CHATGPT之父 山姆·阿尔特曼的13条思考 关于【如何成功】-万字长文-sam smith和泰勒

2023年以来，全球最炙手可热的商业领袖，必须是当前OpenAI的CEO，前YC孵化器的CEO Sam Altman 山姆·阿尔特曼（山姆·奥特曼），他的知名度即将比肩，并很快超越比尔·盖茨，乔布斯，马斯克这些人物，而且他还很年轻，1985年生人，不到40岁！

山姆·奥特曼出生于美国犹太裔家庭，8岁接触Mac编程。上大二时（2015）创建了Loopt（一款地理位置社交App），估值1.75亿，从斯坦福退学加入YC训练营。

2012年卖掉公司，加入YC成为创业导师，他特别善于鼓舞人心，被称成为创业者的“尤达”。

CHATGPT爆火全球之前，他其实已经是美国硅谷的一个传奇人物，在YC孵化出全球知名企业，比如airbnb等，他的野心远不止于人工智能，不只是AGI，而是是全人类，改造整个地球，下面是山姆·奥特曼的疯狂想法：

1. 实现和管理通用人工智能AGI（OpenAI）

2. 用核能、生物科技和AI技术，全面升级现代生活方式。（3.75亿美元投Helion做可控核聚变，希望把一度电降到1美分）

3. 成立一个由企业家组成的超级组织，改善资本主义经济。（暂未实施）

4. 建立一个「宪章城市」，测试未来的基础设施和管理方式。（暂未实施）

5. 给普通人提供全民基础收入。（虹膜识别真人，用World Coin虚拟货币给民众发低保）

我们最好先相信他有这个能力，并拭目以待。

在不远的未来，在所有公众号爆吹这个人之前，我们冷静地看下他在几年前亲自写下的成功之道，来理解他如何做到今天的成绩的。

他总结了13条原则，附有英文原文。全文总共7000多字。

中文关键词在这里：

复利：给自己找能产生复利的事情，而打工上班是线性增长，卖时间没有复利。复利的力量是巨大的，很多人没有意识到的，这是第一条。

自信：自信到过度，自信到盲目都可以，他说的是over confidence！能做到大成功的人，自信到骗过自己。独立思考：因为学校不教这个，所以学会独立思考变得异常重要。擅长销售：首先是擅长沟通——尤其是书面沟通——这是一项值得做的投资，其次做好销售的最好方法是真诚地相信你所销售的东西。专注：不是集中注意力、不分心，而是思考什么事对你最重要，势不可挡的优先做好这件事。敢于冒险：大多数人高估了风险，低估了回报。冒险很重要，因为不可能一直都是对的——你必须尝试许多事情，并随着学习的增加迅速适应。专注：专注是工作的力量倍增器。努力工作：你可以通过聪明或努力的工作达到你所在领域的90%左右，这仍然是一个伟大的成就。大胆一点。任性：一个大秘密是，你可以让世界在很大程度上服从你的意愿——大多数人甚至没有尝试，只是接受事情就是这样。让自己有竞争壁垒：最好方法是通过杠杆，建立个人品牌。建立自己的人才网络：建立社交网络的最好办法就是识别出一个人真正的特长，并且帮助把他安排到最适合他的位置上，这会给你带来十倍的回报。自驱力：做这件事是为了我自己对这件事的评价，不是为了让别人看得上，一种纯粹让自己满意的驱动力。

————英文原文+中文翻译—————

How To Be Successful

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.

But much of it applies to anyone.

如何获得成功？

我观察了成千上万的创始人，并对赚大钱或创造重要东西需要什么进行了很多思考。通常，人们开始想要前者（赚钱），最终想要后者（创造）。

我会给你13个关于如何取得如此超级成功的思考。一旦你已经达到了成功的基线程度（通过特权或努力），并想投入工作将其转化为超群的成功，我说的这些会帮你更容易做到。

但其中大部分适用于每一个人。

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 dont 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.

1 复利自己

复利是魔法，从每一处去寻找复利，指数增长曲线是创造财富的关键。

一个每年价值增长50%的中型企业在很短的时间内变得巨大。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极端的可扩展性。但是随着技术的发展，越来越多的人会。找到它们并创造它们是值得付出很多努力的。

你自己也想成为一条指数增长的曲线——你应该把你的生活目标定在一个不断增加的向上和向右的轨迹上。走向一个具有复合效应的职业很重要——大多数职业都相当线性地发展。

你不想在这样一个职业中，做了两年的人和做了二十年的人一样有效——你的学习率应该总是很高。随着你职业生涯的进展，你做的每一个单位的工作都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多方法可以获得这种杠杆作用，比如资本、技术、品牌、网络效应和管理人员。

专注于在你定义为成功指标的任何东西——金钱、地位、对世界的影响或其他任何东西——上再加一个零是有用的。我愿意在项目之间花尽可能多的时间来找到我的下一件事。但我总是希望它是一个项目，如果成功，将使我的职业生涯看起来像一个脚注。

大多数人陷入线性机会。愿意让小机会去关注潜在的步骤变化。

我认为，商业领域最大的竞争优势——无论是对公司还是对个人的职业生涯——是长期思维，对世界上不同的体系将如何融合有一个广阔的视野。复合增长的一个显著方面是，最遥远的年份是最重要的。在一个几乎没有人真正着眼长远的世界里，市场会给那些着眼长远的人丰厚的回报。

相信指数，要有耐心，会有惊喜。

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.

2 要有过分多的自信

自信是非常强大的。我认识的最成功的人相信自己，几乎到了妄想的地步。

尽早培养这一点。当你得到更多的数据点，表明你的判断是好的，并且你可以始终如一地交付结果时，更加信任自己。

如果你不相信自己，就很难让自己对未来有逆向的想法。但这是创造大多数价值的地方。

我记得很多年前埃隆·马斯克带我参观SpaceX工厂的时候。他详细地谈到了制造火箭的每一个部件，但令人难忘的是，当他谈到将大型火箭送上火星时，他脸上绝对确定的表情。我离开时想，“嗯，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。如果没有足够的自信，这几乎是不可能的。不幸的是，你越雄心勃勃，这个世界就越会试图摧毁你。

大多数非常成功的人在人们认为他们错了的时候，至少有一次对未来的预测是正确的。否则，他们将面临更多的竞争。

自信必须与自我意识相平衡。我过去讨厌任何形式的批评，并积极避免批评。现在我试着总是带着这是真的的假设去听，然后决定我是否要采取行动。

寻求真相是艰难的，而且往往是痛苦的，但这是自信和自欺欺人的区别。

这种平衡也有助于你避免被认为是有资格的和失去联系的。

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.

3 学会独立思考

创业很难教，因为原创思维很难教。学校不是为了教这个而设立的——事实上，它通常奖励相反的东西。所以你必须自己培养它。

从基本原则思考并尝试产生新想法很有趣，找到与之交流的人是一个更好的方法。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，真正对了一次”是创业者的方式，你要给自己很多机会，才能获得幸运。

最有力的教训之一是，你可以想出在似乎没有解决办法的情况下该怎么做。你这样做的次数越多，你就会越相信。勇气来自于学习，你可以在被击倒后重新站起来。

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.

4 善于“销售”

仅有自信是不够的——你还必须能够说服别人相信你所相信的。

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、一定程度的魅力和执行能力的证据。

擅长沟通——尤其是书面沟通——是一项值得做的投资。我对清晰沟通的最佳建议是首先确保你的想法清晰，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你所销售的东西。推销你真正相信的东西感觉很棒，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——任何人都可以通过深思熟虑的练习变得更好。但是出于某种原因，也许是因为感觉不舒服，许多人把它当成了无法学习的东西。

我的另一个重要销售建议是在重要的时候亲自出现。当我刚开始的时候，我总是愿意坐飞机。

这通常是不必要的，但它三次为我带来了职业生涯的转折点，否则我会走向另一条路。

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.

5 敢于冒险

大多数人高估了风险，低估了回报。冒险很重要，因为不可能一直都是对的——你必须尝试许多事情，并随着学习的增加迅速适应。

在你职业生涯的早期，冒险通常更容易；你不会失去太多，而且你可能会获得很多。一旦你已经让自己达到了承担基本义务的程度，你应该努力让冒险变得容易。

寻找小赌注，如果你错了，你可以输1倍，但是如果成功了，你可以赢100倍。然后在那个方向下更大的赌注。

不过，不要存钱太久。在YC，我们经常注意到在Google或Facebook工作了很多时间的创始人的问题。

当人们习惯了舒适的生活、可预测的工作和无论做什么都成功的名声时，很难忘记这一点（人们有一种不可思议的能力，总是能让自己的生活方式与明年的工资相匹配）。

即使他们真的离开了，回归的诱惑也很大。将短期收益和便利置于长期满足之上是很容易的——也是人类的天性。

但是当你不在跑步机上的时候，你可以跟随你的直觉，花时间在可能会变得非常有趣的事情上。尽可能长时间地保持你的生活廉价和灵活是做到这一点的一个有效方法，但显然需要权衡。

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.

6 专注

专注是工作的力量倍增器。

我见过的几乎所有人都应该花更多的时间思考应该关注什么。在正确的事情上工作比工作很多小时重要得多。大多数人把大部分时间浪费在无关紧要的事情上。

一旦你想出了该做什么，就不可阻挡地快速完成你的少数优先事项。我还没有遇到一个行动缓慢、非常成功的人。

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.

7 努力工作

你可以通过聪明或努力的工作达到你所在领域的90%左右，这仍然是一个伟大的成就。

但是达到第99个百分位需要两者兼而有之——你将与其他非常有才华的人竞争，他们会有伟大的想法，并愿意做很多工作。

极端的人会得到极端的结果。大量工作伴随着巨大的生活权衡，决定不这样做是完全理性的。但它有很多好处。在大多数情况下，势头会增强，成功会带来成功。

这通常很有趣。生活中最大的乐趣之一是找到你的目标，超越它，发现你的影响比你自己更重要。

一位YC创始人最近表示，在离开一家大公司的工作并朝着最大可能的影响力努力后，他有多快乐和满足感，这让他非常惊讶。为此付出的努力应该得到庆祝。

我不完全清楚为什么在US的某些地方努力工作已经成为一件坏事，但在世界其他地方肯定不是这样——US以外企业家表现出的活力和动力正迅速成为新的基准。

你必须弄清楚如何在不筋疲力尽的情况下努力工作。人们为此找到了自己的策略，但一个几乎总是有效的策略是和你喜欢花很多时间在一起的人一起找到你喜欢做的工作。

我认为那些假装你大部分时间（在你生命的一段时间内）不工作就能在职业上取得超级成功的人是在做坏事。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，还有一个想法：在职业生涯开始时就努力工作。努力工作就像兴趣一样，你越早做，你就有越多的时间来获得回报。

当你有更少的其他责任时，努力工作也更容易，这在你年轻的时候经常发生，但并不总是如此。

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.

8 大胆一点

我相信艰难创业比轻松创业容易。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。

如果你在一个重要的问题上取得了进展，你会有不断的人想帮助你。让自己变得更加雄心勃勃，不要害怕做你真正想做的事情。

如果其他人都在创办模因公司，而你想创办一家基因编辑公司，那就去做，不要事后猜测。

跟随你的好奇心。对你来说令人兴奋的事情对其他人来说也常常令人兴奋。

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.

9 任性

一个大秘密是，你可以让世界在很大程度上服从你的意愿——大多数人甚至没有尝试，只是接受事情就是这样。

人们有巨大的能力让事情发生。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力的结合阻止了大多数人接近他们的潜力。

要求你想要的。你通常不会得到它，通常拒绝会很痛苦。但是当这奏效时，它的效果出奇地好。

几乎总是，那些说“我将继续前进，直到这一切成功，无论挑战是什么，我都会解决它们”的人，并且是认真的，会继续成功。他们坚持不懈，足够长的时间给自己一个运气顺其自然的机会。

Airbnb是我相信这一点的证明。

他们讲述了太多的故事，我不建议他们尝试复制（把刷爆的信用卡放在孩子们用来制作棒球卡的九槽三环活页夹里，每顿饭都吃一美元商店的麦片，一场接一场地与根深蒂固的兴趣斗争，等等），但是他们设法生存了足够长的时间，让运气顺其自然。

要任性，你必须乐观——希望这是一种可以通过练习来改善的人格特质。我从未见过一个非常成功的悲观主义者。

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.

10 让自己有竞争壁垒

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，而且显然是真的。

但这对你个人来说也是如此。如果你所做的事情可以由别人来做，最终会由别人来做，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，你可以用个人关系来做到这一点，通过建立强大的个人品牌，或者在多个不同领域的交集中变得优秀。

还有许多其他策略，但你必须想出一些方法来做到这一点。

大多数人做他们一起出去玩的人做的事情。这种模仿行为通常是一个错误——如果你做的和其他人一样，你就不难与之竞争。

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.

11 建立你的网络

伟大的工作需要团队。建立一个有才华的人的网络——有时密切合作，有时松散合作——是伟大职业生涯的重要组成部分。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。

建立人脉的一个有效方法是尽可能多地帮助别人。长期以来，这样做是我获得大部分最佳职业机会的原因，也是我四大最佳投资中的三个。

我一直很惊讶，因为十年前我做了一些帮助创始人的事情，好事经常发生在我身上。

建立人脉的最好方法之一是树立真正关心与你共事的人的声誉。过于慷慨地分享好处；它会十倍地回到你身边。此外，学习如何评估人们擅长什么，并让他们扮演这些角色。

（这是我学到的关于管理的最重要的东西，我没有读过太多关于它的书。）你想有一个名声，那就是努力推动人们，让他们完成比他们想象的更多的事情，但不要努力到让他们筋疲力尽。

每个人都比其他人更擅长一些事情。用你的优势来定义你自己，而不是你的弱点。承认你的弱点，并想出如何克服它们，但不要让它们阻止你做你想做的事情。

“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，这几乎总是反映出缺乏创造力。

弥补你弱点的最好方法是雇佣互补的团队成员，而不仅仅是雇佣那些擅长和你一样事情的人。

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。通过实践，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认识很多人，跟踪谁会给你留下深刻印象，谁不会。记住，你主要是在寻找进步的速度，不要高估经验或当前的成就。

当我遇到新的人时，我总是试着问自己，“这个人是自然的力量吗？”这是一个很好的启发式方法，可以找到有可能完成伟大事业的人。

发展人脉的一个特例是找一个杰出的人在你身上下注，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。毫不奇怪，最好的方法是竭尽全力提供帮助。（记住，你必须在以后的某个时候支付这笔费用！）

最后，记得把时间花在支持你的抱负的积极的人身上。

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.

12 致富靠拥有资产

我童年时代最大的经济误解是人们从高薪中致富。尽管有一些例外——例如艺人——但福布斯榜单历史上几乎没有人靠薪水致富。

通过拥有能迅速增值的资产，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。但是不知何故，你需要拥有某样东西的股权，而不仅仅是出售你的时间。时间只是线性缩放的。

制造价值快速增长的东西的最好方法是大规模制造人们想要的东西。

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.

13 自驱力

大多数人主要是受外部驱动的；他们做他们所做的事情是因为他们想给别人留下深刻印象。这是不好的，有很多原因，但这里有两个重要的原因。

首先，你会在共识的想法和共识的职业轨道上工作。你会非常关心——比你意识到的要多得多——别人是否认为你在做正确的事情。

这可能会阻止你做真正有趣的工作，即使你做了，别人也会做的。

其次，你通常会错误地计算风险。你会非常专注于跟上其他人，不会在竞争性游戏中落后，即使是在短期内。

聪明人似乎特别容易受到这种外部驱动行为的影响。意识到这一点会有所帮助，但只是一点点——你可能必须非常努力地工作，以免落入模仿陷阱。

我认识的最成功的人主要是内部驱动的；他们做他们所做的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。

在你赚了足够的钱去买你想要的任何东西，并获得了足够的社会地位，以至于获得更多不再有趣之后，这是我所知道的唯一能继续推动你达到更高水平的力量。

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，你就知道了。

杰西卡·利文斯顿和保罗·格雷厄姆是我在这方面的标杆。YC在最初的几年里受到了广泛的嘲笑，几乎没有人认为他们刚开始的时候会取得巨大成功。

但是他们认为如果成功了，这对世界会很好，他们喜欢帮助别人，他们确信他们的新模式比现有的模式更好。

最终，你将通过在对你来说重要的领域表现出色来定义你的成功。你越早朝着这个方向开始，你就能走得越远。在任何你不痴迷的事情上都很难取得巨大的成功。