This recent post by Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) on how to achieve outlier success was just passed around our office. And it's so fucking good that I decided to regurgitate it here on the blog by listing all 13 of his thoughts along with some of his most salient points. All of the words below are his (not mine), but most of his words are missing. I wanted to make a more condensed version so that you could easily print out this post and affix it to your desk. I am about to do that. Thanks for a great post, Sam.
1. Compound yourself
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.
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.
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.
4. Get good at “sales”
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.
5. Make it easy to take risks
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.
6. Focus
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
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.
8. Be bold
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.
9. Be willful
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.
10. Be hard to compete with
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.
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.
13. Be internally driven
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.
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
This is not new. It has been reported on before. But I just finished reading this article about Jeff Bezos’ relentless commitment to “high-quality and high-velocity decision making” at Amazon.
Here are a couple of high level points:
- There are decisions that cannot be easily reversed (Type 1) and there are decisions that can be (Type 2). Knowing which is which is important. To help get better at this, they are very diligent about tracking the outcomes of previous decisions.
- Make decisions without all of the info you wish you had, because if you don’t, you’re probably moving too slow. Speed is paramount. If you’ve categorized your decisions properly (see above), being wrong may not actually be that costly.
- There’s a company philosophy centered around “disagree and commit.” It is about moving forward – since speed is so important – without full consensus. In other words: We may not all agree, but can we disagree and commit to this?
Perhaps the most interesting, and seemingly paradoxical, aspect of Amazon’s “high-velocity decision making process” is that it is built upon narrative memos, instead of PowerPoint decks. In fact, decks have been banned at the company since 2004.
The reason for this is that narrative memos are more difficult to write, which means you really have to understand what you’re talking about. It encourages deeper thought and it allows nuances and interdependencies to come through.
Apparently important meetings start with everyone just sitting in a room reading the narrative memo, which are often between 4-6 pages. Once everyone has read the memo and is on the same page, the meeting starts.
As someone who writes a daily narrative, this approach really resonates me. It would be a hell of a lot easier if I could just show up here every day and throw down a few bullet points. But then both of us would get far less out of this practice.
Writing takes time. Bezos has acknowledged that these memos cannot be written in a day or two. But clearly there’s a belief that more time spent up front translates into greater overall speed. Their market cap suggests that is working.
At the beginning of this month, Interbrand released its annual ranking of the world’s best global brands. This year’s 2018 report marks the 19th year of the study. If you’d like to download a free copy of the report, you can do that here. But below is a snapshot of the first 24 brands:
Apple and Google are in top position for the 6th year in a row. And Amazon is on a hockey stick trajectory with its brand value jumping by 56%. More than half of the list is comprised of the following five sectors: Automotive (16), Technology (13), Financial Services (12), Luxury (9), and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (9). Luxury is currently the fastest growing sector.
In their report, they outline five themes that have emerged and that are helping these brands outperform. They are:
Positive utility - not enough to just make people feel good through storytelling; you need to create real value and a positive impact in the world
Subscription mindset - there’s an increasing amount of brand value in subscription-based businesses (29% in 2018 compared to 18% in 2009); you need to offer your products and services with the least amount of friction as possible
Customer-centricity - bring the voice of your customer into every aspect of your business; be nimble enough to respond quickly
Learning from luxury - the top performing category in this year’s ranking; about exclusivity and authenticity
Role of brand - make your brand part of the decision-making process; build brand equity and trust
I’ll stop there and let you all dig into the rest of the report if you’re interested.
But one thing I found particularly interesting about the study is that they used – insert buzzwords here – “AI-powered social listening” to try and measure the emotion and sentiment floating around on the internet around specific brands. The goal was to pin down the perceived trustworthiness of specific brands.
Not surprisingly, they found a pretty strong correlation between customer trust and purchasing intent. Makes sense to me.