Principles

A collection of principles that resonate with me, in case you find it useful.

The why

• Aim for great work.

  • Richard Hamming: “I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself ‘Yes, I would like to do first-class work.’ Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, ‘Yes, I would like to do something significant.’”

  • Paul Graham: “Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you’d fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that’s what’s going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question.”

• Towards a cause you believe in.

  • Steve Jobs: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”, “You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

  • David Deutsch: “The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately only by universal laws of physics. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people.”, “If humanity fails at anything, it will be because of a failure to create knowledge.”

  • I believe that creating knowledge is the primary driver of human progress, and we have the opportunity to dramatically accelerate this process with AI in our lifetimes. What do you believe in?

The how

• Nurture and follow your curiosity.

  • Explore what energizes you and let it drive you. Your curiosity is your main source of motivation and your best guide towards important problems. Protect it like a living organism. You can learn anything you’re curious about.

  • Paul Graham: “Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on curiosity.”, “Husband your morale. It’s the basis of everything when you’re working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism.”, “Stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?”

  • Naval Ravikant: “Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”

  • Steve Jobs: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

• Think big and take risks.

  • Sam Altman: “I always want to work on a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.”, “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.”

  • Paul Graham: “If you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good.”, “Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don’t look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably being too conservative.”

  • Ray Dalio: “If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.”

  • Andrej Karpathy: “A 10x more important problem is at most 2-3x harder to achieve. In fact, in some cases a 10x harder problem may be easier to achieve. Thinking 10x forces you out of the box, to confront the real limitations of an approach, to think from first principles, to change the strategy completely, to innovate.”

• Develop your vision.

  • Richard Hamming: “Having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers.”, “For many years, I devoted 10% of my time (Friday afternoons) to trying to understand what would happen in the future of computing thinking about: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen?”

  • Peter Thiel: “What does it mean to be contrarian? It does not mean simply doing the opposite of what the majority does — that’s just consensus thinking by a different guise. The most contrarian thing to do is to think independently.”

  • Sam Altman: “Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. You have to cultivate it on your own.”, “You want to be able to project yourself 20 years into the future, and then think backwards from there. Trust yourself—20 years is a long time; it’s ok if your ideas about it seem pretty radical.”

• Learn to communicate your vision.

  • Sam Altman: “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.”

  • Richard Hamming: “The duty of a great scientist is not only to find new things but to communicate them successfully in at least three forms: writing papers and books, prepared public talks, and impromptu talks.”

• Narrow your focus to the one single most important problem.

  • Richard Hamming: “The way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.”

  • Paul Graham: “Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem.”

  • Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

  • Frank Slootman: “Priority should ideally only be used as a single word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.”, “Narrow focus is the result of clear thinking. It’s the leadership’s job to distill things down to their essentials. Left to their own devices, people will work on easy and sexy (but incremental) problems.”

• Put in enough work to be confident you outwork everyone.

  • Paul Graham: “Four steps to great work: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.”

  • Richard Hamming: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity.”

  • Sam Altman: “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. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.”

  • Elon Musk: “Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

• Focus on improving your rate of learning.

  • Richard Hamming: “Knowledge increases exponentially, roughly doubling every 17 years. You must concentrate on fundamentals and develop the ability to learn new fields of knowledge when they arise.”

  • Elon Musk: “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details, or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

  • Brett Adcock: “Take the time to master your craft. Your rate of learning is your greatest lever.”

How to improve your rate of learning?

• Constantly reflect on how to improve.

  • Elon Musk: “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

• Be radically open-minded.

  • Seek ideas and feedback that contradict your view of the world and yourself.

  • Ray Dalio: “The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on thoughtful disagreement, in which the goal is not to convince the other party that you are right—but rather to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it.”, “Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning. This is the quickest way to learn and to increase your probability of being right.”

  • Richard Hamming: “Regularly ask about your most deeply held beliefs: Why do I believe what I do? What evidence would I accept to be proven wrong?”

  • Elon Musk: “Always take the position that you are to some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong over time. One of the biggest mistakes people generally make, and I’m guilty of it too, is wishful thinking.”, “Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.”

• Seek out the best colleagues to learn from.

  • Paul Graham: “The most effective way to learn any craft is by working with the best at this craft.”, “Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It’s better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones.”, “Sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can’t.”

• Embrace failure as a learning opportunity.

  • Ray Dalio: “If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.”, “Pain + Reflection = Progress”

Back to the how

• Cultivate almost too much self-belief.

  • Sam Altman: “If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future.”, “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.”, “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.”

  • Richard Hamming: “Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.”

• Cultivate unreasonable willpower.

  • Sam Altman: “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.”, “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.”

  • Steve Jobs: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”, “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

• Build long-term relationships with forces of nature.

  • Sam Altman: “Great work requires teams. 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.”, “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.”

• Be hard to compete with by building leverage.

  • Sam Altman: “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.”

  • Naval Ravikant: “Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.”

• Cultivate a sense of urgency.

  • Frank Slootman: “When people say they’ll get back to you in a week, ask them why not tomorrow morning? It doesn’t matter if your request is unreasonable. The point of the question is to increase people’s sense of urgency. When you change an organization’s tempo, people demand more from each other, which is the essence of a high-performing organization.”

• Make yourself accountable to the highest standards.

  • Don’t settle for anything less than amazing work for yourself and for others.

  • Steve Jobs: “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

How to think about startups

• Creating a startup is like creating a movie.

  • Keith Rabois: “I don’t believe in finding product market fit, I believe in forging it like creating a movie. You start with a vision of a better future you want to accomplish, you cast the team, you produce it, you market it, and you sell tickets. There’s no pre-existing movie that people are waiting for, and you’re not unlocking it. Nobody who produces a movie goes and interviews 10 people on the street and says, ‘What movie do you want to see this weekend?’”

  • What kind of movie do you want to create?

• It’s all about execution. Brett Adcock: “What I have learned is that the only real competitive advantage in technology is the number of product iterations and the progress made between those iterations. Essentially, I value the rate of progress in the highest regard. What matters is my team’s ability to execute at the fastest possible rate and to continue innovating over time.”