Sam Altman - The Most Important Thing When Choosing A Career Path

Nugget from Sam Altman, Paul Graham

Hey Friend!

Today I bring you an insight that I picked some time ago from Sam Altman’s famous blogpost “How To Be Successful”.

It touches on a theme that is crucial for ensuring a successful career (and I also complemented it with an insight from Paul Graham).

👤 Doer

💡Nugget

🟠 Sam Altman:

Source → From his Blogpost: “How To Be Successful”

You 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.

"Arm yourself with Specific Knowledge, Accountability and Leverage."

"Leverage is a force multiplier of your judgment."

"Judgment requires experience, but it can be built faster by learning foundational skills."

- Naval Ravikant

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.

"The main message of The Magic of Thinking Big: Don't overestimate others and underestimate yourself. I still read the first two chapters whenever doubt creeps in.

It's not enough to remove life's niggly minutiae that are bothering you—you need a compelling big goal. You need an inspiring, abnormally large objective to chase."

- Tim Ferriss (on Twitter)

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.

🟠 Paul Graham:

Source → From his Essay: “How To Do Great Work”

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you.

The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.

(I originally created this visual for an essay I contributed to the organization Spread Great Ideas. You can check out the essay by clicking here!)

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💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s edition!

Happy Friday ;)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!