The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
- Trust yourself more. Get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results.
- If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.
- Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it.
- I try to always listen to criticism 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.
The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven.
- Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people.
- If you’re externally driven, you’ll work on consensus ideas and consensus career tracks, which will prevent you from doing truly interesting work.
- You’ll be focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games.
- Internally driven people do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world.
— Adapted from Sam Altman via a16z