How to Be Successful

How to Be Successful" (January 2019) is Sam Altman's most widely shared personal essay — a list of 13 principles distilled from watching thousands of founders succeed and fail at YC. The essay is striking for its contrarianism on compounding: Altman argues that the most important decision is choosing a field with compounding returns early, because linear work cannot beat exponential returns no matter how hard you work. His other key claims: you have to develop real self-belief even when external feedback says you're wrong; most people drastically underestimate how much is achievable if you work on something important and tell people about it; and being willing to be difficult to work with — in the sense of pushing back on bad ideas — is a competitive advantage, not a social liability. The essay predates Altman's AGI obsession but anticipates it: his instruction to "work on things that matter" and his claim that the most valuable insights come from building a mental model of the future that is more accurate than most people's current model are exactly the epistemic foundations of OpenAI's planning. The 2019 framing — that leverage comes from code, capital, and media — echoes Naval Ravikant but with a startup-specific focus on talent density and ambitious projects rather than passive income. This is the essay that explains why Altman bets so hard on AI: it is the biggest compounding game he has found.