Learnings From Sam Altman

18 Jun 2023

Compound Yourself

1. Move your carrer towards an upward right trajectory.
2. Don’t stay in a career where someone with 20 years of experience is equivalent to 2 year of experience.
3. As your career progress, each unit of work should produce more and more results. Question How is that leverage possible as a developer/PM in software?
4. Look for really big opportunities that if successful can make everything else small. Question Not clear about Long term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together.

Have almost too much self-belief

1. Develop a very high sense of self-belief and develop that early.
2. As you get datapoints about your judgement is good and can consistently deliver results, trust it more.
3. Balance your self-belief with self-aware, if people are critical of you, listen and understand why.

Learn to think independently

1. Think from first principles, generate ideas and discuss with someone.
2. Grit is that you will fall multiple times and you can stand up every time.

Get Good at Sales

1. Get good at written communication. Make sure your thinking is clear and use plain language to explain it.
2. Show for in person meeting whenever it’s important.

Make it easy to take Risk

1. Take risk and take it more often. You have to try many things and adapt quickly
2. 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. Question, What are some of these bets looks like.
3. Keep you life cheap and flexible.

Focus

1. It’s more important to work on the right thing instead of just working.
2. Move Fast and accomplish the most important bits in the direction.

Work Hard

1. Working hard and smart can take you to 99% percentile.
2. Momentum begets success.
3. Working towards maximum big impact should be celebrated and is fulfilling.
4. Work Stamina is the biggest predictor of sucess. Question What are you doing to increase the work stamina.

Be Bold

1. It’s easier to do hard startup compared to easy startup.
2. Working on important and hard problem will get you tailwind of people willing to help you.
3. Follow your curiousity.

Be Wilful

1. Iam 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.

Be Hard to Compete With

1. Like build a strong personal brand, learn things at intersection of one or more fields.
2. Most people do whatever people they are hanging out with.

Build a Network

1. Effective way to build network is to help people as much as you can.
2. Quickly spotting drive, creativity gets much easier with practise.
3. Ask this question, Is this person force of nature?

Be internally driven

1. Smartest people are internally driven and they do things to satisfy themselves
2. They feel compelled to make something happen in the world.