Name: Sam Altman's Advice To People In Their 20's
Uploaded: 2024-01-23T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 4 min 22 s
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You've worked incredibly hard and I know that a lot of people around you have worked very hard, what's sort of the advice or the way that you think about your work-life balance in your twenties,

To-infinitive

and what do you recommend to people who want to do these things and also want to, you know, experience their twenties?

Well, I don't think I work as hard as a lot of people.

I think I do work pretty hard, but I think it's compound interest is a good metaphor here.

If you work really hard at the beginning of your career and you get a little bit better at what you do every day, every week, every year and you learn more and you meet more people and you just get more done.

There's a compound effect and it's far better to put that time in at the beginning of your career than at the end.

Because if you do it at the beginning, you get to benefit from it, you know, for the rest of the time you work.

So, you know, one thing I always try to do is like, meet every person I had time for, go to everything I could and just like, spend a little bit more time trying to learn and get better at what I did, what I do.

The, you know, the beginning of your career, I think in terms of setting the trajectory of the rest of your career follows is the most valuable time.

And so obviously, you don't want to work all the time because your twenties or your twenties.

But I do think you want to work harder than most people think you should.

And I think that if you do that, you tend to benefit from it later. Life is super unfair.

Sometimes you also just get unlucky and, and so all you can do is kind of maximize chances there.

But I do think that working hard early in your career to get the leverage in the compounding effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I never got.

And so going into that idea of these early years being particularly valuable and working very hard on thing,

how do you decide when you've worked on something long enough and it's time to call it quits, or when you've worked on it for four years and you're just about to have that breakthrough?

Yeah, this is really hard. Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something, there's no perfect answer to that.

But it's really challenging to even get that approximately correct.

I think most people give up on things way too early.

So the mistake that most people make is they try something, it does not immediately work.

You see this particularly in young entrepreneurs.

It does not immediately work. After seven weeks, they say, "You know what, I tried this thing, it's just not meant to be and I have too many other projects," and so they immediately give up.

And you kind of, you know, the satirical version of this is people that are 23 and have started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before it could ever possibly be successful.

There are a lot of critics, there are a lot of people who say this thing sucks, it's going to fail, it's really stupid.

And then also there's like, what at YC we called the trough of Sorrow where no one even bothers to say it sucks because no one cares at all.

Most of the founders that I have spent a lot of time with that have gone on to be super successful, spent a very long time on their idea when a lot of other people would have given up,

and either people said it sucks or people said nothing at all.

And a framework that I have for when to give up and when to keep working is it should be an internal and an external decision.

If people aren't using it or if people are saying it's bad, that alone is not a reason to give up.

You want to pay some attention to that, they might be right.

But I think the best entrepreneurs I know, they make an internal decision about when to give up or when to keep working on something.

It's basically when you have run out of ideas and something is not working, then it's a good time to stop.

And so into this idea that you need a long time to do anything important, what's the source of motivation for people?

Like what should people be looking to find to be inspired or to keep going on these ideas for a long period of time?

Yeah, I think if you don't actually believe what you're doing is really important, if you don't derive satisfaction from what you're doing,

then you will not be able to sustain all of the bad things that happen in the incredibly long period of time that the bad things happen over.

And so the only motivation that I have seen work for people over a long period of time is enjoyment in what they're doing and an intense belief that it matters,

and ideally liking the people that they go to work with every day.

And by the way, it's totally cool when people start off saying, "Well, I want to make money," or "I wanna be famous."

I think a lot of people start that way and they don't like to admit it.

But pretty quickly, or at least in the first few years, I think a lot of people find a deeper mission for why they do what they do and that drives them then for the rest of the time they work.