Down This Bowl of Chicken Soup: The Success Creed of ChatGPT's Creator

Lately there has been a subject sweeping the globe like a runaway hit: ChatGPT.

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT—a chatbot released by the artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI—burst onto the scene.

The Swiss banking giant UBS called it “the fastest-growing consumer application in history.”

According to a UBS report, just two months after ChatGPT’s launch, its monthly active users had surpassed 100 million by the end of January 2023. It took Instagram a full two and a half years to reach that scale. TikTok took nine months. ChatGPT took just two.

The founder of OpenAI—and thus the creator of ChatGPT—is the 38-year-old Sam Altman.

At 38, Altman has had a charmed career. At 19 he dropped out of Stanford’s computer science department to start a company; at 26 he and his partners sold the company for $43 million, achieving financial freedom; at 29 he invested in and ran YC, America’s largest startup incubator, growing it tenfold in scale over five years; and at 30 he joined Musk and others to found OpenAI, taking his place among the world’s top entrepreneurs.

In 2019, as he was about to become CEO of OpenAI, Altman wrote a blog post titled “How To Be Successful”—a very chicken-soup name, but savored slowly, every word is a pearl.

This is a “success creed” for business, entrepreneurship, and personal growth, but it offers much for our family office to learn from and reflect on regarding the family enterprises, family human capital, and family financial capital we work with (see Flourishing Tree’s Six Family Capitals for details). We at Flourishing Tree have therefore translated and reorganized the piece—this is not a word-for-word rendering of the original, and it also includes some of our own views and understanding.

1. Compounding Growth

If we look carefully, the magic of compounding is everywhere.

The exponential growth compounding brings is key to creating wealth.

A company growing 50% a year will become an industry giant in just a few years. As technology accelerates, these business opportunities—delivering exponential growth through extreme network effects and scalability—are becoming more and more common, and are worth the effort to find and create.

The same holds for a personal career: you must find ways to compound so that it grows exponentially. Most career paths are linear, jobs in which two years of experience and twenty years of experience are barely different.

If you don’t want to become that kind of person, keep learning and iterating, make each day’s work add to your ultimate goal, and be able to integrate capital, technology, brand, network effects, and management to produce leverage.

All the rewards in life—whether wealth, relationships, or knowledge—come from compounding. Once you find the right work and the right people to travel with, commit yourself fully. Then keep refining for a few decades, and you’ll reap enormous returns in both relationships and economic benefit. That is why the compounding effect matters so much.

Note that compounding growth and long-termism go hand in hand. In the business world, sticking to long-termism is hard, but in the end those who believe in the power of compounding and hold to long-termism are richly rewarded.

2. Absolute Self-Confidence

The power of confidence is immense; nearly every successful entrepreneur or investor possesses absolute self-confidence.

If you don’t believe in yourself, it is impossible to think contrarily—and contrarian thinking is often the very quality that leads a company through its hardest passages.

The larger a company grows, the greater the difficulties and challenges it faces. At such moments, only your own absolute self-confidence can keep lifting the morale of yourself and your team, and give you the courage to face adversity.

Intel’s Andy Grove wrote a famous book called Only the Paranoid Survive. In Grove’s view, the constant upheaval of information technology makes it nearly impossible for any company’s strategy to stay fresh; “facing tenfold change, managing a company is harder than reaching the heavens.” At such a time, the only thing to rely on—more than reason, even—is the entrepreneur’s decisiveness and paranoia. And that paranoia is absolute self-confidence.

Of course, you must also learn to overcome the arrogance that confidence can breed. When criticized, force yourself to assume the criticism is correct, and adjust your plans on that basis. An entrepreneur must learn to balance self-confidence with self-awareness, avoiding the disconnection from others that overconfidence causes.

3. Independent Thinking

Entrepreneurship often springs from original thinking—that is, thinking from “first principles.” This cannot be taught or learned in a school classroom.

Producing innovative ideas through first principles is an exhilarating process, and it is rarer still if you can find like-minded people to exchange ideas with on the same wavelength. More important, though, is to put ideas into action and iterate quickly.

The most effective way to learn is to find a path of breakthrough out of adversity and failure. The more you try, the more you’ll come to believe that true courage is being able to rise again after you’ve been knocked down.

4. Being Good at Selling

Confidence alone is not enough; you must also be able to persuade others to believe in your convictions.

In a sense, all work—even the way you treat yourself—is essentially selling: you must sell yourself, and you must sell your products and ideas.

A good salesperson needs four things: an inspiring vision, excellent communication skills, a bit of personal charisma, and strong execution. On top of that, you need absolute confidence in the product you’re selling.

Selling can also be improved through deliberate practice, but perhaps because people carry some prejudice against selling, many are unwilling to admit it, learn it, or improve at it.

As the founder of a company, you must be able to step onto the field yourself and become the “chief marketing officer.”

5. Being Willing to Take Risks

Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward.

Early in a career, taking risks is often easier, because you don’t have much to lose but stand to gain a lot. Once you’ve achieved a certain success and status and settled into your comfort zone, decisions to take risks become harder to make.

Yet for entrepreneurship, sometimes being unwilling to take risks is the greatest risk of all.

Sharpen your ability to gauge risk, keep the downside of a failed gamble within a bearable range, and on that basis step out of your comfort zone, follow your intuition, and go take the risk.

Mark Twain said: twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So cast off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, and set sail. Explore, dream, discover!

6. Staying Focused

Focus makes work far more effective.

People think focus means saying “yes” to the thing you need to focus on, but that’s not what focus means at all. Focus means saying “no” to a hundred other good ideas. You must choose carefully. I am as proud of the work we haven’t done as of the work we have. Innovation is saying “no” to a thousand things.

Most people waste most of their time on things that don’t matter. Focus is figuring out what you should do and then moving fast, concentrating your energy on the few most important things. Successful people are all fast movers.

7. Working Hard

Smart or hardworking—once you have one of the two, you can surpass 90% of people. But to surpass 99%, you must be both smart and hardworking, because your competitors are usually people like that.

Only by acting to the utmost can you create extraordinary achievements.

Working hard poses challenges to work-life balance, but I think balance doesn’t mean being in a state of equilibrium every single moment.

Diligence, too, has a compounding effect, and often brings one stunning reward after another, which can produce great joy in life. The earlier you start working hard, the longer and greater the payoff.

How do you work hard without burning out? There’s a trick: do work you love with people you enjoy being around.

8. Being Bold and Willful

When everyone is doubting you, don’t be afraid to do what you truly want to do.

Follow your curiosity, follow the guidance of your inner voice. What excites you, once shaped by your creation, is sure to excite others too.

Most people either don’t dare to try, don’t try hard enough, or give up too early, and so fail to realize their potential. They accept things as they are without even trying, never imagining that the world can be changed by their own “boldness and willfulness.”

Just as most people give up, there is almost always someone who says: “I’ll keep at it until this method works; whatever challenges I face, I’ll solve them all.” They are serious, bold, and willful; they keep moving forward until they succeed. They held on long enough, and so their luck came to them.

To stay bold and willful, you must stay optimistic; almost no successful person is a pessimist. And optimism as a trait can be gradually strengthened through practice.

9. Building a Moat

If your company has an advantage others find hard to compete with, then without doubt your company becomes more valuable.

The same holds for you as an individual: whether you possess abilities others find hard to replace also determines how much you are worth.

This ability and advantage is what Buffett calls a “moat.”

At the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Buffett said: “Let us make the moat—keeping it wide and keeping it from being crossed—the primary criterion of a great company.” Charlie Munger holds that a company’s competitive advantage is its “moat,” the intangible trench that protects the enterprise from invasion. Excellent companies have deep moats that keep widening, providing the company with lasting protection.

10. Building a Network

The team is the key to a venture’s success; the success of a solo founder depends on the ability to gather outstanding talent.

One of the most effective ways to build a network is to help others as much as possible and create value for them.

Truly care about others, learn to assess and appreciate their strengths, and place them in suitable positions and roles. Be able to draw out others’ potential rather than manufacture anxiety and pressure.

Everyone on the team should play to their strengths rather than shore up their weaknesses. Let the team’s complementarity dissolve the weaknesses that might otherwise challenge the work. So hire members whose abilities complement your own, not people similar to you.

An effective route to building a network is to socialize more. And don’t be confined to a person’s past work experience and current achievements; what you need to watch is whether this person has potential, and whether that potential can be continually drawn out.

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who share your ambitions and vision, working and growing alongside them.

11. Owning “Assets”

Only by owning “assets” that appreciate quickly can you truly grow rich—these can be enterprises, real estate, or natural resources and intellectual property.

Renting out your own time will never make you rich. Because a person’s time is finite and linear, and if you’re paid by hours worked, your income is necessarily limited.

By contrast, most rich people are paid by results—sales commissions, transaction commissions, profit dividends, royalties on their works, and so on—all tied to work performance or the outcome of a deal. Such income is unstable, but it has no ceiling, which is why it can make people rich. And these outcomes are “assets” you can truly own.

The most important skill for growing rich is to become a lifelong learner; whatever you want to learn, you must find the way and the means. The old money-making model was: study four years at university, earn a degree, and work thirty years in a professional field. It’s different now. The times change day by day; you must master a new specialty within nine months, and that specialty will be obsolete in four years. But in the three years it exists, you can become very rich.

12. Having Inner Drive

Most people’s motivation to work is external; they do things to win others’ approval.

This mindset is harmful. First, it makes you care too much about others’ opinions at work, hindering you from doing things that are truly valuable but that others don’t approve of; second, it leads to misjudging the situation and being unwilling to take risks, because you’ll be so intent on staying aligned with others (including competitors) that you lose the chance to create a distinctive advantage.

Buffett said: a big issue in how people act is whether they have an “inner scorecard” or an “outer scorecard.” If an inner scorecard satisfies you, it will be very useful. I do this often. I’d put it this way: look, if the whole world ignored your results, would you rather be regarded as the greatest in the world while actually being the worst investor, or be regarded as the most incompetent in the world while actually being the best?

Most successful people run on self-drive. They do things to realize their own dreams; they feel they have the power to change the world. Once a person has money and status, fame and fortune gradually lose their appeal, and only inner drive can push a person to keep climbing higher and find the meaning of life.

Summary

In the end, every person who comes into this world will use their life to create a “work” of their own. How to make it the “most beautiful work” is the lesson of a lifetime.

Jiro Ono’s sushi is a beautiful work; Jobs’s iPhone is a beautiful work; Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a beautiful work; and so are the beautiful works of Plato, Aristotle, Laozi, Confucius, Darwin, Newton, and Einstein. It is precisely these beautiful works that have changed our world and profoundly shaped every one of us.

What is our own beautiful work? Do the thing that fascinates you, and do it to the utmost!

Reference: How to Be Successful — https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful