Live data from Hacker News

How to Be Successful

blog.samaltman.com

71–80 of 326 posts

Re: How to Be Successful

#71
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 should always be high.

I'm having trouble reconciling this point. How can you continuously increase your effectiveness exponentially in a particular role? Take being a developer for example. Seems like the progression of skill is usually linear (with some variability). Is Sam saying that investing in becoming a great engineer ins't effective if your ultimate goal is to be extremely successful? I feel like this is overly reductionist. Maybe being an engineer for your entire career isn't going to lead to that massive success, but spending part of your career cultivating that skill does provide indirect benefits that can help you become super successful. For example, being able to rapidly prototype an MVP when you are testing product ideas. Building a business is the high-leverage action that could lead to massive success, but the years you spent cultivating your technical ability could be what enabled you to be able to build the MVP in the first place. Or maybe it allowed you to recognize good technical talent if your first engineering hires. I think exclusively focusing on tasks that provide orders of magnitude improvement is too direct and superficial of an answer. I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts.

Re: How to Be Successful

#72

1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.

Sure but just being wealthy is more than enough and if you can get VC money that kinds of covers your base.

Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire..

Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"

Re: How to Be Successful

#74
One thing that came to mind is that some of these "13 thoughts" are kind of dependent on each other.

For example, you might not want to be bold and have too much self-belief without being able to work hard, think independently or making it easy for yourself to take risks. If anything, try to do all of them, or be wary of how you pick and choose from the list.

Re: How to Be Successful

#75

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.

If you acquire a billion dollars and give 10% of that to give well, I will say you have been a successful human, since it is "only" estimated to cost 175 billion a year to end poverty in 20 years[0], which means we only need 1750 such individuals each year for 20 years to end poverty, worldwide, forever, which is a goal worthy of humanity[1].

[0] http://www.anielski.com/real-cost-eliminating-poverty/

[1] One of the goals of the UN is to end extreme poverty by 2020, a very worthy goal, but this is going one step beyond that and ending global poverty, in all its forms, forever.

Re: How to Be Successful

#76
post #34

1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. 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 witne…

[deleted]

Re: How to Be Successful

#77
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. 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 witne…

What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.

This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves).

All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.

I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...

Re: How to Be Successful

#78
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…

OMG, you've been working for 3 whole years and haven't done anything ground-breaking?! Seriously though, maybe you aren't 'great', whatever that means exactly, and I doubt it's necessary for you to believe that, whether it's true or not.

You might find (books like) Albert Ellis' New Guide to Rational Living useful - I did! It's about observing and recording your recurring thoughts, particularly ones that make you feel bad, and replacing them with more accurate, helpful ones - stopping the self-sabotage. It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves without noticing. We're trained to be nice to others, without including ourselves in that. I used to do a lot of extremely negative, paralyzing self-talk - saying nasty things to myself I'd never dream of laying on someone else; sounds like you do this too, maybe. This falls under "How to love yourself", something I had to learn to do. Louise Hay has a great 12-point list of things under that heading, stuff like "Treat yourself like you'd treat someone you really love." Then as you get older, you realize you aren't so terrible, and others aren't so great..

I think 'self-belief' comes naturally with untangling that stuff, and otherwise isn't always a good sign, e.g.

"Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." ...I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images#id00026

Post reply on HN