The things I wish someone had told me

Today everyone knows Sam Altman, he is co-founder and CEO of OpenAi (the brain behind chatgpt), he shared a paper called “The things I wish someone had told me”, this is one of many summaries of his thoughts.

1. Optimism, obsession, self-confidence, raw effort and personal connections are how things start.

2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calm and urgency, and unreasonable compromise are how things get done. Long-term guidance is in short supply; Try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.

3. It is easier for a team to do something difficult that really matters than to do something easy that doesn’t matter; Bold ideas motivate people.

4. Incentives are superpowers; adjust them carefully.

5. Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; This is easy to say, but obviously difficult to do. You can delete more things than you think.

6. Communicate clearly and concisely.

7. Fight nonsense and bureaucracy whenever you see it and get other people to fight it too. Don’t let the org chart prevent people from working productively together.

8. Results are what count; Don’t let a good process excuse bad results.

9. Invest more time in recruiting. Take risks with high potential people with a rapid rate of improvement. Look for evidence of achieving things besides intelligence.

10. Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people by their net impact on organizational performance.

11. Rapid iteration can pay off a lot; It’s generally okay to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.

12. Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.

13. Inspiration is perishable and life passes quickly. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.

14. Scale often has surprising emergent properties.

15. Compound exponential are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gains compound advantage with scale.

16. Get up and move on.

17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.