The days are long but the decades are short (2015)(blog.samaltman.com) |
The days are long but the decades are short (2015)(blog.samaltman.com) |
The thing that changed this for me is, no joke, having kids. This brought me away from the feeling that life is fleeting with little point to the minuscule things I may accomplish and showed me a grander scale. As an engineer, I'll never be a Maxwell, Shannon, etc., but I can raise the generation to come in a way that - though I may never know it - could have an incredible influence on the world.
btw, I know the other commenters mean well with sharing their experiences, but to be blunt, folks should not be having kids because there's something missing.
Of course, with everyone else having GPS and the Internet, it becomes much harder to find somewhere to sleep, because the amazing places you may have discovered fifty years ago will now be fully-booked months in advance.
The truth is that a dream isn't meant to be reached or achieved, it's meant to inspire people to do more than just sit around under trees smoking pot all day. It's a nice lie they tell themselves as to why they're trading time with their families for time at the office.
The days are long but the decades are short (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065466 - Feb 2021 (73 comments)
The days are long but the decades are short (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903714 - Sept 2019 (33 comments)
The days are long but the decades are short – Sam Altman - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668835 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
Sam Altman: 36 Life Lessons I Learned Before the Age of 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491492 - May 2015 (3 comments)
The days are long but the decades are short - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454440 - April 2015 (387 comments)
All these people go to schools and work environments where they exclusively interact with incredibly intelligent people. Do they really know just how mediocre the average person is? Or is the average person implicitly written off with respect to any sort of prodigious success.
None of the advise is incorrect of course, it's just that the sum is unattainable and at times contradicting. It basically says: here's 20 balls. Now juggle them up in the air, don't let any of them drop.
That being said, your 20s are special. It's indeed the decade where you have the most energy versus the least responsibilities. Don't take your 20s in slow or tame mode.
You should work hard and also spend the maximum amount with friends. And your parents. Also, exercise, sleep well, and so on. Doing a long list of things very well might lead to exhaustion or one thing coming at the expense of the other things.
Like I said though, do live your 20s hard. Do not live it safely and slowly as if you're middle-aged already. It's a limited time opportunity.
It's all so flat and tasteless. It lacks character, it assumes such basic goals for human beings as happiness or money. They all write like they're handing in some kind of flavorless college freshman's book report.
I don't know where the truly philosophical individuals are these days but they certainly aren't heading up tech companies.
Want life advice? Start looking into the history of philosophy and read it widely and deeply. The words are powerful and there's no underlying assumption that life is reducible to making it out the best way we can in the current dominant socio-economic structure; they actually suggest that, gasp dominant systems and structures might not be serving people well. People actually believed in this thing called meaning and thought about how to pursue it beyond fulfilling prescribed roles and desires.
It's so arrogant of these founders to suggest that their personal experience in capitalism is extractable to some set of general principles worthy of moralization. Worse, they do it with the literary style of a lemming. At least the moralists of the 16th and 17th centuries knew how to construct a pithy, catchy aphorism when they were dolling out vague advice. Sheesh.
Your success will convince you you’re a genius, qualified to comment on anything, but you will have completely killed anything inside yourself that doesn’t involve corporate advancement.
I am not joking. Now going to the gym is 'easier' vs 20 years ago, because an hour at the gym doesn't seem like much time.
Nice list, though. Happy birthday and good luck on your journey, Sam.
If you take nothing else from this repost, let this really sink in.
And for those of us in the northern hemisphere, you should have a plan by this point in the year for your work life to truly enjoy it when it arrives.
It sort of stopped me in my tracks. I looked out the window at the green outside and thought of being stuck indoors working on a bunch of milestones and goals and... sigh.
But only a few years later Altman has more influence and power than even Aurelius in his time.
We should all read Montaigne instead, the reflections of a man 1400 years later, isolated, considering his influence and how he lives/lived in the world.
I did put some of this advice into practice. One thing it got me was an ODD diagnosis.
That one would assume these people are solely in the place they are due to exceptional intelligence and merit and not a combination of luck, connections and a degree of hard work and talent just shows how much of a bubble tech is.
The meritocracy myth rages on.
But all of these advice while not novel and may sound superficial, will make you more happier and more successful if followed.
e.g. a ~20%(adjust by country/age) CAGR in income will make most feel monetarily successful no matter what the start point is. Spending less time on TV and more with family/friends will for most give them more happiness. Working hard may not be enough but almost always a pre-requisite.
The hobbies I have are similarly frugal: fixing stuff, repairing old cars, where I feel I've gained some value for the time spent.
I save money by not buying much stuff in general. So when I do have to spend it’s not a big deal. It’s not like saving $80 by not going to a concert would have some profound impact on my future financial situation. Same with vacations or buying clothes. I don’t do that stuff often, so when I do, whatever. Why ruminate so much on it.
I used to be more of your mindset but realized it was stupid. And you end up missing out on opportunities if you’re too frugal just for the sake of it (rather than necessity). People I’ve met on trips, random books I’ve bought, etc have changed my life in lots of positive ways.
Let me guess: Could it be coming from a poor family?
I think being content with what you have and what you buy, the fulfillment of fixing things has much more value than fancy stuff that is fancy today but gets outdated quickly.
Also "experiencing things" seems overrated these days. As if scratching things off a bucket list has lots of value.
I wonder if this makes it harder to find a partner?
Also, is it easier to spend money with a credit card than in cash?
> Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom
This is true outside of your work but not so much during it:
- when you makes lots of money you feel less free to resign than for a shitty interchangeable job. It’s even more true as the shitty job has less chance to be intellectually interesting
- building your own business usually means you’re even less free mentally as you got more responsibilities
- if you’re got employee it’s even worse : you’ve got more legal obligations and probably moral implications.
Money can buy a lots of thinks but certainly not freedom.
There is a lower bound, and I think it's around the 90-95th percentile if you want to excel in tech. This is based on 115 = 85th percentile, and I think <110-115 you're going to have a tough time in a top tech company as an engineer.
You have to be somewhat lucky to be able to do this, but also you have to actually try. Your comment seems needlessly dismissive as well as inaccurate.
For many the secret of success seems to be something like:
0. Pick the right thing(s) to work on (ideally the thing that will result in #3)
1. Work really hard (ideally starting with as many advantages as possible - wealth, family, connections, safety nets, etc.) so you can
2. Buy as many lottery tickets as possible (ideally rigging the game in your favor if possible) to improve the likelihood that you will eventually
3. Win the lottery
This may seem flippant, but if you don't achieve #2, you're much less likely to achieve #3.
Since #3 is so luck dependent, you need to increase your luck - which means increase your chances of possibly winning - usually by increasing the number of trials, or by rigging the game somehow. However in most of these games (lottery tickets, startups, etc.) there are many more losers than winners.
In the hindsight the "act" might look like the thing that made you succeed, but most of the time it's actually the luck. The "strategy" is just a normal reaction. For example:
"I invested half of my money in stock market and half in property. That made me a billionaire. You should do the same."
vs
"I won $1M from the lottery, and I invested half of it in stock market and half in property."
Obviously if you omit the lottery part the advise doesn't make any sense (i.e. you won't be a billionaire by investing half of your minimum wage every fortnight). This may be an extreme example, but demonstrates my point.
As I understand it, and I’m not going to pretend to know everything about him, Sam Altman is not a successful programmer but a successful businessman. To assert that his success is even primarily due to IQ rather than being at the right place at the right time and having connections to the right people demonstrates a dogmatic deviation to the notion that IQ is all encompassing, when in reality is it consistently shown to be poorly correlated with success.
But, a lot of this advice like “take risks” is much easier to do when your failures don’t result in losing everything. If a poor person starts a business and fails they might not be able to afford to eat. If Sam Altman failed would he have been pushed to a similar place on the socioeconomic ladder? My guess is no. It’s much easier to fail when your failure state is that you can rely on your well off family with relatively little hardship.