13 thoughts on how to be successful

How to be successful

I loved this article by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI). He shares 13 thoughts on how to drive career success. Some quotes that stuck with me include:

• “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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Did I dominate that last meeting?

There are a lot of AI meeting notetakers on the market now and I think I have tried nearly 10 of them. I am currently loving Fireflies.ai, which not only transcribes and summarises my meetings, it also provides useful analytics, such as the percentage of time each person in the meeting spoke, the emotional tone of the meeting, and importantly, it joins all my virtual meetings automatically (regardless of platform), which means I never forget to use it. Finally, I can use AskFred (the AI) any question about any meeting and Fred will give me an accurate answer.

Book recommendation: Stolen Focus

I feel like it is deeply uncool to recommend books that have been on the bestseller list for over a year. Yet here I am…

I finally got around to reading Stolen Focus (which has been recommended to me countless times and collecting dust on my bookshelf for months).

I have thought a lot about distraction and attention over the last few years, but this book made me consider how our focus is stolen in ways that are really hard to fight back against. It also prompted me to revert back to some attention-improving habits I tried to form a few years ago. I am currently trying to go for a daily walk without my phone and freeing my mind up to simply think. So far, I am loving the insights and ideas that my brain often unleashes during these peaceful moments.