1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.
How to Be Successful
11–20 of 326 posts
Re: How to Be Successful
#1212. You get rich by owning things.
so i should just own a lot of things and then I'll be rich. Works for rich people.
Re: How to Be Successful
#13Great post Sam! My two cents is to try and compete against yourself: quantify your actions with some set of metrics and loop your measurements of those metrics into a feedback loop of improvement. That way, you never feel left behind and have your improvement cycles interrupted or lost, and you gain a good deal of self-introspection, which is invaluable in a world where people nudge/push you around. Your understanding of yourself has to be the ground truth where all other personality traits, habits, and higher-level tasks evolve from, and these combine to generate high-quality work and personal roadmaps.
Re: How to Be Successful
#14Great article! I think sales is one of the most important tools to life, and it's one as a computer science major that was the hardest to cultivate.
Those are all positives directions but I also think about what attributes are really important. I think working longer in a single industry is more important than working hard for a brief amount of time inside. Most of the opportunities comes later as you are deeper inside and just staying till that point is important.
Re: How to Be Successful
#151. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.
A far from incidental detail. But is there sourced information available about his parents' actual income level?
We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling:
For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
Re: How to Be Successful
#16Make sure to also check out Michael Cera’s video “Impossible is the Opposite of Possible”:
Re: How to Be Successful
#171. Stop caring what other people think
2. Do what interests you
Re: How to Be Successful
#18#2: Have almost too much self-belief. Self-confidence has been something I've struggled with my entire life, to the point where its crippled my career growth as a developer. I've been told that I'm a good developer, but if I only believed in myself I could go a lot further and become truly great. However, it's hard for me to believe in myself when I don't have a lot of data points to prove that I AM competent and cap…
I hear you.
I've been trying to find solutions myself - I'm trying to use some strategies listed in this book: The inner game of tennis, by Timothy Galloway, and I'm seeing positive results so far. He talks about 2 versions of self: self1 - the doer and self2 - the judgemental self, which is constantly evaluating self1, and adversely affect self1's potential. He has some useful suggestions on how to limit the impact of self2, and I found those pretty helpful so far.
Re: How to Be Successful
#19This is the most important point in the whole post:
As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people
That goes straight to the concept of scalability. Usually we talk about it in terms of businesses scaling or benefiting from economies of scale, but this is talking about scalability on a personal level. Not to be understated.
Re: How to Be Successful
#201. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.
People will never run out of excuses for their shortcomings in life.