Startup Wisdom

Sam Altman: how to be successful

Steve Jobs on facing death and decision making:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition." — Steve Jobs

Sam Altman: Advice for ambitious 19 year olds

Elon Musk on his relationship with failure: "There's a certain amount of time, and within that time, you want the best net outcome. For all the set of actions that you can do, there's going to be some which will fail, some which will succeed, and you want the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest… There's going to be some amount of failure. But you want your net useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic."

Naval on your biggest competitive advantage:

Patrick Collison on maximizing your younger years:

@ValaAfshar Success has a way of quietly convincing us that our judgment is infallible. That past wins are proof of future victory. The cure is to stay genuinely curious and open to being wrong.

All of us need to be on guard against arrogance, which knocks at the door whenever you are successful. —Steve Jobs

“You need to put yourself in positions where you’re challenged. If you’re not challenged, you’re not growing. If you’re not growing, you’re probably not doing something meaningful.” - Jensen Huang

Naval Ravikant on finding people worth building with: “Everybody tells you it’s the people. You figure out what that means 10 years later once you’ve worked with enough of the wrong people... You should look for someone who is very high intelligence, very high energy, and very high integrity.”

@theJayAlto It takes a lot more energy to build something up than to tear it down. Optimism is a choice that requires courage.

pessimism is the coward's way out

@Jayyanginspires Sam doesn’t miss 🤝

@StartupWisdom_ so dang good

Peter Thiel on the Rarity of Courage:

@successmoverss I think the trick is finding something you’re interested enough in to stay with for 10+ years. Most rewards come from sticking around longer than everyone else.

“The best advice I could give anyone is to spend your time working on whatever you are passionate about.” — Richard Branson

@readswithravi Elon put it best: “Optimism, pessimism, f*** that; we’re going to make it happen.”

I’m in love with this sentence: “The more delusionally optimistic you are, the more life rewards you.”

@ValaAfshar Suffering by itself doesn’t build character. Plenty of people become bitter from suffering. Character comes from how you respond to it.

Nvidia CEO: Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character. Character is not formed out of smart people: it is formed out of people who have suffered.

@drgurner Confidence isn’t always built by solving the biggest problem in front of you. Sometimes it’s built by proving to yourself that you can still move forward somewhere.

Here's a trick if work is going *terribly*: Find areas in your life where you can win. A hobby, your fitness.... Anything. Victories translate & bleed into other areas, just as the negative does. Start stacking energy in your favor.

@justinskycak I've observed that most of the best things in life start as obligations, not opportunities. A hard job A difficult conversation A commitment I didn’t feel ready for Growth has a funny way of showing up disguised as something you’d rather avoid.

Opportunities often arrive disguised as responsibilities.

Paul Graham: How to do great work