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松禾成长关爱基金会

ChatGPT之父阿尔特曼自述:我为何成功?

发表于:2023-02-08 来源:
马斯克之后,谁会是全球新一代的科技领袖?
如果你在美国做个调查,90%的人会选择OpenAI创始人兼CEO 山姆·阿尔特曼(Sam Altman)。比尔·盖茨说,公司的最新产品ChatGPT,意义“不亚于互联网的诞生。”
38岁的阿尔特曼有一路开挂的生涯。19岁从斯坦福大学计算机系辍学创业;26岁与创业伙伴将公司卖了4300万美元,从此财务自由;29岁投资并管理美国最大创业孵化器YC,5年规模扩大十倍;30岁,他与马斯克等人联手创办Open AI,跻身全球顶尖创业者之列。
在YC创始人、硅谷创业教父Paul Graham眼里,Sam是极具魄力的领导者和开拓者。“如果把Sam Altman扔到某个食人族之岛,5年后他会成为这个食人族岛的国王。”
这篇文章是阿尔特曼在2019年即将任OpenAI CEO时写的博客。通过在YC时期和大量创业者及技术人才的交流,阿尔特曼总结了他眼中的创业秘诀,文章标题平淡无奇《如何取得成功》(How to be successful),但字字珠玑,至今仍被硅谷创投圈奉为圭臬。

复利化成长

指数曲线是创造财富的关键

Sam说,复利有神奇的魔力,指数曲线是创造财富的关键。一家中型企业,如果价值每年增长50%,用不了几年就能成为巨头。
世界上,真正有网络效应和高度扩展性的行业并不多。但技术进步让这一点成了可能,你可以花时间发现和创造这样的机会。
个人职业生涯也是如此。大多数职业发展轨迹都是线性的,而成功需要选择具有复利效应的职业。达成这一目标,有多个途径,包括借力资本、技术、品牌、网络效应,以及从事管理工作。

绝对自信

逆向思维创造最大价值
Sam说,自己认识的最成功的人,都是自信到离谱的人。
为什么?因为成功就是超越平庸,需要逆向思维才能创造出最大的价值。而对自己不自信的人很难具备逆向思维能力。
对初创企业CEO来说,一个挑战是激发自己以及团队的士气。如果没有自信,这个任务几乎不可能完成。一个人的志向越远大,遭受的打击就会越多。这个时候,只能靠自信。
自信容易导致自大,怎么克服?
Sam的做法是,强迫自己假设这些批评是正确的,然后在这个基础上调整计划。企业家必须学会保持自信与自我认知之间的平衡,避免过度自信造成与他人脱节。

独立思考

第一性原理
创业过程需要原创性思维,学校很难教,只能是自己学。
Sam非常推崇马斯克的“第一性原理”。马斯克建议凡事都从“第一性原理”出发,从问题的本质开始,想出新的创意,并通过与人交流,尝试发现更简便更快捷的方法以解决问题。
除此之外,Sam有两大心得。第一,对创业者来说,失败是家常便饭,量变导致质变,失败多了,成功就出现了。
第二,把自己逼入绝境,灵感往往就来了。这话可以反过来理解,缺乏灵感,可能就是问题的难度不够大。Sam说,灵感往往来自于压力,这一点他屡试不爽,深信不疑。

重视销售

把自己推销出去
光是自信还不够,创业者需要具备说服他人的能力。
Sam说,干什么工作,本质都是销售,把自己推销出去。当老板,需要把自己推销给投资人、媒体、合作伙伴。打工,要把自己推销给老板,把产品推销给客户。
一个好的销售,需要满足四个条件:好的想法、强大的沟通能力、一点点个人魅力,以及执行力。但做好销售的前提对自己推销的产品抱有绝对的自信。
Sam有几个特别的心得:
  • 书面沟通能力:把事情想清楚,再简明扼要地写清楚。
  • 销售和多数技能一样,是可以磨练的。做的时间越久,就越擅长。
  • 创业公司CEO要参与“打单”。这一点非常重要。

保持专注

专注并快速行动
专注可以让工作事半功倍。
Sam说,自己认识的人,都会花很多时间想明白要专注在哪些事情,而且他们的结果都很不错。由此可见,做正确的事比工作时间长短更重要。多数人是将时间花在了无关紧要的事情上。
一旦你想明白了该做什么事情,就快速行动起来,把精力集中在少数几件最重要的事情上。成功人士都是快速行动者。

努力工作

与相处愉快的人一起做喜欢的事

如果你在聪明和勤奋中占了一项,就能超过90%的人。但想超过99%的人,必须聪明+勤奋。因为你的竞争对手往往是这样的人。
Sam有两个观点:第一,做事极端,才可能有超凡的成就。
第二,创业没办法保持工作和生活的平衡。但勤奋有复利效果,往往能带来一个又一个惊人回报,这能产生巨大的生活乐趣。
Sam认为,勤奋要产生复利,也需要尽早开始。越早开始努力工作,获利时间就越长、获利就越多。
当然,勤奋不能透支身体。怎么平衡?Sam说,个人有个人的高招,有一点肯定靠谱,就是与相处愉快的人一起做喜欢的事。

任性一点

坚持并保持乐观
只要足够任性,坚持下去,世界就有可能以你的意志为转移。
大多数人要么不敢尝试,要么不够努力,要么过早放弃,导致自身潜能没有发挥出来。
Sam认为Airbnb是一个好的案例。无论遇到什么困难,CEO布莱恩·切斯基(Brian Chesky)都能坚持下来,终于等到了时来运转的一天。
怎样才能保持任性和坚定?Sam的建议是保持乐观。乐观这种性格特征是可以通过练习逐步提升的。毕竟,商业上成功的人几乎没有人是悲观的。

打造人际网络

多社交,关注潜力
一个人事业的天花板,往往取决于他能在身边集结多少优秀的人。
怎样打造一个人际网络?Sam有三点建议:
  • 尽可能多帮助别人
Sam取得的工作和投资成就,大多数来自贵人的帮助。而这些人往往是他过去不经意间帮助过的人。
  • 保持好名声
这包括:不亏待每一个一起共事的人;与他人慷慨分享资源;慧眼识珠、知人善用,让每个人充分施展自己的才华。
  • 结交积极向上、志同道合之人
挖掘人才是建立人际网络的有效途径,方法就是多社交。另外,不能局限于他人过往的工作经验和当前的成就,需要关注的是此人是否有潜力,以及潜力能否短时间内被激发。
每当遇到新人,Sam都会问自己,“这个人有异于常人的能力吗?”对于渴求人才的人来说,这个问题很值得思考。

想发大财,必须“拥有东西”

创造人们想要的东西
Sam说,福布斯榜单告诉我们,除了一些艺人,很少有人是靠薪水发财的。挣工资就是出卖自己的时间,而时间换来的财富只会保持缓慢的线性增长,不可能爆发式增长。
Sam认为,拥有能迅速增值的“东西”才能真正致富,可以是企业、房地产,也可以是自然资源、知识产权。
迅速增值的最佳方法就是大量制造出人们想要的东西。创业就是一个途径。

要有内驱力

向更高的地方攀登

Sam招聘,先看人是否有内驱力。
他认为,大多数人的工作动力主要是外部驱动,这些人做什么事情都是为了让外人觉得自己很牛。
这种心态是有害的。一是它会导致工作中过于在意他人的看法,人云亦云,因循守旧;二是会对形势出现误判,比如,容易将注意力集中在主要竞争对手,而不是客户。
Sam相信,大多数成功人士都是靠自我驱动。他们做事情是为了让自己满意,他们觉得改变世界是自己的责任。一个人有了金钱和地位,这二者的吸引力就会逐渐消失,只有内驱力才能推动一个人向更高的地方攀登。
以下为阿尔特曼在2019年即将任OpenAI CEO时写的博客《How To Be Successful》英文原文:
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.
A comment response I wrote on HN:
One of the biggest reasons 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 witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
Thanks to Brian Armstrong, Greg Brockman, Dalton Caldwell, Diane von Furstenberg, Maddie Hall, Drew Houston, Vinod Khosla, Jessica Livingston, Jon Levy, Luke Miles (6 drafts!), Michael Moritz, Ali Rowghani, Michael Seibel, Peter Thiel, Tracy Young and Shivon Zilis for reviewing drafts of this, and thanks especially to Lachy Groom for help writing it.