ARTS - Review - How To Be Successful

How To Be Successful

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.

Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.

我观察了上千个创始人，想了很多关于挣大量的钱或者创建重要的事需要什么。通常，人们开始时候想要前者，之后想要后者。

以下是如何实现这样异常成功的13个想法。一旦你达到了成功的基础线(通过特权或努力) ，并且想要把它带进工作转化为异常成功，一切都会变得更容易。 这大部分适合任何人

1. Compound yourself

Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.

复利自己

复利是有魔力的。到处都是。指数曲线是创造财富的关键。

A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will. It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.

一个每年增长50% 的中型企业在很短的时间内变得巨大。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极端的可伸缩性。但是和科技一起，越来越多的可能。很值得花费大量努力发现他们并创造他们。

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.

你自己也想成为一条指数曲线ーー你的人生目标应该是遵循一条不断向上和向右的轨迹。走向有复利增长的事业是很重要的，大多数事业进程相当线性。

You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.

你不会希望自己的职业生涯中，从事这项工作两年的人能够像从事这项工作二十年的人一样有效率 — 你学习的比率应该一直很高。随着你职业生涯的发展，你所做的每一个工作单元都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多方式获得这种影响力，如资本，技术，品牌，网络效应，人员管理。

It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

专注于为你所定义的成功标准——金钱、地位、对世界的影响等等——再加上一个零是有用的。我愿意花费足够需要的时间在寻找项目与下一件要做的事情之间。但我一直希望这是一个项目，如果成功，将使我的其余职业生涯看起来像一个脚注。

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.

大多数人在线性机会中陷入困境。要愿意让小机会消失，以专注于潜在的步骤变化。

I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

我认为企业最大的竞争优势ーー无论是对于公司还是对于个人的职业生涯ーー是对世界上不同系统将如何整合的长期思考。复合增长的一个值得注意的方面是，最遥远的年份是最重要的。在一个几乎没有人真正着眼于长远的世界里，市场会丰厚地奖励那些着眼于长远的人。

Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.

相信复利，耐心点，并感到惊喜。

2. Have almost too much self-belief

拥有大量自信

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.

自信极其有力量。绝大多数我人士的成功人士的自信几乎到了妄想的地步。

Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.

早点培养。当你得到更多的数据点，你的判断是好的，你可以始终如一地交付结果，相信自己更多。

If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

如果你不相信自己，很难让自己对未来有逆向投资思维。但是这是大多数创造价值的地方。

I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.”

我记得多年前， Elon Musk带我参观SpaceX的工厂。他详细的讲出了火箭每个部件的生产制造， 但令人印象深刻的是他谈到向火星发射大型火箭时脸上那种绝对确定的表情。我离开的时候想“哈，这就是深信的基准”

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.

管理你的斗志 — 你团队的斗志– 是大多数努力中最大的挑战之一。如果没有大量自信几乎不可能做到。不幸的是，你的野心越大，这个世界越想打垮你。

Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong. If not, they would have faced much more competition.

大多数非常成功的人在人们认为他们错了的时候，至少有一次对未来的看法是正确的。否则，他们将面临更多的竞争。

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.

自信必须和自我意识相平衡。我曾经痛恨任何形式的批评，并且积极地回避它。现在我总是假设它是真的，然后决定自己是否想去采取行动。寻找真相总是困难充满痛苦，但是它能区分自信和自欺。

This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.

这种平衡也可以帮助你避免显得自以为是和脱离实际。

3. Learn to think independently

学会独立思考。

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.

企业家精神教起来很困难，因为底层思考非常难教。学校不是用来教这个的— 实际上，它通常会给予相反的回报。所以你只能自己培养它。

Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.

从基本的原则开始思考并尝试产生新的想法是很有趣的，做得更好的方式是找人去交换它。下一步是，发现简单、快速的方式去在真实世界验证这些想法。

“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.

“我会失败很多次，我将会真正正确一次” 是企业家精神的方式。你需要给自己很多机会来获得幸运。

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. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.

要学习的最有力的经验之一是，你可以弄清楚在似乎没有解决办法的情况下该做什么。越多次这么做，你会越相信它。勇气来自于学会在你被击倒之后还能重新站起来。

4. Get good at “sales”

善于销售

Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.

光有自信是不够的ーー你还必须能够说服别人相信你的信念。

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.

所有伟大事业，从某种程度上，都是销售工作。你需要传达你的计划给顾客、准雇员、新闻界、投资人等。这需要一种鼓舞的愿景，强大的沟通技巧，一定程度的个人魅力，以及执行力。

Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.

善于沟通 — 尤其书面沟通– 很值得投资。我对清晰沟通的最佳建议是，首先确保你的思路清晰，然后使用简明扼要的语言。

The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful.

做好销售最好的方式是由衷相信你卖的东西。销售你真正相信的东西感觉是很棒的，尝试销售蛇油令人厌烦。

Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable.

做好销售就像提高任何其他技能一样 — 任何人可以通过反复训练来做好它。但是出于某种原因，也许是因为它让人感到厌恶，许多人认为它是无法学习的东西。

My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way.

我的另一个大的销售技巧是，只要是重要的事情，就亲自出面。当我刚开始工作时，我总是愿意坐上飞机。这经常是不必要的，但有三次它导致了我的职业生涯的转折点，否则就会走到另一个方向。

5. Make it easy to take risks

乐于承担风险

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.

大多数人高估了风险低估了回报。承担风险是重要的，因为不可能总是正确 — 你必须尝试许多东西，并在你学到更多东西时迅速适应。

It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

在你事业早期通常承担风险很容易，你没有更多可失去的了，你有很多潜在的可以获得。一旦你让自己的基本义务得到保障，你就应该尝试让自己容易承担风险。寻找小的投注，那些失败失去1 成功就赚100的机会。之后在那个方向加大投注。

Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy—and human nature—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.

不过，不要积攒太长时间。在 YC，我们经常注意到那些在谷歌或 Facebook 工作了很长时间的创始人存在一个问题。当人们习惯于一个舒适的生活，一个可预测的工作，以及无论做什么都会成功的声誉，那就会很很难抛弃这些。(人们总是有一种不可思议的能力，能够将自己的生活方式匹配明年的薪水)。尽管他们真的离开了，回来的诱惑也是极大的。把短期收益和便利置于长期收益之上是很容易的，这也是人类天性。

But when you aren’t on the treadmill, you can follow your hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.

但是当你不在枯燥的工作，你可以跟随你的第六感，花时间在真正感兴趣的事情上。尽可能长时间地保持你的生活便宜和灵活是一个强有力的方法，但是很明显需要权衡。

6. Focus

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

专注是工作的力量倍增器。

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.

我见过的几乎每个人都会花更多的时间来思考应该关注什么，这对他们来说是很有好处的。在正确的事情上工作比在许多时间上工作要重要得多。大多数人把大部分时间浪费在无所谓的事情上

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.

一旦你想好了要做什么，就要势不可挡地迅速完成你的一小撮优先事项。我还没有见过一个行动缓慢但非常成功的人。

7. 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.

努力工作

你可以通过聪明或者努力工作在你的领域达到90%，这仍然是一个伟大成就。但是达到99%的程度，两者都需要— 你将会和其他非常有天赋的有伟大想法的并乐意很多工作的人竞争。

Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.

极致的的人获得极致结果。大量工作带来巨大的生活权衡取舍，决定不这么做也是完全理性的。但是它也有很多优势。在大多数情况下，势头是复合的，而成功会带来成功。

And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated.

它经常真的有趣。生活中最大的乐趣之一就是找到你的目标，在这方面做得很出色，并发现你的影响对比你自己更重要的事情很重要。一位YC的创始人最近表示非常惊讶，他在离开大公司的工作后，为自己的最大可能的影响而努力，这让他更加快乐和充实。在这方面努力工作应该得到庆祝。

It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US, but this is certainly not the case in other parts of the world—the amount of energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US is quickly becoming the new benchmark.

不完全清楚为何努力工作在美国一些地区变成一个坏的事情，但在世界其他地区肯定不是这样的。美国以外的企业家所表现出的能量和动力正迅速成为新的基准。

You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.

你必须弄清楚如何努力工作而不至于筋疲力尽。人们会寻找自己的策略来应对，但是有一条总是奏效的方式是，寻找哪些你喜欢做的工作，和你享受花时间在一块的人一起工作。

I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

我认为哪些假装你不用大部分时间工作(人生的一阶段)就能超级成功的人是非常有害的。事实上，持久工作是长期成功可一个可预测的事。

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.

关于努力工作还有一个想法：在你的职业生涯开始时就努力工作。艰苦的工作就像利息一样复利，你越早做，你就有越多的时间来获得收益回报。当你有较少的其他责任时，也更容易努力工作，这在你年轻的时候经常发生，但并不总是这样。

8. Be bold

大胆一些

I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.

我相信，做一个困难的创业公司比做一个容易的创业公司更容易。人们希望成为令人兴奋的事物的一部分，并感到他们的工作很重要。

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.

如果你在一个重要的问题上取得进展，你将会有一个不断想要帮助你的人带来顺风。让你自己成长得更有雄心，不要怕你真正想做的事情。

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it.

如果其他人都在创办备忘录公司，而你想创办一家基因编辑公司，那就去做，不要犹豫。

Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

听从你的好奇心。对你来说似乎很兴奋的事情，往往对其他人来说也会很兴奋。

9. Be willful

要有意志力

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.

一个很大的秘密是，你可以在令人惊讶的百分比上让世界屈服于你的意志，大多数人甚至没有尝试，而只是接受事情本来的样子。

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.

人们有巨大的能力使事情发生。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力等因素的结合，使大多数人无法达到接近其潜力的程度。

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.

追求想要的事情。你经常不会得到它，经常被拒会很痛苦。但当它起效，结果会出奇的好。

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. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way.

大多数总是，当人们说”我将会一直努力到这个事奏效，无论挑战是什么我将会克服“， 意味着，正在成功路上。他们不屈不挠足够长就会给他们带来一个机会，幸运就在路上了。

Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way.

Airbnb是我在这方面的标杆。他们讲了很多故事，我不建议尝试复制（把刷爆的信用卡放在孩子们用来装棒球卡的九槽三环夹子里，每顿都吃一元店的麦片，与强大的根深蒂固的利益集团进行一场又一场的斗争，等等），但他们设法生存了足够长的时间，让运气顺着他们。

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.

要想成为有意志力的人，你必须乐观 — 希望这是一个可以通过实践来改善的人格特质。我从来没有见过一个非常成功的悲观主义者。

10. Be hard to compete with

Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.

做到难与竞争

大多数人都明白，如果公司难以与之竞争，那么它们就更有价值。这很重要，而且显然是真的。

But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.

但是作为个人这个也是真的。如果你做的事其他人也可以做，那么将会，赚更少的钱。

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. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.

变得难以竞争的最好方法是建立杠杆作用。例如，你使用个人关系，通过建立一个强有力的个人品牌，或者在多个不同领域取得优势。还有很多其他的策略，但是你需要找出做到的方法。

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

大多数人做他们所交往的大多数人做的事。这种模仿行为通常是一个错误–如果你做的是别人都在做的事情，你将不难与之竞争。

11. Build a network

建立人际网

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. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.

伟大的工作需要团队。发展一个由有才华的人组成的工作网络–有时是紧密的，有时是松散的–是伟大事业的一个重要组成部分。你所认识的真正有才华的人的网络规模往往成为你能取得成就的限制因素。

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.

一个有效的方式去构建人际网络是尽可能的去帮助别人。这么做持续长时间，带给我大部分最好的事业机会，我四个最好投资中的三个。我不断地感到惊讶，因为我十年前为帮助一个创始人所做的事情，经常有好事发生在我身上。

One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.

建立网络的最好方法之一是建立一个真正照顾到与你合作的人的声誉。在分享收益方面要过于慷慨；它将以10倍的速度回报给你。另外，要学会评估人们擅长什么，并让他们担任这些角色。(这是我在管理方面学到的最重要的东西，而我并没有读过很多这方面的书）。你要在推动人们努力工作方面享有声誉，使他们的成就超过他们的想象，但又不至于让他们精疲力尽。

Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do. “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are.

每个人都有某方面强于其他人的地方。定义你自己的是你的强项，不是你的弱点。承认你的弱点找出如何与他们相处工作，但是不要让他们停止你想做的事。“我不能做某事，因为我不擅长做某事”是我经常从企业家那里听到的令人惊讶的话，这几乎总是反映出创造力的缺乏。弥补你的弱点的最好方法是雇佣互补的团队成员，而不是仅仅雇佣那些和你同样擅长的人。

A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.

一个构建人际网络的尤其有价值的方面是善于发现未被发现的天赋。在实践下，迅速发现智力，驱动力和创造力变得更容易。最简单的方式是建大量的人，保持追踪哪些令人印象深刻的和不深刻的。记住，你主要是在寻找改进的速度，不要高估经验或当前的成就。

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.

当我遇到新的人时，我试着总是问自己 “这个人是天生的力量吗？” 这是一个相当好的启发式方法，可以找到那些有可能完成伟大事业的人。

A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!)

发展网络的一个特殊情况是找到知名人士为你下注，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。要做到这一点，毫不奇怪，最好的办法是不遗余力地提供帮助。(请记住，你必须在以后的某个时间点上把这些钱交出来！）。

最后，记得把你的时间花在那些支持你的雄心壮志的积极的人身上。

Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.

12. You get rich by owning things

通过拥有东西变富有

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

我小时候对经济最大的误解是人们通过高薪水变富。尽管有一些例外–例如娱乐界人士—几乎没有人是通过工资上福布斯榜的。

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

你通过拥有价值快速增长的东西而变得真正富有。

This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.

这可以是企业的一部分、房地产、自然资源、知识产权或其他类似的东西。但是不管怎样，你需要拥有一些东西的权益，而不是仅仅出售你的时间。时间只是线性规模。

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.

制造价值迅速增加的东西的最好方法是大规模制造人们想要的东西。

13. Be internally driven

拥有自驱力

Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones.

大多数人主要是外部驱动的; 他们做他们所做的是因为他们想给别人留下深刻印象。这种情况有很多原因，但有两个重要的原因。

First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway.

Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.

首先，你将在协商一致的想法和协商一致的职业轨道上工作。 你会非常关心–比你意识到的要多得多–其他人是否认为你在做正确的事情。这可能会妨碍你做真正有趣的工作，即使你做了，别人也会做。

第二，你通常会把风险计算弄错。你会非常专注于跟上别人的步伐，在竞争性游戏中不掉队，即使是在短期内。

Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap.

The most successful people I know 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.

This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.

Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks for this. YC was widely mocked for the first few years, and almost no one thought it would be a big success when they first started. But they thought it would be great for the world if it worked, and they love helping people, and they were convinced their new model was better than the existing model.

Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.

聪明人似乎特别容易出现这种外部驱动的行为。意识到这一点是有帮助的，但只是一点点–你很可能要付出极大的努力才能不落入模仿的陷阱。

我所知道的最成功的人主要是由内部驱动的；他们所做的事情是为了给自己留下深刻印象，也是因为他们感到必须要在这个世界上有所作为。在你赚够了钱，可以买到你想要的任何东西，得到了足够的社会地位，不再以获得更多的东西为乐趣之后，这是我所知道的唯一的力量，会继续推动你达到更高的表现水平。

这就是为什么一个人的动机问题是如此重要。这是我试图了解一个人的第一件事。正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时，你就会知道它。

杰西卡-利文斯顿和保罗-格雷厄姆是我这方面的标杆。YC在最初几年被广泛嘲笑，在他们刚开始的时候几乎没有人认为它会大获成功。但他们认为，如果它能成功，对世界来说是件好事，而且他们喜欢帮助人，他们坚信他们的新模式比现有模式更好。

最终，你将通过在对你很重要的领域进行出色的工作来定义你的成功。你越早朝这个方向起步，你就能走得越远。你很难在你不痴迷的事情上取得巨大的成功。

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:

One of the biggest reasons I’m excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.

Until then, if you aren’t born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(

It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I’ve witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it’s possible.

I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren’t born incredibly lucky.

我对基本收入感到兴奋的最大原因之一是，它将释放出大量的人类潜力，让更多的人能够承担风险。 在此之前，如果你不是天生的幸运儿，你必须在大摇大摆之前努力奋斗一阵子。如果你出生在极端贫困的地方，那么这就超级困难了:(

机会分配如此不均，显然是一种难以置信的耻辱和浪费。但是，我已经目睹了足够多的人出生在对他们非常不利的环境中，并取得了令人难以置信的成功，所以我知道这是可能的。

我深深地意识到，如果我不是生来就非常幸运，我个人就不会有现在的成就。

Thanks to Brian Armstrong, Greg Brockman, Dalton Caldwell, Diane von Furstenberg, Maddie Hall, Drew Houston, Vinod Khosla, Jessica Livingston, Jon Levy, Luke Miles (6 drafts!), Michael Moritz, Ali Rowghani, Michael Seibel, Peter Thiel, Tracy Young and Shivon Zilis for reviewing drafts of this, and thanks especially to Lachy Groom for help writing it.