How To Be Successful （如何成功）- Sam Altman

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.

Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.

1. Compound yourself

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.

A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will.  It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.

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. 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.

It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.

I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.

Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.

If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.”

Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-belief. And unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to tear you down.  

Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong. If not, they would have faced much more competition.

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.

This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.

3. Learn to think independently

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.

Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.

“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.

One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.

4. Get good at “sales”

Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.

All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.

Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.

The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful.

Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable.

My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way.

5. Make it easy to take risks

Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.

It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. 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.

Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy—and human nature—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.  

But when you aren’t on the treadmill, you can follow your hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

7. Work hard

You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.

And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated.  

It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US, but this is certainly not the case in other parts of the world—the amount of energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US is quickly becoming the new benchmark.

You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.

I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.

8. Be bold

I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it.

Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

9. Be willful

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.

People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.

Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.

Almost always, the people who say “I am 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. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way.

Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way.

To be willful, you have to be optimistic—hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.

10. Be hard to compete with

Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.

But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.

The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

11. Build a network

Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.

One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.

Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do. “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are.

A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.

I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.

A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!)

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.

12. You get rich by owning things

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.

13. Be internally driven

Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones.

First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks.  You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway.

Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.

Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap.

The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.

Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks for this. YC was widely mocked for the first few years, and almost no one thought it would be a big success when they first started. But they thought it would be great for the world if it worked, and they love helping people, and they were convinced their new model was better than the existing model.

Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:

我观察了成千上万的创始人，并思考了很多关于赚大钱或创造重要事物所需要的东西。通常，人们开始想要前者，最终想要后者。

这里有 13 个关于如何取得如此异常成功的想法。一旦您已经达到成功的基线程度（通过特权或努力）并且想要投入工作以将其转化为异常成功，这里的一切都更容易做到。[1] 但其中大部分适用于任何人。

1.复合自己

复利是神奇的。到处寻找它。指数曲线是创造财富的关键。

一家价值每年增长 50% 的中型企业会在很短的时间内变得庞大。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极高的可扩展性。但是随着技术的发展，越来越多的人会这样做。找到它们并创建它们是值得付出很多努力的。

你自己也想成为一条指数曲线——你的目标应该是让你的生活遵循一条不断增长的向上和向右的轨迹。转向具有复合效应的职业很重要——大多数职业的发展都是线性的。

你不想从事这样的职业，即从事该行业两年的人与从事该行业二十年的人一样有效——你的学习率应该始终很高。随着你事业的进步，你所做的每个工作单元都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多方法可以获得这种影响力，比如资金、技术、品牌、网络效应和管理人员。

专注于为您定义的成功指标（金钱、地位、对世界的影响或其他）添加另一个零是很有用的。我愿意在项目之间花费尽可能多的时间来寻找我的下一件事。但我一直希望它是一个项目，如果成功，将使我的职业生涯的其余部分看起来像一个注脚。

大多数人都会陷入线性机会的泥潭。愿意让小机会去专注于潜在的步骤变化。

我认为商业中最大的竞争优势——无论是对公司还是对个人的职业——都是长期思考，对世界上不同的系统将如何融合在一起有一个广阔的视野。复合增长的一个显着方面是最远的年份是最重要的。在一个几乎没有人采取真正长远眼光的世界里，市场会丰厚地回报那些这样做的人。

相信指数，保持耐心，然后惊喜不断。

2. 过于自信

自信心是非常强大的。我认识的最成功的人几乎相信自己到了错觉的地步。

早早培养这个。当您获得更多数据点表明您的判断力良好并且您可以始终如一地交付结果时，请更加相信自己。

如果你不相信自己，就很难让自己对未来产生逆势的想法。但这是创造最多价值的地方。

我记得很多年前埃隆马斯克带我参观了 SpaceX 工厂。他详细地谈到了制造火箭的每一个部分，但让我印象深刻的是，当他谈到要向火星发射大型火箭时，他脸上绝对肯定的表情。我离开时想“嗯，所以这就是信念的基准。”

管理你自己的士气——以及你团队的士气——是大多数努力中最大的挑战之一。没有足够的自信，这几乎是不可能的。不幸的是，你越雄心勃勃，这个世界就越想打垮你。  

大多数非常成功的人在人们认为他们错了的时候至少一次对未来确实是正确的。否则，他们将面临更多的竞争。

自信必须与自我意识相平衡。我曾经讨厌任何形式的批评并积极避免它。现在我试着总是假设它是真的来听它，然后决定我是否要采取行动。寻求真相是艰难的，而且常常是痛苦的，但这是将自信与自欺欺人区分开来的东西。

这种平衡还可以帮助您避免遇到有权利和脱节的情况。

3.学会独立思考

创业精神很难教，因为原创性思维很难教。学校不是为了教授这些而设立的——事实上，它通常会奖励相反的东西。所以你必须自己培养它。

从第一原则开始思考并尝试产生新想法很有趣，找到可以与之交流的人是在这方面做得更好的好方法。下一步是找到简单、快速的方法在现实世界中测试这些想法。

“我会失败很多次，只有一次我真的是对的”是创业者的道。您必须给自己很多机会才能获得幸运。

最重要的教训之一是，你可以在似乎无解的情况下想出该怎么做。你这样做的次数越多，你就会越相信它。毅力来自于学习你可以在被击倒后重新站起来。

4. 善于“销售”

光有自信是不够的——你还必须能够说服其他人相信你的信仰。

在某种程度上，所有伟大的职业都变成了销售工作。你必须向客户、潜在员工、媒体、投资者等宣传你的计划。这需要鼓舞人心的愿景、强大的沟通技巧、一定程度的个人魅力和执行能力的证据。

善于沟通——尤其是书面沟通——是一项值得的投资。对于清楚地交流，我最好的建议是首先确保你的思路清晰，然后使用简单明了的语言。

擅长销售的最好方法是真诚地相信您所销售的产品。推销你真正相信的东西感觉很棒，而试图推销蛇油感觉很糟糕。

擅长销售就像提高任何其他技能一样——任何人都可以通过刻意练习变得更好。但出于某种原因，也许是因为它令人反感，许多人将其视为无法学习的东西。

我的另一个重要销售秘诀是在重要的时候亲自出现。当我刚开始的时候，我总是愿意上飞机。这通常是不必要的，但它有三次为我带来了职业生涯的转折点，否则我会走另一条路。

5.让冒险变得容易

大多数人都高估了风险，低估了回报。承担风险很重要，因为不可能一直都是正确的——你必须尝试很多事情，并在你学到更多东西时迅速适应。

在职业生涯的早期冒险往往更容易；你没有太多可失去的，而且你可能会得到很多。一旦你达到了承担基本义务的地步，你就应该尽量让冒险变得容易。寻找小赌注，如果你错了，你可以输掉 1 倍，但如果成功，你可以赚 100 倍。然后在那个方向下更大的赌注。

不过，不要保存太久。在 YC，我们经常注意到长期在谷歌或 Facebook 工作的创始人存在的问题。当人们习惯了舒适的生活、可预测的工作以及无论做什么都会成功的声誉时，就很难将其抛在脑后（而且人们有一种令人难以置信的能力，可以始终将他们的生活方式与明年的薪水相匹配）。即使他们真的离开了，回来的诱惑也很大。将短期收益和便利置于长期成就之上是很容易的，也是人的本性。  

但是当你不在跑步机上时，你可以跟随你的直觉，花时间做一些可能真的很有趣的事情。尽可能让你的生活保持廉价和灵活是做到这一点的有效方法，但显然需要权衡取舍。

6.专注

专注是工作的力量倍增器。

几乎我见过的每个人都会因为花更多时间思考应该关注什么而受益匪浅。做正确的事比长时间工作更重要。大多数人将大部分时间浪费在无关紧要的事情上。

一旦你弄清楚该做什么，就势不可挡地快速完成你的一小部分优先事项。我还没有遇到一个行动迟缓却非常成功的人。

7.努力工作

通过聪明或努力的工作，你可以在你的领域达到大约第 90 个百分位，这仍然是一个伟大的成就。但要达到第 99 个百分位，两者都需要——你将与其他非常有才华的人竞争，他们有很好的想法，也愿意付出很多努力。

极端的人得到极端的结果。大量工作伴随着巨大的生活权衡，决定不这样做是完全合理的。但它有很多优点。在大多数情况下，势头会复合，成功会带来成功。

这通常很有趣。生活中最大的乐趣之一就是找到你的目标，擅长它，并发现你的影响比你自己更重要。一位 YC 创始人最近表示非常惊讶，他在离开一家大公司的工作并努力发挥最大可能的影响力后变得更加快乐和充实。努力工作应该受到庆祝。  

我不完全清楚为什么努力工作在美国的某些地区变成了一件坏事，但在世界其他地区肯定不是这种情况——美国以外的企业家表现出的精力和干劲很快就会消失成为新的标杆。

你必须弄清楚如何努力工作而不精疲力竭。人们为此找到了自己的策略，但几乎总能奏效的一个方法是找到你喜欢和你喜欢花很多时间在一起的人一起做的工作。

我认为那些假装你可以在大部分时间（在你生命的某个时期）不工作的情况下在专业上取得超级成功的人是在帮倒忙。事实上，工作耐力似乎是长期成功的最大预测因素之一。

关于努力工作的另一个想法：在你职业生涯的开始就开始努力。努力工作就像兴趣一样复杂，你越早做，你就有越多的时间来获得回报。当您承担的其他责任较少时，也更容易努力工作，这在您年轻时经常但并非总是如此。

8.大胆

我相信做一个艰难的创业比一个简单的创业更容易。人们希望成为令人兴奋的事情的一部分，并觉得他们的工作很重要。

如果你在一个重要问题上取得了进展，你就会有源源不断的人想要帮助你。让自己变得更有野心，不要害怕从事你真正想从事的工作。

如果其他人都在开模因公司，而你想开一家基因编辑公司，那就去做吧，不要再猜了。

跟随你的好奇心。对你来说令人兴奋的事情对其他人来说往往也会令人兴奋。

9.任性

一个很大的秘密是，你可以以惊人的比例让世界屈服于你的意志——大多数人甚至不去尝试，只是接受事情本来的样子。

人们拥有使事情发生的巨大能力。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力的结合使大多数人无法发挥他们的潜力。

问你想要什么。你通常不会得到它，而且拒绝通常会很痛苦。但是当它起作用时，它的效果出奇地好。

几乎总是，那些说“我将继续前进直到成功，无论挑战是什么，我都会解决它们”的人，并且是认真的，继续取得成功。他们坚持了足够长的时间，让自己有机会走好运。

Airbnb 是我的基准。他们讲的故事太多了，我不建议尝试重现（把用完的信用卡放在孩子们用来放棒球卡的九槽三环活页夹页里，每顿饭都吃美元商店的麦片，一场又一场的战斗具有强大的根深蒂固的兴趣，等等）但他们设法生存了足够长的时间，好运如愿以偿。

要任性，就必须乐观——希望这是一种可以通过实践提高的人格特质。我从未见过一个非常成功的悲观者。

10.难以与之竞争

大多数人都明白，如果公司难以与之竞争，它们就更有价值。这很重要，而且显然是正确的。

但这也适用于您个人。如果你所做的事情可以由其他人完成，那么它最终会被完成，而且花费更少。

变得难以与之竞争的最好方法是建立杠杆。例如，您可以通过个人关系、建立强大的个人品牌或擅长多个不同领域的交叉点来做到这一点。还有很多其他的策略，但你必须想出一些方法来做到这一点。

大多数人会做大多数与他们一起出去玩的人所做的事情。这种模仿行为通常是错误的——如果你在做其他人都在做的事情，你就不会很难与之竞争。

11.建立网络

伟大的工作需要团队。建立一个有才华的人网络来与之共事——有时是紧密的，有时是松散的——是伟大事业的重要组成部分。你认识的真正有才华的人的网络规模往往会限制你的成就。

建立网络的有效方法是尽可能多地帮助人们。在很长一段时间内，这样做会带来我最好的职业机会和四项最佳投资中的三项。由于十年前我为帮助一位创始人所做的事情，我经常感到好事发生在我身上，这让我一直感到惊讶。

建立人脉的最佳方式之一是树立真正关心与您共事的人的声誉。过于慷慨地分享好处；它会回到你 10 倍。此外，学习如何评估人们擅长什么，并将他们置于这些角色中。（这是我学到的关于管理的最重要的东西，但我还没有读过很多。）你想以足够努力地推动人们取得比他们想象的更多的成就而闻名，但不要太努力他们烧完。

每个人在某些事情上都比其他人做得更好。用你的长处定义你自己，而不是你的弱点。承认你的弱点并想办法解决它们，但不要让它们阻止你做你想做的事。“我不能做 X，因为我不擅长 Y”是我经常从企业家那里听到的话，而且几乎总是反映出缺乏创造力。弥补你的弱点的最好方法是雇用互补的团队成员，而不是只雇用擅长与你相同的人。

建立网络的一个特别有价值的部分是善于发现未被发现的人才。通过练习，快速发现智力、动力和创造力变得更加容易。最简单的学习方法就是结识很多人，并记录谁给你留下了深刻印象，谁没有。请记住，您主要是在寻找改进率，不要高估经验或当前成就。

当我遇到一个新的人时，我总是试着问自己“这个人是自然的力量吗？” 对于寻找可能成就伟大事业的人来说，这是一个很好的启发式方法。

发展网络的一个特例是找到知名人士与你打赌，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。毫不奇怪，做到这一点的最好方法就是竭尽全力提供帮助。（请记住，您必须在以后的某个时候支付这笔费用！）

最后，记住要与支持你抱负的积极的人共度时光。

12. 你通过拥有东西而致富

我小时候最大的经济误解是人们靠高薪致富。尽管有一些例外——例如艺人——但在福布斯榜单的历史上几乎没有人拿到过薪水。

通过拥有价值迅速增加的东西，你会变得真正富有。

这可以是企业的一部分、房地产、自然资源、知识产权或其他类似的东西。但不知何故，你需要拥有某些东西的股权，而不是仅仅出卖你的时间。时间仅线性缩放。

让东西的价值迅速增加的最好方法是大规模地制造人们想要的东西。

13. 内部驱动

大多数人主要受外部驱动；他们做他们做的事是因为他们想给别人留下深刻印象。这很糟糕，原因有很多，但这里有两个重要的原因。

首先，您将致力于达成共识的想法和达成共识的职业轨迹。如果其他人认为您在做正确的事，您会非常在意——比您意识到的要多得多。这可能会阻止你做真正有趣的工作，即使你做了，其他人也会这样做。

其次，您通常会错误地计算风险。你会非常专注于跟上其他人的步伐，而不是在竞争性游戏中落后，即使是在短期内也是如此。

聪明人似乎特别容易受到这种外部驱动行为的影响。意识到它会有所帮助，但只是一点点——你可能必须非常努力地工作才能不落入模仿陷阱。

我认识的最成功的人主要是内部驱动的；他们做自己做的事是为了给自己留下深刻印象，因为他们觉得有必要让世界发生一些事情。在你赚到足够的钱来购买你想要的任何东西并获得足够的社会地位以致于获得更多不再有趣之后，这是我所知道的唯一会继续推动你达到更高水平表现的力量。

这就是为什么一个人的动机问题如此重要。这是我试图了解某人的第一件事。正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时你就会知道。

杰西卡利文斯顿和保罗格雷厄姆是我的基准。YC 最初几年被广泛嘲笑，几乎没有人认为刚开始时会取得巨大成功。但他们认为，如果它能奏效，对世界来说将是一件好事，而且他们乐于助人，而且他们坚信他们的新模式比现有模式更好。

最终，您将通过在对您重要的领域中出色地完成工作来定义您的成功。你越早朝那个方向开始，你就能走得越远。在您不痴迷的任何事情上都很难取得巨大成功。

[1] 我在HN上写的一条评论回复：