Sam Altman

How To Be Successful 如何成功

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. 我观察了成千上万的创始人，并思考了很多关于如何才能赚到巨额资金或创造重要的东西。通常，人们一开始想要前者，最终想要后者。

Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone. 以下是关于如何实现这种异常成功的 13 个想法。一旦你已经达到了一个基本的成功程度（通过特权或努力），并希望投入工作将其转化为异常成功，这里的一切都会更容易做到。[1] 但其中大部分适用于任何人。

1. Compound yourself
1. 复利自己

在金融领域，"compounding"（复利）指的是利息不只是基于原始的本金计算，还基于之前已经累积的利息计算。简单地说，复利就是“利上利”的概念。
例如，假设你在银行有一个储蓄账户，年利率为5%。如果你存入1000元，那么一年后你将获得50元的利息，总额达到1050元。如果这个利息留在账户中继续产生利息，那么下一年你将获得的利息不再是50元，而是52.5元（1050元的5%），这就是复利的效果。

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. 复利是魔术。到处寻找它。指数曲线是创造财富的关键。

A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will. It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them. 一家每年价值增长 50% 的中型企业在很短的时间内变得巨大。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极高的可扩展性。但随着技术的发展，越来越多的人会这样做。 找到它们并创建它们是值得的。

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly. 你自己也想成为一条指数曲线——你应该让你的生活遵循一个不断上升和正确的轨迹。走向具有复合效应的职业很重要——大多数职业的发展都是相当线性的。

You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people. 你不想从事这样的职业，已经做了两年的人可以和做了二十年的人一样有效——你的学习率应该一直很高。随着你的职业发展，你所做的每个工作单元都应该产生越来越多的结果。获得这种杠杆的方法有很多，例如资本、技术、品牌、网络效应和管理人员。

It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote. 专注于在你定义的任何成功指标上再加一个零是很有用的——金钱、地位、对世界的影响等等。我愿意在项目之间花尽可能多的时间来寻找我的下一件事。但我一直希望这是一个项目，如果成功，将使我职业生涯的其余部分看起来像一个脚注。

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes. 大多数人都陷入了线性机会的泥潭。愿意放弃小机会，专注于潜在的步骤变化。

I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do. 我认为，无论是对公司还是对个人的职业生涯而言，商业中最大的竞争优势是长期思考，以广阔的视野看待世界上不同的系统将如何融合在一起。复合增长的一个值得注意的方面是，最远的年份是最重要的。在一个几乎没有人真正有长远眼光的世界里，市场会为那些有长远眼光的人提供丰厚的回报。

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised. 相信指数，要有耐心，并感到惊喜。

2. Have almost too much self-belief
2.有太多的自信

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. 自信是非常强大的。我认识的最成功的人几乎都相信自己，甚至到了妄想的地步。

Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. 尽早培养。随着您获得更多数据点，表明您的判断力是好的，并且您可以始终如一地提供结果，请更加相信自己。

If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created. 如果你不相信自己，就很难让自己对未来有相反的想法。但这是创造最大价值的地方。

I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.” 我记得多年前埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）带我参观SpaceX工厂时。他详细谈到了火箭每个部件的制造，但记忆犹新的是，当他谈到向火星发射大型火箭时，他脸上绝对肯定的表情。我离开时想：“呵呵，这就是信念的基准“。

Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-belief. And unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to tear you down. 管理自己的士气和团队的士气是大多数工作中最大的挑战之一。如果没有很多自信，这几乎是不可能的。不幸的是，你越是雄心勃勃，世界就越会试图把你打垮。

Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong. If not, they would have faced much more competition. 大多数非常成功的人对未来的看法至少一次是正确的，当时人们认为他们错了。否则，他们将面临更多的竞争。

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion. 自信必须与自我意识相平衡。我曾经讨厌任何形式的批评，并积极避免它。现在，我试着总是假设它是真的，然后决定我是否要采取行动。寻求真理是艰难的，而且往往是痛苦的，但它是将自信与自欺欺人区分开来的原因。

This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch. 这种平衡还可以帮助您避免给人留下有权和脱节的印象。

3. Learn to think independently
3.学会独立思考

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own. 创业很难教，因为原创思维很难教。学校不是为了教这个而设立的——事实上，它通常会奖励相反的东西。所以你必须自己培养它。

Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world. 从基本原理出发思考并尝试产生新的想法很有趣，而找到与之交流的人是在这方面做得更好的好方法。下一步是找到简单、快速的方法来在现实世界中测试这些想法。

“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky. “我会失败很多次，而我真的会做对一次”是企业家的方式。你必须给自己很多机会才能走运。

One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down. 要学习的最有力的教训之一是，您可以弄清楚在似乎没有解决方案的情况下该怎么做。你这样做的次数越多，你就越会相信它。勇气来自于学习在被击倒后可以重新站起来。

4. Get good at “sales”
4.善于“销售”

Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe. 光有自信是不够的——你还必须能够说服别人相信你的信仰。

All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability. 在某种程度上，所有伟大的职业都变成了销售工作。你必须向客户、潜在员工、媒体、投资者等宣传你的计划。这需要鼓舞人心的愿景、强大的沟通技巧、一定程度的魅力和执行能力的证据。

Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language. 善于沟通，尤其是书面沟通，是一项值得的投资。对于清晰的沟通，我最好的建议是首先确保你的思路清晰，然后使用简单明了的语言。

The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful. 擅长销售的最好方法是真正相信你所销售的产品。卖掉你真正相信的东西感觉很棒，而试图卖蛇油感觉很糟糕。

Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable. 擅长销售就像提高任何其他技能一样——任何人都可以通过刻意练习来变得更好。但出于某种原因，也许是因为它感觉令人反感，许多人将其视为无法学习的东西。

My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way. 我的另一个重要的销售技巧是，只要重要，就亲自出现。刚开始的时候，我总是愿意坐飞机。这通常是不必要的，但有三次它为我带来了职业生涯的转折点，否则就会走向另一条路。

5. Make it easy to take risks
5.让风险变得容易

Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more. 大多数人高估了风险，低估了回报。承担风险很重要，因为不可能一直都是对的——你必须尝试很多事情，并在学习更多时迅速适应。

It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction. 在职业生涯的早期承担风险通常更容易;你没有什么可失去的，而且你可能会得到很多。一旦你让自己达到了一个基本义务的地步，你就应该试着让风险变得容易。寻找你可以下的小赌注，如果你错了，你会输 1 倍，但如果它有效，你可以下 100 倍。然后朝这个方向下更大的赌注。

Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy—and human nature—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment. 不过，不要攒太久。在 YC，我们经常注意到在 Google 或 Facebook 工作过很长时间的创始人存在一个问题。当人们习惯了舒适的生活、可预测的工作以及无论做什么都成功的声誉时，就很难将其抛在脑后（人们有一种令人难以置信的能力，总是将他们的生活方式与明年的薪水相匹配）。即使他们真的离开了，回来的诱惑也很大。将短期收益和便利置于长期成就之上是很容易的，也是人类的天性。

But when you aren’t on the treadmill, you can follow your hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs. 但是当你不在跑步机上时，你可以跟随你的直觉，把时间花在可能变得非常有趣的事情上。尽可能长时间地保持你的生活的廉价和灵活性是做到这一点的有力方法，但显然需要权衡取舍。

6. Focus
6. 专注

Focus is a force multiplier on work. 专注是工作的力量倍增器。

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. 我见过的几乎每个人都会花更多的时间思考要关注什么，从而得到很好的服务。做正确的事情比工作很多小时重要得多。大多数人把大部分时间都浪费在无关紧要的事情上。

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful. 一旦你弄清楚了该怎么做，就要坚定不移地快速完成你的少数优先事项。我还没有遇到一个非常成功的行动迟缓的人。

7. Work hard
7.努力工作

You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot. 你可以通过聪明或努力地工作来达到你所在领域的第 90 个百分位左右，这仍然是一项了不起的成就。但要达到第 99 个百分位，需要两者兼而有之——你将与其他非常有才华的人竞争，他们会有好主意并愿意做很多工作。

Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success. 极端的人会得到极端的结果。大量工作会带来巨大的生活权衡，决定不这样做是完全合理的。但它有很多优点。在大多数情况下，动力会复合，成功会带来成功。

And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated. 而且这通常非常有趣。生活中最大的乐趣之一就是找到你的目标，擅长它，并发现你的影响对比你自己更大的事情很重要。最近，一位 YC 创始人表示，在一家大公司辞职并努力发挥最大影响后，他感到非常惊讶，他感到非常高兴和充实。在这方面努力工作应该受到庆祝。

It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US, but this is certainly not the case in other parts of the world—the amount of energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US is quickly becoming the new benchmark. 我并不完全清楚为什么在美国的某些地区努力工作已经成为一件坏事，但在世界其他地区肯定不是这样——美国以外的企业家所表现出的能量和动力正在迅速成为新的基准。

You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with. 你必须弄清楚如何在不倦怠的情况下努力工作。人们为此找到了自己的策略，但几乎总是有效的策略是找到你喜欢和你喜欢花很多时间的人一起做的工作。

I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success. 我认为那些假装自己可以在大部分时间（在你生命中的某个时期）不工作的情况下在职业上取得超级成功的人是在做伤害。事实上，工作耐力似乎是长期成功的最大预测因素之一。

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young. 关于努力工作的另一个想法：在职业生涯开始时就去做。辛勤工作就像利息一样复利，你越早做，你就越有时间获得收益。当你有较少的其他责任时，努力工作也更容易，这在你年轻的时候经常发生，但并非总是如此。

8. Be bold
8.大胆一点

I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters. 我相信做一个艰难的创业比做一个轻松的创业更容易。人们希望成为令人兴奋的事情的一部分，并觉得他们的工作很重要。

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on. 如果你在一个重要问题上取得了进展，你就会有源源不断的人想要帮助你。让自己变得更有野心，不要害怕做你真正想做的事情。

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it. 如果其他人都在创办模因公司，而你想创办一家基因编辑公司，那就去做吧，不要再猜测了。

Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too. 追随你的好奇心。对你来说似乎令人兴奋的事情，对其他人来说往往也会令人兴奋。

9. Be willful
9.任性

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. 一个大秘密是，你可以在令人惊讶的时间内让世界屈服于你的意志——大多数人甚至不尝试，只是接受事情的本来面目。

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. 人们有巨大的能力让事情发生。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力的结合使大多数人永远无法发挥他们的潜力。

Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well. 问你想要什么。你通常不会得到它，而且拒绝往往会很痛苦。但是当它起作用时，它的效果出奇地好。

Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out”, and mean it, go on to succeed. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way. 几乎总是，那些说“我会继续前进，直到它成功，无论挑战是什么，我都会弄清楚它们”的人，并且是认真的，继续成功。他们坚持的时间足够长，给自己一个运气的机会。

Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way. Airbnb是我在这方面的基准。他们讲述了太多的故事，我不建议尝试复制（将用完的信用卡放在孩子们用来制作棒球卡的九槽三环活页夹中，每顿饭都吃一元店的麦片，与强大的根深蒂固的兴趣进行一场又一场的战斗，等等），但他们设法存活了足够长的时间，让运气如他们所愿。

To be willful, you have to be optimistic—hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person. 要想任性，你必须乐观——希望这是一种可以通过练习来改善的人格特质。我从来没有遇到过一个非常成功的悲观主义者。

10. Be hard to compete with
10.很难与之竞争

Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true. 大多数人都明白，如果公司难以与之竞争，它们就会更有价值。这很重要，而且显然是正确的。

But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money. 但这对你个人来说也是如此。如果你所做的事情可以由别人完成，那么它最终会完成，而且花更少的钱。

The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it. 变得难以竞争的最好方法是建立杠杆。例如，你可以通过人际关系来做到这一点，通过建立一个强大的个人品牌，或者通过擅长多个不同领域的交叉点来做到这一点。还有许多其他策略，但你必须想出一些方法来做到这一点。

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with. 大多数人会做和他们一起出去玩的大多数人做的任何事情。这种模仿行为通常是一个错误——如果你在做和其他人都在做的事情一样，你就不难与之竞争。

11. Build a network
11. 建立网络

Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish. 伟大的工作需要团队。发展一个有才华的人网络——有时是密切的，有时是松散的——是伟大职业生涯的重要组成部分。你认识的真正有才华的人网络的规模往往会成为你能取得成就的限制。

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago. 建立网络的一个有效方法是尽可能多地帮助人们。在很长一段时间内，这样做是我最好的职业机会和四项最佳投资中的三项的原因。我经常感到惊讶，因为十年前我为帮助一位创始人所做的一些事情，好事经常发生在我身上。

One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out. 建立网络的最佳方法之一是建立真正照顾与您一起工作的人的声誉。过于慷慨地分享好处;它会 10 倍地回到你身边。此外，学习如何评估人们擅长什么，并将他们置于这些角色中。（这是我学到的关于管理的最重要的东西，我没有读过太多关于它的文章。你希望有一个名声，即推动人们足够努力，让他们取得比他们想象的更多的成就，但又不能太努力以至于筋疲力尽。

Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do. “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are. 每个人都在某些事情上比其他事情更好。用你的长处来定义自己，而不是你的短处。承认你的弱点并弄清楚如何解决它们，但不要让它们阻止你做你想做的事情。 “我不能做X，因为我不擅长Y”是我经常从企业家那里听到的话，几乎总是反映出缺乏创造力。弥补你弱点的最好方法是雇用互补的团队成员，而不仅仅是雇用那些擅长你同样事情的人。

A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment. 建立网络的一个特别有价值的部分是善于发现未被发现的人才。通过练习，快速发现智力、动力和创造力变得更加容易。最简单的学习方法就是结识很多人，并跟踪谁继续给你留下深刻印象，谁没有。请记住，您主要在寻找改进率，不要高估经验或当前成就。

I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things. 当我遇到一个新朋友时，我总是试着问自己：“这个人是自然的力量吗？对于寻找可能完成伟大事业的人来说，这是一个很好的启发式方法。

A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!) 发展网络的一个特例是找到一个知名人士来押注你，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。毫不奇怪，做到这一点的最好方法是不遗余力地提供帮助。（请记住，您必须在以后的某个时候支付这笔费用！

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions. 最后，记住花时间与支持你抱负的积极的人在一起。

12. You get rich by owning things
12.你通过拥有东西致富

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary. 我童年最大的经济误解是人们从高薪中致富。尽管有一些例外，例如艺人，但在福布斯排行榜的历史上，几乎没有人能拿到薪水。

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value. 通过拥有快速增值的东西，你会真正致富。

This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly. 这可以是企业、房地产、自然资源、知识产权或其他类似事物的一部分。但不知何故，你需要拥有某物的股权，而不仅仅是出卖你的时间。时间只是线性缩放。

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale. 制造价值迅速增加的东西的最好方法是大规模制造人们想要的东西。

13. Be internally driven
13. 内部驱动

Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones. 大多数人主要是外部驱动的;他们做他们所做的事情是因为他们想给别人留下深刻印象。这很糟糕，原因有很多，但这里有两个重要的原因。

First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway. 首先，您将致力于共识的想法和共识的职业轨道。 如果别人认为你在做正确的事情，你会非常在乎——比你意识到的要多得多。这可能会阻止你做真正有趣的工作，即使你这样做了，其他人也会这样做。

Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term. 其次，你通常会得到错误的风险计算。你会非常专注于跟上其他人的步伐，即使在短期内也不会在竞技游戏中落后。

Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap. 聪明人似乎特别容易受到这种外部驱动行为的影响。意识到这一点会有所帮助，但只是一点点——你可能需要非常努力地工作，以免落入模仿陷阱。

The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance. 我认识的最成功的人主要是内部驱动的;他们做他们所做的事情是为了给自己留下深刻印象，因为他们觉得有必要在世界上做点什么。在你赚了足够的钱来买任何你想要的东西，并获得了足够的社会地位，以至于获得更多的东西就不再有趣了，这是我所知道的唯一能继续推动你达到更高水平的力量。

This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it. 这就是为什么一个人的动机问题如此重要的原因。这是我试图了解某人的第一件事。正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时，你就知道了。

Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks for this. YC was widely mocked for the first few years, and almost no one thought it would be a big success when they first started. But they thought it would be great for the world if it worked, and they love helping people, and they were convinced their new model was better than the existing model. 杰西卡·利文斯顿（Jessica Livingston）和保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）是我的基准。YC在最初的几年里被广泛嘲笑，当他们刚开始的时候，几乎没有人认为它会取得巨大的成功。但他们认为，如果它奏效，对世界来说将是件好事，他们喜欢帮助人们，他们相信他们的新模式比现有模式更好。

Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with. 最终，您将通过在对您很重要的领域表现出色来定义您的成功。你越早开始朝这个方向前进，你就能走得越远。很难在任何你不痴迷的事情上取得巨大的成功。

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN: [1] 我在 HN 上写的评论回复：

One of the biggest reasons I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. 我对基本收入感到兴奋的最大原因之一是，它将通过让更多人自由承担风险来释放人类潜力。

Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( 在那之前，如果你不是天生的幸运儿，你必须爬上去一段时间，然后才能进行大的挥杆。如果你出生在极端贫困中，那么这是非常困难的:(

It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible. 机会分配如此不均，显然是一种难以置信的耻辱和浪费。但我亲眼目睹了足够多的人，他们天生就背负着沉重的堆叠，并继续取得令人难以置信的成功，知道这是可能的。

I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky. 我深深地意识到，如果我不是生来就非常幸运，我个人就不会有今天的成就。

Thanks to Brian Armstrong, Greg Brockman, Dalton Caldwell, Diane von Furstenberg, Maddie Hall, Drew Houston, Vinod Khosla, Jessica Livingston, Jon Levy, Luke Miles (6 drafts!), Michael Moritz, Ali Rowghani, Michael Seibel, Peter Thiel, Tracy Young and Shivon Zilis for reviewing drafts of this, and thanks especially to Lachy Groom for help writing it. 感谢布莱恩·阿姆斯特朗、格雷格·布罗克曼、道尔顿·考德威尔、黛安·冯·弗斯滕伯格、麦迪·霍尔、德鲁·休斯顿、维诺德·科斯拉、杰西卡·利文斯顿、乔恩·利维、卢克·迈尔斯（6 稿！）、迈克尔·莫里茨、阿里·罗加尼、迈克尔·塞贝尔、彼得·蒂尔、特雷西·杨和希冯·齐利斯审阅了本文的草稿，特别感谢 Lachy Groom 帮助撰写了本文。