Re-reading this made me notice the overlap between the two posts. Most of the suggestions across both posts fall into a few common themes. I find having a shorter list of "keys to success" helps me keep them top of mind day to day. I see four main themes here across both posts:
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
These lists are always the same and never say anything new. Work hard, have goals, be focused, etc etc. No fucking shit. Everyone has heard this stuff X1000. The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
I agree a tough background makes it a lot harder. But I don't think that takes away from the fact that people find these kinds lists helpful in moving forward from their starting point. I can think of a few famous examples of people who attribute their success partly to crafting and refining their own personal guidelines. Charlie Munger of Bershire Hathaway and his "mental models". Ray Dalio of Bridgewater documents the principles that helped him in a landmark book called Principles. Now I'm curious to look up people's backgrounds to see what successful people from tough backgrounds put in their lists.
> The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite will be very meaningful. But for some people, simply stating that can be the difference between them declining the invite outright, accepting it and it being a hardship and causing undue stress/friction for them, or accepting it and enjoying themselves. The same sorts of scenarios exist both professionally and personally, and being cognizant of them can bring a lot of success in life.
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...