitors are often such people.

Sam has two views: first, extreme actions are necessary to achieve extraordinary success.

Secondly, it's difficult for entrepreneurs to maintain a balance between work and life. However, diligence has a compound effect and often brings amazing returns, which can generate great joy in life.

Sam believes that diligence needs to generate compound interest and should also start as early as possible. The earlier you start working hard, the longer the profit time and the more profit you will gain.

Of course, diligence cannot be overdrawn on the body. How to balance? Sam said that everyone has their own tricks, but one thing is for sure, doing things you enjoy with people you get along with is reliable.

任性一点

translates to

Be a little more willful

As long as you are stubborn enough and persist, the world may shift according to your will.

Most people either don't dare to try, don't work hard enough, or give up too early, resulting in their potential not being fully realized.

Sam believes that Airbnb is a good example. No matter what difficulties arise, CEO Brian Chesky can persevere and finally wait for the day when things turn around.

How to maintain stubbornness and firmness? Sam's suggestion is to stay optimistic. This personality trait of optimism can be gradually improved through practice. After all, almost no successful person in business is pessimistic.

Building Interpersonal Networks

The ceiling of one's career often depends on how many outstanding people he can gather around him.

How to build a personal network? Sam has three suggestions:

*Help others as much as possible

Sam's work and investment achievements are mostly due to the help of influential people. These people are often those whom he has helped in the past without realizing it.

*Maintain a good reputation

This includes: not mistreating every colleague; generously sharing resources with others; having a discerning eye for talent and utilizing it well, allowing everyone to fully display their talents.

*Meet positive and like-minded people

Mining talents is an effective way to establish interpersonal networks, and the method is to socialize more. In addition, we should not limit ourselves to other people's past work experience and current achievements. What we need to focus on is whether this person has potential, and whether the potential can be stimulated in a short period of time.

Whenever Sam meets a new person, he asks himself, "Does this person have any abilities that are different from ordinary people?" For those who are eager for talent, this question is worth considering.

To make a fortune, you must "have something".

Sam said that the Forbes list tells us that apart from some artists, few people get rich by relying on salaries. Earning a salary means selling one's time, and the wealth obtained from time will only increase slowly in a linear manner, and it is impossible to have explosive growth.

Sam believes that only by possessing something that can quickly appreciate in value can one truly become wealthy. This can be a company, real estate, natural resources, or intellectual property.

The best way to rapidly increase value is to mass-produce what people want. Entrepreneurship is one way to do this.

要有内驱力

translates to

要有内驱力

in English.

Sam Recruitment, first look at whether the person has internal drive.

He believes that the main motivation for most people's work is external drive, and these people do everything to make others think they are great.

This mentality is harmful. Firstly, it can lead to being overly concerned with the opinions of others in work, following the crowd and being conservative. Secondly, it can result in misjudging the situation, such as focusing too much on the main competitors rather than the customers.

Sam believes that most successful people are driven by themselves. They do things to satisfy themselves, and they feel that changing the world is their responsibility. When a person has money and status, the attraction of these two things will gradually disappear, and only internal drive can push a person to climb higher.