In 2019, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a blog post that outlined his thoughts about how to achieve outlier success. In 2023, after his company accomplished outlier success with the release of ChatGPT, his post was reshared widely on the Internet.
All the points in the article are well written and extremely insightful, even if on the surface they aren’t super novel (work hard, focus, build a network). However, there was one idea he shared that’s much less well known:
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.
Sam Altman, How To Be Successful
This idea was also touched on by Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One (Thiel was also a reviewer of Altman’s post). In Chapter 6, titled “You are not a lottery ticket”, Thiel argues we overestimate the role chance plays in our life and underestimate the power of our own planning. He points to several successful entrepreneurs as those who are obsessive planners, but do so because they possess “definite” visions of the future, and don’t presume life is up to chance. Thiel says this is something we can all do. If we build a definite vision for the future, based around our goals and convictions, we can have more control over our outcomes than we previously thought.
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One