In 2019, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post titled “How To Be Successful,” which outlines his lessons learned from prominent startup career in Silicon Valley. The post is great read, even if it the main takeaways aren’t super novel (work hard, focus, build a network). However, one idea does stand out as unique:
Be willful: 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. 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.
Sam Altman, How To Be Successful
One of the “reviewers” cited in that post is Peter Thiel. In Thiel’s 2014 book “Zero to One” he makes the point in the chapter ‘You Are Not a Lottery Ticket’ that we overestimate the role chance plays in our lives and underestimate the power of our own planning. He points to several successful entrepreneurs as obsessive planners who act this way because they maintain “definite” visions of the future, rather than presuming life is up to chance. Thiel asserts that this is something we can all do: if we build a definite vision for the future based on our own conviction, we can have more control over our outcomes than we might have previously thought.
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang believes in the idea of willfulness so much that he probes for it in his interviews by asking candidates what’s the hardest they’ve ever worked on something. Here is why:
“I generally believe there really are two kinds of people in the world. There’s, and this is a psychological term, but there’s having an internal versus an external locus of control. So if you have an internal locus of control, it means that you believe the things that happen in your life are actually more of product of what you do and the actions that you take. So you believe a lot more in like, you’re holding the reins on your own life. And if you have an external locus of control, it’s the opposite. You believe that things that happen to you are mostly the outcome of things outside of your control, sort of like the world is very deterministic and you’re sort of like a pinball in a big pinball machine.
I only want to work with people who have an internal locus of control. One way to index off of that is seeing how hard they worked at the things that matter to them. If they have an internal locus of control then they’re going to work their ass to make sure the things that matter to them happen in the best possible way. If they have an external locus of control, it matters to them but they throw their hands up in the air and let the world take the wheel.
Alexandr Wang, The Logan Bartlett Show