The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short by Sam Altman

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on.  I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer:

 

1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list.  Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.  Don’t lose touch with old friends.  Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people. Have parties.

 

2) Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it.  Make it count.  Time is extremely limited and goes by fast.  Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway.  Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something).  Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life.  Negativity is really bad.  Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

 

3) How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard.  It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.

 

4) On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about.  And it’s hard to be totally happy/fulfilled in life if you don’t like what you do for your work.  Work very hard—a surprising number of people will be offended that you choose to work hard—but not so hard that the rest of your life passes you by.  Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally.  Even if you miss, you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place.  Figure out your own productivity system—don’t waste time being unorganized, working at suboptimal times, etc.  Don’t be afraid to take some career risks, especially early on.  Most people pick their career fairly randomly—really think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.

 

5) On money: Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal.  Also, lack of money is very stressful.  In almost all ways, having enough money so that you don’t stress about paying rent does more to change your wellbeing than having enough money to buy your own jet.  Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I’ve spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.

 

6) Talk to people more.  Read more long content and less tweets.  Watch less TV.  Spend less time on the Internet.

 

7) Don’t waste time.  Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.

 

8) Don’t let yourself get pushed around.  As Paul Graham once said to me, “People can become formidable, but it’s hard to predict who”.  (There is a big difference between confident and arrogant.  Aim for the former, obviously.)

 

9) Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade. 

 

10) However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it.  Don’t be afraid to do something slightly reckless.  One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do.

 

11) Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people.  Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people).  Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown.  It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.

 

12) Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter.  It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.  Get rid of distractions in your life.  Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

 

13) Keep your personal burn rate low.  This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life.

 

14) Summers are the best.

 

15) Don’t worry so much.  Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem.  Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.

 

16) Ask for what you want.  

 

17) If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it.  Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do.  When in doubt, kiss the boy/girl.

 

18) Exercise.  Eat well.  Sleep.  Get out into nature with some regularity.

 

19) Go out of your way to help people.  Few things in life are as satisfying.  Be nice to strangers.  Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.

 

20) Youth is a really great thing.  Don’t waste it.  In fact, in your 20s, I think it’s ok to take a “Give me financial discipline, but not just yet” attitude.  All the money in the world will never get back time that passed you by.

 

21) Tell your parents you love them more often.  Go home and visit as often as you can.

 

22) This too shall pass.

 

23) Learn voraciously. 

 

24) Do new things often.  This seems to be really important.  Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think.  Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.

 

25) Remember how intensely you loved your boyfriend/girlfriend when you were a teenager?  Love him/her that intensely now.  Remember how excited and happy you got about stuff as a kid?  Get that excited and happy now.

 

26) Don’t screw people and don’t burn bridges.  Pick your battles carefully.

 

27) Forgive people. 

 

28) Don’t chase status.  Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling.

 

29) Most things are ok in moderation.  Almost nothing is ok in extreme amounts.

 

30) Existential angst is part of life.  It is particularly noticeable around major life events or just after major career milestones.  It seems to particularly affect smart, ambitious people.  I think one of the reasons some people work so hard is so they don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this.  Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this way; you are not alone.

 

31) Be grateful and keep problems in perspective.  Don’t complain too much.  Don’t hate other people’s success (but remember that some people will hate your success, and you have to learn to ignore it). 

 

32) Be a doer, not a talker.

 

33) Given enough time, it is possible to adjust to almost anything, good or bad.  Humans are remarkable at this.

 

34) Think for a few seconds before you act.  Think for a few minutes if you’re angry.

 

35) Don’t judge other people too quickly.  You never know their whole story and why they did or didn’t do something.  Be empathetic.

 

36) The days are long but the decades are short.

 

Source - 

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short

 

The HP Way: Dave Packard on How to Operate a Company

In 1960, David Packard gave an informal speech at the company he co-founded that wasn’t intended for publication.

The speech, which can be found in The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company, covered why companies exist, management by objective vs. control, and the importance of financial responsibility.

Packard said, “This is crucial in determining whether we can continue to grow, keep an efficient organization, and maintain our company’s character.”

The Purpose of A Company

On why companies exist in the first place, Packard wrote:

I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile— they make a contribution to society (a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental)

So with that in mind let us discuss why the Hewlett-Packard Company exists. I think it is obvious that we started this company because Bill and I, and some of those working with us in the early days, felt that we were able to design and make instruments which were not as yet available. I believe that our company has grown over the years for that very reason. Working together we have been able to provide for the technical people, our customers, things which are better than they were able to get anywhere else. The real reason for our existence is that we provide something which is unique. Our particular area of contribution is to design, develop, and manufacture electronic measuring instruments.

[T]he reason for our existence and the measure of our success is how well we are able to make our product.

Objective vs. Control

As for how the individual person fits into these efforts, Packard hits on the difference between management by objective and management by control:

The individual works, partly to make money, of course, but we should also realize that the individual who is doing a worthwhile job is working because he feels he is accomplishing something worthwhile. This is important in your association with these individuals. You know that those people you work with that are working only for money are not making any real contribution. I want to emphasize then that people work to make a contribution and they do this best when they have a real objective when they know what they are trying to achieve and are able to use their own capabilities to the greatest extent. This is a basic philosophy which we have discussed before— Management by Objective as compared to Management by Control.

Supervising People

Packard hits on the notion of what it means to supervise someone:

In other words when we discuss supervision and management we are not talking about a military type organization where the man at the top issues an order and it is passed on down the line until the man at the bottom does as he is told without question (or reason). That is precisely the type of organization we do not want. We feel our objectives can best be achieved by people who understand what they are trying to do and can utilize their own capabilities to do them. I have noticed when we promote people from a routine job to a supervisory position, there is a tremendous likelihood that these people will get carried away by the authority. They figure that all they have to do now is tell everyone else what to do and quite often this attitude causes trouble. We must realize that supervision is not a job of giving orders; it is a job of providing the opportunity for people to use their capabilities efficiently and effectively. I don’t mean you are not to give orders. I mean that what you are trying to get is something else. One of the underlying requirements of this sort of approach is that we do understand a little more specifically what the objectives of the company are. These then have to be translated into the objectives of the departments and groups and so on down.

On Focus

While Steve Jobs famously said that focus is the ability to say no, Packard approached focus from another angle:

The other objective which is complementary to this and equally important is to try to make everything we do worthwhile. We want to do our best when we take on a job. … The logical result of this is that as we concentrate our efforts on these areas and are able to find better ways to do the job, we will logically, develop a better line of general purpose measuring instruments.

The Product

Getting the product to the customer is only half the job.

In engineering, there are two basic criteria that are uppermost in the definition of what we hope to be able to do. As we develop these new instruments, we hope they will be creative in their design, and they will provide better ways of doing a job. There are many examples of this— the instruments our engineers have developed this last year give us some good examples. The clip-on milliammeter, the new wave analyzer, the sampling scope— all are really creative designs. They give people who buy them methods of making measurements they could not make before those instruments were available. However, creative design alone is not enough and never will be. In order to make these into useful devices, there must be meticulous attention to detail. The engineers understand this. They get an instrument to the place where it is about ready to go and the job is about half done. The same applies in the manufacturing end of the program. We need to produce efficiently in order to achieve our slogan of inexpensive quality. Cost is a very important part of the objective in manufacturing, but producing an instrument in the quickest manner is not satisfactory unless at the same time every detail is right. Attention to detail is as important in manufacturing as it is in engineering.

The Problem You Solve

It’s not about what you sell, it’s about the problems you solve.

We certainly are not anxious to sell a customer something he does not want, nor need. You may laugh, but this has happened— in other companies of course, not ours! Also, we want to be sure that when the instrument is delivered, it performs the function the customer wanted.

On Financial Responsibility

Packard, ever the financial conservative, offers a timeless lesson on financial responsibility that Charlie Munger would be proud of:

Financial responsibility is equally important, however different in nature. It is essentially a service function to see that we generate the resources which make it possible for us all to do our job.

These things translated mean that in addition to having the objective of trying to make a contribution to our customers, we must consider our responsibilities in a broader sense. If our main thought is to make money, we won’t care about these details. If we don’t care about the details, we won’t make as much money. They go hand in hand.

Responsibility to Employees

On the company’s responsibility to employees:

We are not interested only in making a better product. We feel that in asking you people to work for us, we in turn have an obligation. This is an important point and one which we ask each of you to relay to all the employees. Our first obligation, which is self-evident from my previous remarks, is to let people know they are doing something worthwhile. We must provide a means of letting our employees know they have done a good job. You as supervisors must convey this to your groups. Don’t just give orders. Provide the opportunity for your people to do something important. Encourage them.

Management Skills are not Enough

Packard firmly rejects the notion that management skills alone suffice. He argues that managers must deeply understand their people’s realities.

Some say you can be a good manager without having the slightest idea of what you are trying to manage, that the techniques of management are all important. There are many organizations which work that way. I don’t argue that the job can’t be done that way but I do argue strongly that the best job can be done when the manager or supervisor has a real and genuine understanding of his group’s work. … I don’t see how a person can even understand what proper standards are and what performance is required unless he does understand in some detail the very specific nature of the work he is trying to supervise.

The Traits Managers Need

As to what traits management should exhibit:

Tolerance is tremendously significant. Unless you are tolerant of the people under you, you really can’t do a good job of being a supervisor. You must have understanding— understanding of the little things that affect people. You must have a sense of fairness, and you must know what it is reasonable to expect of your people. You must have a good set of standards for your group but you must maintain these standards with fairness and understanding.

Profits are The Only Path

Lest you think Packard was a socialist, he argues that profits are the only path towards achieving the management philosophy he laid out.

I want to say that I have mentioned our primary objectives, but none of these can be accomplished unless the company makes a profit. Profit is the measure of our contribution to our customers— it is a measure of what our customers are willing to pay us over and above the actual cost of an instrument. Only to the extent that we can do something worthwhile, can provide more for the customer, will he year in and year out pay us enough so we have something left over. So profit is the measure of how well we work together. It is really the final measure because, if we cannot do these things so the customer will pay us, our work is futile.

Packard’s speech serves as a timely reminder of what’s important and the difference between managing something and building something to steward for generations.

Source –

https://fs.blog/the-hp-way-david-packard/