原文 How To Be Successful

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:

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.

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.

1. Compound yourself

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.

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.

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.

Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.

3. Learn to think independently

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.

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.

“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.

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.

4. Get good at “sales”

Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

5. Make it easy to take risks

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.

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.

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.

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.

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

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.

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.

7. Work hard

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

8. Be bold

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.

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.

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.

Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

9. Be willful

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

10. Be hard to compete with

Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.

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.

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.

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.

11. Build a network

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.

12. You get rich by owning things

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.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

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.

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.

13. Be internally driven

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.

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 :(

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.

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.

翻译

我观察过数以千计的公司创始人，并且反复思考过什么样的人可以挣到巨额财富，或者作出重要创造。通常来说，人们出道的时候是期盼前者（即巨额财富），但是最终还是想要后者（即作出重要创造）。

下面是关于如何获得非凡成功的13点方法。这些方法对于已经取得一定成就的人（无论是因为出身还是因为个人努力取得的成就）会更容易达成。但是大部分方法适用于任何人。

1. Compound yourself - 让自己的能力以几何级数增长

复利具有神奇的魔力，我们能在很多情境中看到他的存在。其中的奥秘就在于指数曲线。

一个年增长率50%的中型企业能在极短的时间内发展壮大。世界上只有少数公司能够具有网络效应和极度规模化扩张的潜能。但是，随着科技发展，越来越多的贸易能够实现全球化，这值得我们付出十足的努力。

你自身也应该成为一个成指数性增长的曲线-你为自己人生设定的目标应该是要走一个不断增长并且永远向右上方运动的轨迹。在一个有复合效应的职业发展道路上前进是非常重要的-大多数职业发展道路都是相当线性的。

不要留在一个工作两年和工作二十年的人在效率上无差别的行业--你应该一直保持很高的学习指数。伴随着你的职业发展，你所做的每个单位的工作都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多东西能给你加上这个杠杆，比如资本，科技，品牌，人际关系影响，和做管理。

专注于在你定义的成功指标后面加个零是有用的-这些指标可以包括金钱，地位，对世界的影响力，或者其他什么。面对选择的时候，我会尽可能多花一些时间来确定我下一件事情做什么。我永远都希望如果我选择的这件事情成功了，这件事情能够（成功到）使我职业生涯中的其他事情看起来微不足道。

绝大多数人沦陷在那些只能线性增长的机会中。你要学会舍小求大，专注在实现跳跃式的增长。

我认为，不管是对公司还是对个人，在商业里最有竞争力的优势是，能够有广阔的视野去理解世界上不同体系的东西如何相互作用，并且有长远的思考。复利增长最显著的特点之一是：以后那几年才是最关键的。这个世界上几乎没什么人有长远的思维方式，而如果有人想得长远，市场就会给你丰厚的嘉奖。

相信指数（先缓后陡）的增长形态，保持耐心，然后就高兴地等待惊喜。

2. Have almost too much self-belief - 要保持蜜汁自信

相信自己具有巨大能量。我了解到的大部分成功者，他们相信自己几乎到了自欺欺人的程度。这要尽早培养。当你得到越来越多数据证实你的判断，并且能持续预判结果时，就更要相信自己了。如果你不相信你自己，你很难让自己有关于未来的与众不同的想法。而最大价值的创造正是来自于这里。我记得很多年前Elon Musk带我参观SpaceX工厂时，他详细地讲解了火箭每一部分的制造工艺，但是我记忆中最鲜明的是，当他讲到向火星发射大型火箭时，他脸上所展现出的绝对确信。我就想：“啊，所谓信念坚定者就该是这个样子。”大部分奋斗者最大的挑战是如何管理好自己的士气、团队的士气。这需要非常多的自信。而且，你越有野心，世界就越要给你挑战。大部分很成功的人应该都至少有一次面对其他人的否定而最终证明他是做了正确判断的经历。但如果不是这样，他们其实会面临更大的竞争。自信必须要有自我察觉来平衡。我以前痛恨所有的批评并且会有意识地避免这些批评，现在我试着去听它们并且假设它们是对的，然后再决定我要不要因此调整自己的行为。寻找真相总是艰难且痛苦的，但这也正是区别自信和自大的关键。这样的平衡也会避免让你看起来傲慢或是不接地气。

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

你很难教会别人如何创业，因为你很难教会别人如何独立思考。学校里面是不会教导学生自主思考的，事实上学校的教学方法并不利于学生发展自己原创的想法。 所以你只能靠自己培养这种能力。从基本（底层）原则出发去思考并尝试发展出新的想法是一个很有趣的过程，在这个过程中如果能和别人一起探讨和交换彼此的看法可以帮助自己更好的思考。下一步则是就用一些简单和快速的方法在现实世界中去检测自己的想法是否能成立。创业者通常持有的一个态度是：“我会失败很多次，但是总有一次我肯定会做出成就的”。在获得幸运的眷顾之前，你必须要有允许自己失败多次的心理准备。最有用的经验之一是：即使你处在绝境中也知道如何找到出路。你这样做的次数越多，你就会越相信自己。勇气来自于你深知自己可以在失败之后重振旗鼓的信念。

4.Get good at “sales”- 会销售

仅自信是不够的——你必须能说服别人认同你的观点。所有伟大的职业，在某种程度上都是销售工作。你必须向客户、潜在雇员、媒体、投资者等等“传教”。这需要有充满激励感的愿景，优秀的沟通技巧，某种程度上的个人魅力，以及实际执行能力。提升沟通能力——尤其是书面沟通——这种投资非常值得。我能就此给出的最佳建议是：要清晰地进行沟通，那么你的思路首先要清晰，然后用平实又简明扼要的语言把它表达出来。提高销售能力的最佳办法，是真诚地相信你所销售的产品。销售你所认可并信任的东西，那感觉会很棒，挂羊头卖狗肉的虚假销售感觉糟透了。提高销售能力和学习其他技能一样——通过刻意的练习，每个人都能进步。但出于某些原因，也许是因为学习过程并不那么轻松愉快，很多人觉得销售技能无法习得。我的另一个销售技巧是重要时刻一定要面谈。当我刚刚起步时，总是乐意随时飞过去。很多时候确实不必这么大费周折，但有三次 ，它为我迎来了事业重大的转折点。如果当时没有坚持这样做，机会或许就溜走了。

5. Make it easy to take risks - 改变让冒险更容易

大多数人高估风险低估回报。冒险之所以重要是因为你不可能永远是对的——当你学到更多东西时，你必须多次尝试，边学边快速迭代适应。在职业生涯早期冒险通常更容易。你没有太多能失去的东西，但也许能够得到许多。一旦你把本职工作做好，就应该试着让冒险变得容易。先冒一点小险，如果你错了，你将输掉一倍，而一旦你对了，你将获得百倍的收益。接下来，你就在这个方向进行更激进的尝试。不过别待在同一个地方太久了。在YC,我们注意到在google或facebook工作很久的创业者有这么一个通病。当人们习惯于舒适的生活，稳定的工作，在自己做的事情上已有成功的声誉，把这一切丢在身后就变得非常非常难（而难以置信的是人们总能过着把来年薪水都花掉的生活） 。即使他们真的离开了，回归安逸的诱惑也非常大。比起长期的自我实现，优先考虑短期利益和便捷很容易且符合人性。但当你不再重复繁重单调的工作时，你可以听从你的直觉，把把时间花在你觉得会很有意思的事情上。做到如此的一种强效方法就是，尽可能的过着花钱少而有弹性的生活，不过这很显然伴随着取舍。

6. Focus - 专注

专注使工作事半功倍。几乎所有我见过的那些花更多时间思考应该专注在哪些事情的人，都从中受益颇多。做正确的事比花费更多的时间更重要。 大多数人把大部分时间浪费在无关紧要的事情上。一旦你弄清楚要做什么，就马不停蹄地完成几个优先事项。我还没有遇到过谁很成功，但行动力弱的。

7. Work hard - 努力工作

通过聪明工作或努力工作，你可以在自己所属的领域做到前 10 %。但要做到前 1% ，就需要二者兼修了——你的竞争对手不但天赋异禀，才思泉涌，而且任劳任怨。追求极致的人获得极致的成果。花大量时间在工作上势必影响生活，不这样做的原因显而易见。但这样做也有很多好处，在大多数情况下，工作与生活的动力会相辅相成，成功导向另一个成功。而且这通常非常有意思。生活中最大的乐趣之一就是找到自己存在的意义，并去把它做好，发现你可以影响别人。一位 YC 的创始人最近分享了他的经验，他从一家大公司辞职，转而向最大程度实现自己的影响力而努力，这为他带来惊人的喜悦和满足感。在这个层面努力工作，真是太值得了。我不是很清楚为什么“努力工作是坏事”成为了某些美国人的信条。而在世界上其他地方，由企业家展现的能量和驱动力，正在迅速成为新的社会认可标杆。你必须找到方法，努力工作而不是被耗竭。人们会各自选择策略，但有一个屡试不爽的方法是：找到你喜爱的事业和一群你愿意与之共事的人。有些人说无需（或在某个人生阶段无需）花费大量时间工作，你也能获得职业巨大的成功，我认为是一种误导。事实上，工作的持久性是长期成功的标准之一。我关于努力工作还有一点要说：在职业生涯的一开始就要这样做。努力工作就像银行利息，越早行动，就拥有越长的受益时间。而且在承担的责任较少时，人更容易努力工作。而那往往发生在年轻的时候，虽然并非人人如此。

8. Be bold - 大胆一点

我坚信创办一家努力的公司比一家安逸的公司要简单的多。人们想要参与到有趣的事情中来，体会到他们所做的工作很重要。如果你在有巨大价值的问题上取得进展，将不断有人蜂拥而至想要帮助你。让自己更雄心壮志一些吧，不要畏惧从事你真正想要从事的事业。如果其他人在创立表情包公司，而你想要创立一个基因编辑公司，那就去做吧，不要质疑它。跟随你的好奇心。让你觉得激动人心的事情也会让别人觉得兴奋不已。

9. Be willful - 固执一点（头要铁一点）

一个大秘密是，绝大多数时候你都能按照你的意愿去改变世界——大部分人都不愿意尝试，就接受世界就是这样的了。人们有实现各种可能的潜质。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不把自己推向极致，都让他们无法最终释放那些潜力。索取自己想要的东西。你通常得不到，而且遭受拒绝也不好受。但一旦得手，则会效果惊人。一如既往，那些说 “我要一直努力直到成功，不管碰到什么挑战，我都要解决它”，并且真的去这么做的人，就会成功。他们坚持不懈了足够久，使得好运气可以垂青他们。在这方面，Airbnb公司达到了我的标准。他们有太多可讲的故事，我并不是要推荐你们去重蹈覆辙(比如在小孩儿用来放棒球卡的那种三环九槽活页夹里装满信用卡，每顿饭都只吃一元店里的早餐麦片，与那些深藏内心的强大诱惑接二连三地斗争，诸如此类）但是他们坚持了非常久，久到足以有好运垂青。想要变成能做到迎难而上的那种人（铁头娃），乐观是很必要的——这是有望通过练习来改善的品质。我还从未见过一个成功的悲观主义者。

10 . Be hard to compete with- 让别人望尘莫及

正如大多数人所知，一个公司越难被超越就越有价值。这是句重要的大实话。但这一法则也适用于个人。如果你所从事的事情别人也能做，那肯定会被别人取代，而且赚钱更少。最好的让自己难以被超越的方法是建立影响力。例如，搭建良好的人际关系网络，或创造强大的个人品牌，或在多领域的交汇点拥有优势。还有许多其他的策略，你要自己想通并去行动。大部分人都会和周围人做一样的事。这种模仿行为通常是错误的——如果你所做的和其他人没什么不同，你应该很容易就被超越了。

11. Build a network- 建立人脉

伟大的事业需要团队合作。建立一个既可以紧密合作也可以宽松相处的精英人才网络，是伟大事业里不可或缺的一部分。你成功的上限往往取决于你自己高质量人脉的广度。建立人脉的一个行之有效的办法是尽自己最大的努力去帮助别人。过去以来，我职业生涯里的大部分好机遇以及四个最好投资里的三个，都是得益于帮助别人。我时常感到惊喜，因为我总是持续不断地得到天上掉下来的馅饼，而起因仅仅是我在10年前帮了某些人某些事。而另一个建立人脉的好方法是拥有一个好名声，一个真正在乎、关心和你一起共事的人的好名声。对你的同事慷慨分享你的资源和优势吧，这将带给你10倍的回报。然后，知人善任，人尽其才。（这是我从管理学中学到的最重要的事，尽管我还没有学很多。）最后是去拥有能推动常人去超越他们自己自身，而又不至于把他们逼耗竭的能力。每个人都拥有比其他人更擅长的领域。用你自己的优势而不是劣势去定义你自己。要认识清楚你自己的劣势，并且找到方法去修补或提升，但是注意不要让它们成为你追寻梦想的绊脚石。我经常对某些企业家感到惊讶，他们会说“我不能做X因为我对Y不擅长"，这大致反映了他们缺乏一种创造力。补足你劣势的最佳方法，是去雇佣能补充你劣势的团队，而不是去招那些和你擅长相同领域的人。建立人脉的一个特别有价值的部分是善于慧眼识珠。通过练习，可以让发掘智慧、动力、和创造力的人变得容易得多。最简单学习这个的方式是和更多的人相遇，并且反思谁在影响你，而谁没有。记住，你主要是在寻找一个人的潜力，但不要把他们的经历或者目前的成就看得过重。每当我认识一个人，我总会问自己：“这个人是否拥有势不可挡的力量？”。在甄别一个人能否做出一番成就时，这个问题不失为一个好的引子。建立人脉的一个特例是：理想状况下，在你的职业生涯早期，你得找到一个杰出的人看重你。实现这一点的最佳方式无疑是主动去帮助他。（同时你得记住，之后要把这份恩情传递给更多人！）最后，记住一定要把你的时间花在那些积极向上并且支持你理想的人身上。

12. You get rich by owning things - 财富源自资产而非工资

我在儿时对经济学最大的误解就是：人们通过赚取薪水变得富有。虽然有一些特例——如娱乐行业——但是纵观福布斯排行榜的历史，没有人是通过领工资跻身榜单的。真正变得富有，是通过拥有迅速增值的事物。可以是拥有商业、房地产、自然资源、知识产权等其他类似的东西。但是无论如何，你得拥有某项事物的所有权，而不是仅靠出卖自己的时间。时间只会让财富线性（缓慢）增长。让事物迅速增值的最佳办法，是创造一定规模的人们所需要的东西。

13.Be internally driven - 成为内在驱动者

大多数人都是外在驱动型，他们做事的动因是想赢的别人的赞赏和认同。这样做坏处不少，最糟糕的是以下两点：

首先，你的观点和职业生涯由此将会以寻求认同和一致性为基础。你将会无比在意——比你意识到的还要多——其他人是否认为你做的是对的。这会阻断你去从事真正有趣的工作的可能性，即使你在做你认为有趣的工作，那也是其他人早就做过的了。第二，这样做会导致错误的风险预估。即使在短期内，你的注意力也会因此放在追赶别人，不要在比赛中落后，哪怕只是为了追逐短期利益。聪明人似乎更容易受到这种外在驱动行为的风险。意识到这一点会有所帮助，但是帮助不大——你必须非常努力，才能避免自己落入这样的陷阱。我所知道的最成功的那群人，全都是内在驱动者；他们做事是为了赢得自己的赞赏和认同，他们觉得自己有责任为世界做一些事。当你已经赚了足够的钱，可以买任何想买的东西，也获得了一定的社会地位，再去通过获得更多而带来自我认同感这件事本身，对你来说已经失去了吸引力。内在驱动是我所知道的唯一可以激励你再创新高的方法。这就是驱动力如此重要的原因，这是我去了解和判断一个人的首要衡量标准。正确的驱动力很难以一系列规则来定义，但是当你遇到它，你就会知道。在这点上，Jessica Livingston 和 Paul Graham 是我的标杆。YC 在初创的几年备受嘲讽，几乎没有人看好它会成功。但是他们认为，如果这件事情成功了对这个世界将大有裨益，而且他们乐意帮助别人，他们相信自己的新模式比现有模式更好。最终，在所热爱的领域作出优秀的成绩，这将会定义你的成功。越早开始朝这个方向努力，就会走得越远。如果没有真正的热爱，你很难取得大的成功。

我写在HN的对评论的回复。

“基础收入项目”使我感到激动的最大原因是：它能让更多人愿意冒险，进一步来说，能释放更多人类潜能。

在那之前，如果你出身不是那么幸运，在你展翅飞翔之前，需要先努力理清道路。 如果你出身极其贫困，那就会非常困难了。

很明显，机会分配不均是一种难以置信的耻辱和浪费。但我亲眼目睹了太多多的人出生在极度阻碍他们的困境之中，并继续取得了令人难以置信的成功，我知道这是可能的。

我深深地意识到一个事实，那就是如果我不是出身如此幸运，我也不会处在我现在这个位置上。