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How To Be Successful

In my observation of numerous founders, I've identified 13 key strategies for achieving exceptional success.

  1. Compound Yourself: Seek exponential growth in your career and your business. Aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing trajectory.

  2. Have Almost Too Much Self-Belief: Cultivate a strong belief in yourself and your ideas. This belief should be balanced with self-awareness and openness to criticism.

  3. Learn to Think Independently: Original thinking is crucial for entrepreneurship. Cultivate this skill by thinking from first principles and generating new ideas.

  4. Get Good at "Sales": You must be able to convince others of your beliefs. This requires a compelling vision, strong communication skills, charisma, and evidence of execution ability.

  5. Make it Easy to Take Risks: Taking risks is essential for success. Look for small bets where you can make a significant gain if it works.

  6. Focus: Prioritize working on the right thing over working many hours. Be relentless in achieving your key priorities.

  7. Work Hard: Working hard is necessary for achieving top-tier success. Find work you enjoy doing with people you enjoy spending time with.

  8. Be Bold: Don't be afraid to work on what you really want to work on. Follow your curiosity and ambition.

  9. Be Willful: You can bend the world to your will more often than you think. Persistence and optimism are key.

  10. Be Hard to Compete With: Build up leverage to make yourself difficult to compete with. Avoid mimicking what everyone else is doing.

  11. Build a Network: Develop a network of talented people to work with. Be generous and help others as much as you can.

  12. You Get Rich by Owning Things: 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.

  13. Be Internally Driven: The most successful people are primarily internally driven. They do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world.

These strategies require effort and dedication, but they can lead to remarkable success.

The original article: https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful