Deep down, we all want to create something important with our lives. We want families, friendships, communities and businesses that grow and prosper.
We want to do good work that matters. And of course we need to make money along the way.
As a partner at the renowned Y Combinator seed-funding organization, Sam Alton has observed thousands of founding entrepreneurs up close who have achieved great success. Here are his 13 tips for getting there:
Compound yourself. Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. Find scalability and repeatability, and you will find profitability. Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.
Have almost too much self-belief. Self-belief is immensely powerful. Trust yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future and this is where most value gets created.
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, are 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.
Get good at communication. Becoming a persuasive communicator is an investment worth making. Make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.
Show up in person whenever it’s important. Be willing to get on a plane. In today’s world of Webex meetings, this is frequently unnecessary, but it can make all the difference.
Take the right 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.
Focus. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your priorities accomplished quickly. There are not many slow-moving people who are very successful.
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.
Be bold. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters. Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people, too.
Be willful. 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. 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.
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. Get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice.
You get rich by owning things. You don’t get rich from high salaries. You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value. This can be a piece of a business, real estate, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time.
Be internally driven. Most successful people 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.
All of the above are easier said (or written) than done. But no one ever said that creating something important and meaningful would be easy.
Have a great week.
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