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How to Be Successful

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: How to Be Successful

#181

Post by aphextron »

LouisSayers wrote: post #108
TrackerFF wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, I was going to post this - but it's probably a very polarized opinion. The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit. When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or bank…

For sure - you have connections to money which can help fund your startup. The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process. I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she…

>I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...

This is what really gets to me. Those companies will go bankrupt, the investors will lose out, the employees will get laid off, and the founder will have paid himself $300k/yr for those 5 years of fiddling around with nonsense and playing with other people's money, as he goes off to the next venture and spouts platitudes of success. There's absolutely no connection anymore between actual business success. Gaining "funding" is seen as the end all be all goal, and anything after that is just whatever.

And I think the reason you see less diversity here comes down to a class divide in moral values. No working class person can possibly even comprehend thinking like that. It comes off as completely sociopathic. Yet there is a class of people who are perfectly comfortable doing it, and we just let them for whatever reason. It starts to make you understand where class based revolutions have come from in the past.

Re: How to Be Successful

#183

Post by tlrobinson »

delusional wrote: post #169
peterkshultz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> unless we have someone to compare ourselves to.

Couldn't that someone be one's ancestors, or even one's past self?

Re: How to Be Successful

#184

Post by yesenadam »

qquark wrote: post #168
yesenadam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You should read the article I linked to! Sadly it was a bit too long to paste the whole thing.

When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.

Re: How to Be Successful

#185

Post by Supermancho »

Tade0 wrote: post #177
peterkshultz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wealth is finite at any given moment and it so happens that growth does not affect everyone equally. On top of that developed economies tend to grow slower - we may all be millionaires by early 70s standards with our fast cars and air travel, but I don't think in 50 years we will be millionaires by today's standards - there simply won't be that much growth in the future.

> Wealth is finite at any given moment

Investment supposes this is not true because wealth is not an evaluation of liquidity. The hardest thing to realize is that that's poor people thinking and you're already behind if that's how you operate (ie the vast majority of the world, including me).

Re: How to Be Successful

#186

Post by hoaw »

delusional wrote: post #169
peterkshultz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disagree. Success isn't really transferred. If I help you do something I know and you help me do something you know we are both more successful. Wealth on the other hand can't really be shared without losing it.

Re: How to Be Successful

#187

Post by aphextron »

avip wrote: post #38
davebryand wrote: post #25

A more accurate title for this is "How to Be Financially Successful". I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.

"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."

>"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."

Let's take this to its logical conclusion though. Is the happy drunk a success?

Success is defined by your culture, not yourself. It's an intrinsically social property, whose value is determined by your worth to others. Defining your own success is akin to deluding yourself.

Re: How to Be Successful

#188

Post by hoaw »

ngngngng wrote: post #180
distant_hat wrote: post #70

All such articles should be preceded by huge blink tags with 'Warning: survivorship bias ahead'.

I think 99% of the time bringing up survivorship bias adds nothing to the conversation. If I tell you how I ran a marathon, you could shout "survivorship bias!" But that fact still stands that I hadn't successfully run a marathon before I did those things.

It would be warranted if you explained how to run a marathon the same way people explain how to be successful. Which you probably wouldn't.

Re: How to Be Successful

#189

Post by reading-at-work »

delusional wrote: post #169
peterkshultz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how you define "success." By your definition, it necessitates seeing someone else fail in order to feel successful. But I think that's a narrow view of it, and fewer things are zero-sum than people often assume (though plenty of things still are, yes).

A few examples come to mind. One is the craft beer scene. Microbreweries often adopt a collaborative business model with other breweries in their area, rather than being cutthroat and trying to run each other out of town. When a town becomes known for having a thriving beer scene, it attracts more customers in total, to the benefit of all the breweries there. It widens the proverbial pie. Thus, by association with that scene, all the individual businesses become more successful than they would have been otherwise. And in that case I'd say success is about more than money - name and quality recognition, and building a dedicated fan base would probably factor into it as well.

Of course there are limits to that model, such as a local market becoming too saturated, but I think it's a good example of success being a more nebulous term than only being dependent on defeating others.

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