Sam Altman是chatGPT 所属公司openAI的CEO，19岁创业loopt（卖了4340万美金），Y combinator 前总裁，两家核能公司的董事会主席。

Sam Altman19年初在博客中写了这篇文章，讲述了他对如何取得成功的13点思考。

原文地址：https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off （开始，着手）wanting the former and end up（最终） wanting the latter.

Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success（超凡的成功）. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.

outlier：a person, thing, or fact that is very different from other people, things, or facts, so that it cannot be used to draw general conclusions

1. Compound yourself

让自己复利增长，这里用到了经济学中的复利增长的概念，在一些分析报告中也会出现CAGR指标，就是年复合增长率的意思

Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is a business and investing specific term for the geometric progression ratio that provides a constant rate of return over the time period.

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to （...的关键）wealth generation（财富生产）.

A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects（网络效应） and extreme scalability（极高的可拓展性）. But with technology, more and more will.  It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory.（你应该把你的人生目标定为沿着一条不断增长的轨道前进；aim for：瞄准，以..为目标；ever-increasing：不断增加；up-and-to-the-right：股票市场向右且向上的增长曲线An incredible growth curve in your business metrics） It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.

You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning（学习率） should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage（获得杠杆的力量）, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.（资本，科技，品牌，网络效应，管理）

It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact（金钱/地位/世界影响力） 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.（footnote：脚注，次要的东西）

Most people get bogged down （深陷泥沼的 ; 停滞不前的）in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.（牺牲小的机会而去关注巨大的跃迁变化）

I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking（对长期的思考） 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（着眼于长远世界）, the market richly rewards those who do.

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Self-belief is immensely powerful. （自信具有非常强大的力量）The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.（到有妄想症的程度）

Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.

If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.（如果你不相信自己，就很难让自己对未来产生逆向思维。但这是创造最多价值的地方。contrarian：A contrarian is a person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position that is opposed to that of the majority, regardless of how unpopular it may be.）

I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory（记忆深刻） was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for（基准） what conviction（信念） looks like.”

Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors. （所有努力中的最大挑战）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（摧毁你）.

Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong.（大多数非常成功的人至少有一次在人们认为他们错了的时候，未来证实他们是对的。） If not, they would have faced much more competition.

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness（自我意识）. 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.（寻求真相是艰难的，而且常常是痛苦的，但这是将自信与自欺欺人区分开来的东西。）

This balance also helps you avoid coming across as（给人留下...的印象） entitled and out of touch.（任性，失控）

3. Learn to think independently

（学会独立思考）

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.

Thinking from first principles（从第一性原理出发去思考） and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.

“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.（需要给自己获得幸运的机会）

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.（在似乎无解的情况知道应该怎么做） 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.（毅力来自于意识到你可以在被击倒后重新站起来。get back up：重新爬起来）

4. Get good at “sales”

Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.（说服别人相信你所相信的东西）

All great careers, to some degree（在某种程度上）, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. （你必须向客户、潜在员工、媒体、投资者等宣传你的计划。evangelize： try to persuade people to become Christians）This requires an inspiring vision（鼓舞人心的愿景）, strong communication skills（交流能力）, some degree of charisma（个人魅力）, and evidence of execution ability（执行能力）.

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.（使用简洁明了的语言）

The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling（真正相信你销售的东西）. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful.

Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice（刻意练习来提高）. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable.

My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points （职业选择的转折点）for me that otherwise would have gone the other way.

5. Make it easy to take risks

Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward.（高估了风险，低估了回报） Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly （快速适应）as you learn more.

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 （自己的基础生活有保障的时候）you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make （寻找可以下的小赌注）where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to （适应）a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind（抛诸脑后） (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy—and human nature（人性）—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.（优先考虑短期收益和便利，而不是长期实现）

But when you aren’t on the treadmill（in a boring routine，treadmill还指枯燥无聊的工作）, you can follow your hunches （跟随你的直觉）and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs（权衡取舍）.

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.（专注是工作的力量倍增器）

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served（受益匪浅） 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.（做正确的事比长时间工作更重要。大多数人将大部分时间浪费在无关紧要的事情上。）

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

7. Work hard

You can get to about the 90th percentile（百分位数） in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.（势头会加剧，成功会带来成功。beget：To beget something means to cause it to happen or be created.

）

And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it（做出色）, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself（发现你的影响力对其他事情来说比对你自己更重要）. 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（努力发挥最大可能的影响力）. Working hard at that should be celebrated.

It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US, but this is certainly not the case in other parts of the world—the amount of energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US is quickly becoming the new benchmark.（美国以外的企业家表现出的精力和干劲很快就会成为新的标杆）

You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out（努力工作而不筋疲力尽）. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.

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（伤害，损害）. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.（工作耐力似乎是长期成功的最大预测因素之一）

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. （在职业生涯开始时就努力工作。努力工作就像利息一样，你越早做，你就有越多的时间来获得回报。）It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.

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.（人们希望成为令人兴奋的事情的一部分，并觉得他们的工作很重要。）

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you.（不断有人想要帮助你， tailwind：顺风） Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it.

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

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.（你可以有非常惊喜的概率让世界屈服于你的意愿——大多数人甚至不去尝试，只是接受事情就是这样。）

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.（自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力使大多数人无法完全释放他们的潜力）

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（几乎总是）, 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.（他们坚持了足够长的时间，让自己有机会走好运。）

Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce（复制） (keeping maxed-out credit cards （刷爆的信用卡）in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages（九槽三环活页夹页） kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched（根深蒂固的） interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way.

To be willful, you have to be optimistic—hopefully this is a personality trait（性格特点） that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.

Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.

But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.（如果你做的事情可以由别人完成，它最终会被花更少的钱做到）

The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage.（增加杠杆） 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.（不同领域的交叉运用） 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 （模仿的行为）is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

11. Build a network

Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.（你认识的真正有才华的人的网络规模会成为你能完成的事情的限制因素）

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.

One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside;（慷慨地分享好处） it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.

Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do.（承认你的弱点，并弄清楚如何解决它们，但不要让它们阻止你做你想做的事情。） “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are.（

弥补你的弱点的最好方法是雇用互补的团队成员，而不是只雇用擅长与你相同的人。complementary：互补的

）

A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. （通过练习，快速发现智力、驱动力和创造力变得更加容易）The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.

I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” 

"Force of nature" is an idiom. To say a person is a force of nature means the person is a very strong personality or character -- like a hurricane or a tsunami are also forces of nature -- full of energy, unstoppable, unchallengeable, unforgettable. The idiom means that person can accomplish things when other people give up.

It’s a pretty good heuristic(启发法是指依据有限的知识在短时间内找到问题解决方案的一种技术)for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.

A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent（杰出的，有名的） to take a bet on you（押注你）, 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.

12. You get rich by owning things

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.（通过拥有价值迅速增加的东西，你才能真正致富）

This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things.（这可以是企业、房地产、自然资源、知识产权或其他类似事物的一部分） But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.（时间只能线性增长）

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.（大规模制造人们想要的东西）

13. Be internally driven（内部驱动）

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. （达成共识的想法和有共识的职业轨迹） 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.

Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap.（

聪明的人似乎特别容易受到这种外部驱动行为的影响。意识到这一点会有所帮助，但只是一点点——你可能必须非常努力地工作才能不落入模仿陷阱。

）

The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to（觉得有必要） 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.（

在你赚了足够的钱来购买任何你想要的东西，并获得足够的社会地位，以至于获得更多不再有趣之后，这是我所知道的唯一一种将继续推动你达到更高水平的力量。

）

This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.（正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时，你就知道了。）

Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks for this. YC was widely mocked for the first few years, and almost no one thought it would be a big success when they first started. But they thought it would be great for the world if it worked, and they love helping people, and they were convinced their new model was better than the existing model.

Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:

One of the biggest reasons I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash（释放） by freeing more people to take risks.

Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up （奋力往上爬）for a while before you can take big swings.(大展拳脚) 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.（机会分配如此不均显然是一种极大的耻辱和浪费。但我见证了很多人，虽出生不利，但取得了令人难以置信的成功，这是有可能发生的。stack the deck against ：To make arrangements that result in an unfair advantage over someone or something.使情况对某人不利）

I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.（

我深深地意识到，如果我不是天生幸运的话，我个人就不会成为现在的我。

）

Thanks to Brian Armstrong, Greg Brockman, Dalton Caldwell, Diane von Furstenberg, Maddie Hall, Drew Houston, Vinod Khosla, Jessica Livingston, Jon Levy, Luke Miles (6 drafts!), Michael Moritz, Ali Rowghani, Michael Seibel, Peter Thiel, Tracy Young and Shivon Zilis for reviewing drafts of this, and thanks especially to Lachy Groom for help writing it.