via Pexel；

How To Be Successful

如何取得成功

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.

我观察过成千上万的创始人，也思考过很多关于赚大钱或创造重要事物的问题。通常，人们一开始想要的是前者，而最终想要的却是后者。

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.

以下是关于如何取得这种超凡成功的 13 个想法。一旦你已经达到了成功的基本程度（通过特权或努力），并想付出努力将其转化为离群的成功，那么这里的一切都比较容易做到。1 但其中大部分内容适用于任何人。

1. Compound yourself

1.自我复利

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

复利是一种魔力。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.

一个中等规模的企业，如果每年的价值增长 50%，就能在很短的时间内成为巨无霸。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极强的可扩展性。但随着技术的发展，会有越来越多的企业具备这种能力。 值得花大力气去发现和创造它们。

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.

你自己也要成为一条指数曲线--你的人生目标应该是沿着一条不断向上、向右延伸的轨迹。重要的是要朝着具有复合效应的职业发展--大多数职业的发展都是线性的。

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.

你不希望从事的职业是，已经做了两年的人可以和已经做了二十年的人一样有效——你的学习速度应该总是很高。随着你职业生涯的发展，你所做的每个工作单元都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多方法可以获得这种杠杆作用，例如资金、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.

专注于在你定义为成功指标的任何内容上再加一个零是很有用的——金钱、地位、对世界的影响，或者其他什么。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。但我一直希望它成为一个项目，如果成功，将使我职业生涯的其余部分看起来像一个脚注。 大多数人都陷入了线性机会的泥潭。愿意放过小机会，专注于潜在的阶梯式变化。

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。愿意放过小机会，专注于潜在的阶梯式变化。

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，无论是对公司还是个人的职业生涯来说，商业中最大的竞争优势是长期思考，对世界上不同的系统将如何融合在一起有广阔的视野。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具有长远眼光的世界里，市场会给予那些这样做的人丰厚的回报。

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

相信指数，要有耐心，要有惊喜。

2. Have almost too much self-belief

2.拥有几乎过多的自信心

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

自信心的力量是无穷的。我所认识的最成功的人都相信自己，几乎到了妄想的地步。

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

尽早培养这种信念。随着越来越多的数据表明你的判断力是正确的，而且你能不断取得成果，你就会更加相信自己。

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逆向思维。但这正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.”

我记得很多年前，埃隆-马斯克带我参观了 SpaceX 的工厂。他详细讲述了火箭每个部件的制造过程，但让我记忆犹新的是，当他谈到将大型火箭送上火星时，脸上流露出绝对肯定的神情。我离开时想："呵呵，原来这就是信念的基准啊！"

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的最大挑战之一。如果没有强大的自信心，这几乎是不可能的。不幸的是，你越是雄心勃勃，这个世界就越是想把你打倒。

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至少有一次对未来的判断是正确的，而当时人们都认为他们错了。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.

自信必须与自知相平衡。我曾经讨厌任何形式的批评，并主动回避。现在，我试着在倾听批评时总是先假设它是真实的，然后再决定是否要采取行动。寻求真理是艰难的，往往也是痛苦的，但它是自我信念与自我欺骗的分水岭。

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

这种平衡也有助于避免让人觉得你有权有势、不合群。

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.

创业精神很难教授，因为原创思维很难教授。学校的设置不是为了教授这一点--事实上，学校一般会奖励相反的东西。因此，你必须自己培养。

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.

从最初的原则出发思考问题并尝试产生新想法是一件很有趣的事情，而找人交流这些想法是提高这方面能力的好方法。下一步是找到简单、快速的方法，在现实世界中检验这些想法。

“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，我会真正正确一次"，这是创业者的方式。你必须给自己很多机会，才能获得幸运。

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.

最有说服力的一课就是，你能在看似无解的情况下想出办法。这样做的次数越多，你就会越相信这一点。勇气来自于学会在被击倒后重新站起来。

4. Get good at “sales”

4.善于 "推销

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，你还必须能够让别人相信你的信念。

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.

所有伟大的事业在某种程度上都是销售工作。你必须向客户、潜在员工、媒体、投资者等宣传你的计划。这就要求你有鼓舞人心的愿景、较强的沟通能力、一定程度的人格魅力以及执行能力。

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，是一项值得进行的投资。我对清晰沟通的最佳建议是，首先确保你的思路清晰，然后使用平实、简洁的语言。

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.

善于销售的最好方法是真正相信你所销售的东西。销售你真正相信的东西感觉很棒，而试图销售蛇油的感觉则很糟糕。

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.

提高销售能力就像提高其他技能一样，任何人都可以通过刻意练习来提高技能。但出于某种原因，也许是因为感觉令人讨厌，许多人把它当成了学不会的东西。

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.

我的另一大销售秘诀是，无论何时，只要有重要的事情，就一定要亲自露面。刚开始创业时，我总是愿意坐飞机去。这经常是不必要的，但有三次却为我带来了职业生涯的转折点，否则我就会走上另一条路。

5. Make it easy to take risks

5.让冒险变得容易

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，因为不可能永远正确--你必须尝试很多事情，并在学到更多知识后迅速适应。

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.

在职业生涯的早期往往更容易承担风险；你不会有太大的损失，却有可能收获很多。一旦你的基本义务得到了保障，你就应该努力让自己更容易承担风险。寻找你可以下的小赌注，如果你错了，你会损失 1 倍，但如果成功了，你会赚 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，不要积攒太久。在 YC，我们经常注意到在谷歌或 Facebook 工作了很长时间的创始人的一个问题。当人们习惯了舒适的生活、可预见的工作，以及无论做什么都能成功的名声后，就很难将这些抛诸脑后（而且人们有一种不可思议的能力，总能将自己的生活方式与明年的薪水相匹配）。即使他们离开了，回来的诱惑也很大。优先考虑短期利益和便利，而不是长期成就，这很容易，也是人的天性。

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.

但当你不在 "跑步机 "上奔波时，你就可以跟着自己的直觉走，把时间花在那些可能真的很有趣的事情上。在尽可能长的时间内保持生活的低成本和灵活性，是实现这一目标的有效途径，但显然也要有所取舍。

6. Focus

6.专注

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

专注是工作的倍增器。

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，如果能花更多时间思考专注于什么，都会受益匪浅。在正确的事情上工作比工作很多时间要重要得多。大多数人把大部分时间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.

一旦你想好了该做什么，就要势不可挡地迅速完成你的一小撮优先事项。我还没见过行动迟缓却非常成功的人。

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.

你可以通过聪明或勤奋的工作达到你所在领域的第 90 百分位数，这仍然是一项了不起的成就。但是，要达到第 99 百分位数，就需要两者兼备--你将与其他非常有才华的人竞争，他们会有很好的想法，也愿意付出很多努力。

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.

极端的人得到极端的结果。大量工作会带来巨大的人生代价，决定不做是完全合理的。但它也有很多好处。就像在大多数情况下一样，动力会不断累积，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，它往往非常有趣。人生最大的乐趣之一就是找到自己的目标，并在其中取得优异成绩，同时发现自己的影响比自己更重要。最近，一位 YC 创始人非常惊讶地表示，在离开大公司的工作并努力发挥自己最大的影响力后，他变得更加快乐和充实了。为此而努力工作应该受到赞扬。

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.

我不太清楚为什么在美国的某些地方，努力工作成了一件坏事，但在世界其他地方，情况肯定不是这样--美国以外的创业者所表现出的精力和干劲正迅速成为新的标杆。

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.

你必须想办法如何努力工作而不至于精疲力竭。在这方面，人们会找到自己的策略，但有一个策略几乎总是有效的，那就是找到你喜欢做的工作，与你喜欢花很多时间在一起的人一起工作。

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，那些假装不工作就能在职业上取得巨大成功的人（在你生命中的某些阶段）是在帮倒忙。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，还有一个想法：在职业生涯之初就努力工作。努力工作就像利息一样，越早付出，就越有时间获得回报。当你的其他责任较少时，也更容易努力工作，这在你年轻时经常发生，但并非总是如此。

8. Be bold

8.要大胆

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.

我认为，创业难比创业容易。人们希望参与到令人兴奋的事情中，并感到自己的工作很重要。

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，不要害怕去做自己真正想做的事情。

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.

如果别人都在创办 meme 公司，而你想创办基因编辑公司，那就去做吧，不要猜疑。

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

追随你的好奇心。对你来说令人兴奋的事情往往也会让其他人感到兴奋。

9. Be willful

9.意志坚定

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.

一个很大的秘密是，在很多时候，你可以让这个世界按照你的意愿行事--大多数人甚至连试都不试，只是接受事情的现状。

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、不够努力，这些因素加在一起，阻碍了大多数人发挥自己的潜能。

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.

要求你想要的东西。你通常不会得到它，而且被拒绝时往往会很痛苦。但当这种方法奏效时，效果却出奇的好。

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.

那些说 "我要坚持下去，直到成功为止，无论遇到什么困难，我都会想办法解决 "的人，几乎都会取得成功。他们坚持了足够长的时间，给了自己一个幸运的机会。

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.

在这方面，Airbnb 是我的标杆。他们讲了很多我不建议复制的故事（把刷爆的信用卡放在孩子们用来装棒球卡的九槽三环活页夹里、每顿饭都吃一元店的麦片、与强大的固有利益集团进行一场又一场的斗争，等等），但他们设法存活了足够长的时间，让幸运之神眷顾他们。

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.

要有意志力，你就必须乐观--希望这是一种可以通过练习得到改善的人格特质。我从未见过一个非常成功的悲观主义者。

10. Be hard to compete with

10.使其难以与之竞争

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

大多数人都知道，如果企业难以与之竞争，它们就会更有价值。这一点很重要，显然也是事实。

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。如果你做的事情别人也能做，那么别人最终也会做，而且花的钱更少。

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.

要想成为难以竞争的对手，最好的办法就是建立杠杆效应。例如，你可以通过人际关系、建立强大的个人品牌，或者在多个不同领域的交叉点上有所建树。还有许多其他策略，但你必须想出一些办法来做到这一点。

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.

大多数人都会做他们所交往的大多数人所做的事情。这种模仿行为通常是错误的--如果你做的事情与其他人做的一样，你就不难与他们竞争。

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。发展一个优秀人才的合作网络--有时紧密，有时松散--是伟大事业的重要组成部分。你所认识的真正有才华的人的网络规模往往会限制你所能取得的成就。

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.

建立人际网络的有效方法就是尽可能地帮助他人。长期坚持这样做，为我带来了大部分最佳职业机会和四项最佳投资中的三项。我一直很惊讶，因为十年前我帮助过一位创始人，所以经常会有好事发生在我身上。

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.

建立人际网络的最佳方法之一，就是建立起真正照顾与你共事的人的声誉。在分享收益时要过于慷慨，这会给你带来 10 倍的回报。此外，还要学会评估员工擅长什么，并让他们担任这些角色。(这是我在管理方面学到的最重要的东西，而我在这方面读到的书并不多）。你要有一个良好的声誉，能够给员工足够的压力，让他们取得比自己想象中更大的成就，但又不至于让他们精疲力竭。

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.

每个人都比别人擅长某些事情。用你的长处而不是短处来定义你自己。承认自己的弱点，并想办法克服它们，但不要让它们阻止你做自己想做的事。"我做不了 X，因为我不擅长 Y"，这是我经常从创业者那里听到的一句话，而且几乎总是反映出缺乏创造力。弥补自己弱点的最好办法是雇用互补性强的团队成员，而不是只雇用擅长与自己相同领域的人。

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.

建立关系网的一个特别重要的部分是善于发现未被发现的人才。通过练习，快速发现智慧、动力和创造力会变得容易得多。最简单的学习方法就是多与人接触，记录谁能给你留下深刻印象，谁不能。记住，你主要是在寻找进步的速度，不要过分看重经验或当前的成就。

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.

当我遇到新朋友时，我总是试着问自己："这个人是天生的力量吗？这是一个很好的启发式方法，可以找到可能成就大事的人。

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!)

发展人际网络的一个特例是找到一个知名人士为你下注，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。要做到这一点，最好的办法就是不遗余力地提供帮助。(记住，你必须在以后的某个时刻回报他！）。

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

最后，要记得把时间花在那些支持你的抱负的积极的人身上。

12. You get rich by owning things

12.拥有东西就能致富

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.

我童年时期最大的经济误解就是人们靠高薪致富。虽然有一些例外--比如娱乐明星--但在福布斯排行榜的历史上，几乎没有人是靠薪水致富的。

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

真正的富人是通过拥有快速增值的东西。

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的东西。但无论如何，你都需要拥有某些东西的股权，而不仅仅是出售你的时间。时间只能线性增长。

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

制造价值快速增长的东西的最佳方式是大规模制造人们想要的东西。

13. Be internally driven

13.内在驱动

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.

大多数人主要是受外部驱动；他们之所以这样做，是因为他们想给其他人留下深刻印象。这是不好的，原因很多，但这里有两个重要原因。

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，你将在达成共识的想法和职业轨道上工作。 你会非常在意别人是否认为你做的事情是正确的，这一点比你意识到的要重要得多。这可能会妨碍你做真正有趣的工作，即使你做了，别人也会做的。

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，你通常会弄错风险计算。在竞争游戏中，你会非常专注于跟上别人的步伐，即使在短期内也不会落后。

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。意识到这一点会有帮助，但只是一点点--你可能需要付出超乎寻常的努力才能不掉入模仿的陷阱。

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.

我所认识的最成功的人主要都是内在驱动型的；他们所做的一切都是为了给自己留下深刻印象，因为他们觉得自己必须在这个世界上有所作为。当你赚够了钱，想买什么就买什么，获得了足够的社会地位，不再觉得获得更多是件有趣的事之后，据我所知，这是唯一能继续驱使你更上一层楼的力量。

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。这是我试图了解一个人的第一件事。正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时，你就会知道。

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）是我在这方面的标杆。YC 在最初的几年里受到了广泛的嘲讽，在他们刚开始的时候，几乎没有人认为它会取得巨大的成功。但他们认为，如果能成功，对世界将大有裨益，而且他们喜欢帮助别人，他们坚信自己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，你将通过在对你来说重要的领域做出出色的工作来定义你的成功。越早朝着这个方向出发，你就能走得越远。你很难在任何你不痴迷的领域取得巨大成功。

1 A comment response I wrote on HN:

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.

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.

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

1 我在 HN 上写的评论回复：

我对基本收入感到兴奋的最大原因之一是，它将释放出更多人的潜能，让更多人能够承担风险。

在此之前，如果你不是天生的幸运儿，你就必须努力奋斗一段时间，然后才能大展拳脚。如果你出生在赤贫家庭，那么这将是一件非常困难的事情。

机会分配如此不均，显然是一种极大的耻辱和浪费。但我亲眼目睹过很多人在出生时就面临着巨大的挫折，却取得了令人难以置信的成功，因此我知道这是可能的。

我深深地意识到，如果不是生来就无比幸运，我个人也不会有今天的成就。

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.

附注

原文：https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful # Sam Altman
翻译服务来自：https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/zh/
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