These are the notes that I’ve taken from the Sam Altman’s article on How to be successful. He explains everything in a beautiful manner and I really love it.

13 thoughts about how to achieve outlier success:

1. Compound yourself

• Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.
• As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results.
• 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.
• 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

• Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgement is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.
• Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness.

3. Learn to think independently

• 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.

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.
• Getting good at communication - particularly written communication - is an investment worth making.
• Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill - anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice.

5. Make it easy to take risks

• 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.

6. Focus