Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Be Successful

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 326 posts

Re: How to Be Successful

#161

Post by bonestamp2 »

csnewb wrote: post #8

#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…

> Over the past 3 years of working full-time yes I've accomplished some things, but none of them were truly difficult or ground breaking.

3 years? Fuck. It sounds like you're on track for a long and successful career. Not everyone peaks early. Give yourself a break, spend a little more time networking and a little less time on your hard skills and you'll probably find greater opportunities for ground breaking things through relationships than through your skills.

Re: How to Be Successful

#162

Post by ah765 »

I think most of these are true. Here are two of my own that I generally don't see emphasized as much.

1. Do something wrong

Remember that you have to be exceptional to reach outlier success. You won't be unusual if you do what everyone thinks is the correct path. When you feel strongly about something, be unwilling to change or compromise. If you're not doing anything that's considered "wrong", you won't be exceptional, and you probably won't succeed.

2. Have many advantages

Have a high IQ. Have the ability to easily work hard. Have at least reasonably favorable social conditions (no debt, some money from family). To be exceptional, you need every advantage you can get. If you don't have many advantages, then you should really consider whether you can compete with people that have them.

I don't think it's right to encourage everyone to try for outlier success. By definition, you need to be an outlier to reach it. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe you are an outlier, then the odds are better than you might think.

Re: How to Be Successful

#163

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #155
throwaway8451 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who finds the concept of privilege resentful? It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.

The idea is not to "feel bad about" being male, or white, or having four functional limbs. The idea is to recognize that these characteristics - which others can't "strive" towards - may give us advantages that aren't earned. If I suddenly became black, and nothing else about me changed, studies have shown I'd likely be treated differently by police, potential employers, medical facilities, etc. Recognizing that fact…

[deleted]

Re: How to Be Successful

#165

Post by democracy »

porpoisely wrote: post #92

I find these types of articles/blogs to be relatively pointless because the market/economy/country/etc has room for a select few successes. Imagine if Obama wrote "How to Be a Successful Presidential Candidate" and every 2016 candidate read it and adopted it to a tee. We'd still have dozens of failures and only 1 success. If success were really a formula, then we'd all be successful. We can't all get into harvard, we…

So true, I think people come to this conclusion after years...

Re: How to Be Successful

#166

Post by code_coyote »

Advice in this article seems to only marginally apply to someone whose measure of success is in an artistic field. You can't get the same marginal returns as the article talks about. Also you're both competing with others for reader's attention, but not competing with anyone, as your stories can only be made by you.

Re: How to Be Successful

#167

Post by hughzhang »

porpoisely wrote: post #92

I find these types of articles/blogs to be relatively pointless because the market/economy/country/etc has room for a select few successes. Imagine if Obama wrote "How to Be a Successful Presidential Candidate" and every 2016 candidate read it and adopted it to a tee. We'd still have dozens of failures and only 1 success. If success were really a formula, then we'd all be successful. We can't all get into harvard, we…

While you are right that the market only has room for 1 president every four years, this isn't true in economics. Startups create wealth (at least they are supposed to) so while there probably is a limit to how fast the economy can grow, we certainly are not hitting that limit anytime soon.

Re: How to Be Successful

#168

Post by qquark »

yesenadam wrote: post #112
avip wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."

"On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is succes…

To be honest it just seems a bit like playing with words. Of course you can use "success" in sentences where it loses the meaning intended in the current context, but it seems clear to me that when someone writes "to be successful" there are implications that it means being successful on some measure that the author finds valuable or intends the reader to think valuable (in order to sell a book or something).

And of course people can argue all day about what is "being successful", since you could mostly put it as a matter of taste depending on what one finds satisfaction in, in life. It is indeed true that someone who doesn't have the same frame of reference for success as the author will have a harder time finding useful information in such a book/article, but that doesn't mean that because the measure of success can vary from person to person, it doesn't exist at all.

When such an article or book talks about that, there is a meaning behind those words that is conditioned by the cultural context in which it is used (as materialistic as it can be) and obviously this is pretty much never meant to be understood as "how to act as to be able to formulate statements that match 'I successfully did .*'", which is how this quote feels like to me...

Re: How to Be Successful

#169

Post by delusional »

peterkshultz wrote: post #139
porpoisely wrote: post #92

I find these types of articles/blogs to be relatively pointless because the market/economy/country/etc has room for a select few successes. Imagine if Obama wrote "How to Be a Successful Presidential Candidate" and every 2016 candidate read it and adopted it to a tee. We'd still have dozens of failures and only 1 success. If success were really a formula, then we'd all be successful. We can't all get into harvard, we…

I disagree with the idea that the market has room for a finite number of millionaires. See Paul Graham's essay on wealth, specifically the subject about the pie fallacy. "...although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth . Wea…

For money that's true (and of course being a millionaire is about money), but for "success" it isn't. Success is a relative term, which does seem to act a lot like a 0-sum game. That is, I'm only successful if other people around me aren't.

While we might all become richer collectively, we will never feel more successful unless we have someone to compare ourselves to.

Re: How to Be Successful

#170

Post by kordlessagain »

peterkshultz wrote: post #139
porpoisely wrote: post #92

I find these types of articles/blogs to be relatively pointless because the market/economy/country/etc has room for a select few successes. Imagine if Obama wrote "How to Be a Successful Presidential Candidate" and every 2016 candidate read it and adopted it to a tee. We'd still have dozens of failures and only 1 success. If success were really a formula, then we'd all be successful. We can't all get into harvard, we…

I disagree with the idea that the market has room for a finite number of millionaires. See Paul Graham's essay on wealth, specifically the subject about the pie fallacy. "...although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth . Wea…

There is absolutely a limit to the amount of unique ideas/efforts which make a return across a large percent of the population. That population has an upper limit on spend and time spent adopting said product. They don't have an unlimited amount of time and that's exactly what companies have been hammering on to extract more of. Facebook, for example.

It's time we stop pushing this STUPID narrative that software can make you rich if you are just willing to throw your user's interests out the window and "work harder". That is not how this works.

Post reply on HN