How To Be Successful - Sam Altman

Success Notes - Sam Altman

From YC podcast

Follow my interests. I’m comfortable exploring a lot of projects that seem interesting. I realize that most of them will fail or flutter and I don’t care. As long as the ones that work, really work.
If you are in the position to take a year of between projects, do it.
Learned about fields that I had been interested in. Nuclear engineering, synthetic biology, ai, investing.
Traveled around a lot. Got a feel for what the rest of the world is like.
Helped people because I had time.
Left myself unscheduled so I could drop everything and go to a conference halfway around the world.
Got really excited about ideas for companies that turned out to be bad ideas for different reasons.
Almost all of them didn’t work.
When you’re in explore more you try a lot of projects and you expect that most of them won’t work.
How do you decide what to commit to and when?
Requires brutal honesty about what is actually working vs what you’re trying to convince yourself is working.
Its like in investing. It’s ok to be wrong about most things so long as the magnitude of what you’re right about covers all of them.

Getting shit done:

Lots of people spend lots of time of things that seem to be output but don’t actually move things forward.