shelley's...work smart*play hard

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.

我曾經觀察數千位創辦人，對於賺大錢與創造有影響力的事物有了很多思考。通常，以賺大錢為出發點的人們，最終打造了舉足輕重的事物。

關於達到異於常人的成功，我有13個想法。如果已經(透過既有優勢或是努力)達到程度一般的成就，且有意願繼續努力，創造驚人成功，那麼接下來其實並不難。

1. Compound yourself  為自己創造複利

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

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.

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.

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.

複利很神奇。指數曲線是創造財富的關鍵。一家中型企業如果每年市值成長50%，就可以在短時間變成大企業。世界上很少企業真正創造出了社群影響力和規模化能力。不過在技術加持下，會有愈來愈多企業做得到。

你也該尋求自我的指數成長曲線。你的目標應該是讓你的生活遵循不斷向右和向上成長的軌跡。重要的是，尋求可以帶來複利效應的職業，大多數人所從事的工作依然只能帶來線性的成長。

你不會希望身處一份工作，兩年資歷的人，生產力可以跟做了20年的人一樣，透過學習帶來的利率應該是要相當高的。當你的職涯進展，你每投入一個單位的努力，都應該帶出更多更多成果。背後的槓桿包含資本、技術、品牌、社群效應以及人員管理。

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.

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

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.

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

不管你要怎麼定義成功，金錢、地位、世界影響力或任何事，專注於讓成功「進位」。結束一個專案後，我會願意花所需的時間去找到下一個想專注的事項。直到找到那種一旦成功了，值得成為我職涯註腳的計畫。

大多數人遇到線性的職涯契機時就陷進去了，但其實該懂得讓微小的機會溜走，專注於有潛力帶來真正改變的下一步。

相信指數成長，抱持耐心，你絕對會獲得驚喜。

2. Have almost too much self-belief 自信爆表

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

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

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.

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.”

自信強大無比。我所認識最成功的那些人，相信自己的程度近乎妄想。

盡早培養自信。當你有更多的數據支持你的判斷，且你能持續帶來實績，那麼你該更相信自己。

連你都不相信自己，你便難以逆趨勢而行。但反其道而行往往是價值體現的地方。

我還記得多年前馬斯克帶我參觀SpaceX工廠的情景。他鉅細靡遺地告訴我製造火箭零件的一切，我無法忘記他說到把大型火箭發射向火星時的堅定面孔。

離開工廠時，我想到「嗯，這就是信念堅定的模樣」。

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.  

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.

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.

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

不幸地是，野心愈大，這個世界愈會試圖拆你的台。

自信必須與自覺相互平衡。曾經，我痛恨任何種類的批評，並想盡辦法躲開。如今，我試圖聆聽，更會假設批評有理，再決定回應與否。尋求真相很難，常常也會很痛苦，卻也是自信與自欺欺人的分野。

3. Learn to think independently 學習獨立思考

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.

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.

“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.

創業精神是很難教的，因為原創性思維也很難教。學校的設立也不是為了傳授這些，事實上，學校還更常獎勵循規蹈矩的事。因此，獨立思考必須靠自己培養。

從第一性原理（First principle thinking）思考，並從中榨出新的想法是非常有趣的事，找到可以彼此交流的人，則可以磨亮獨立思考的技能。下一步則是找到簡單又快速的方式在真實世界裡測試你的想法。

「我會失敗許多次，然後會有一次正確到不行」，這就是創業者做事的方式。你必須給自己很多次機會去成為幸運的人。

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.

4. Get good at “sales”你要很懂"銷售"

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

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.

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.

光有自信還不夠，你還要說服其他人相信你。

所有偉大的職業，某種程度來說都會變得像業務。你必須宣傳你的計劃，不論對象是客戶、員工、媒體還是投資人。這需要啟發人心的遠見，強大的溝通技巧、某種程度的領袖魅力，以及證明你的執行力。

其實擅長銷售涉及增強任何其他技能，任何人都可以刻意練習而獲得進步。但基於特定理由，或許是認定會遭人反感吧，許多人認為銷售技巧是學不來的。

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.

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.

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.

我的銷售技巧是重要時刻一定親自現身。事業剛起頭的時候，我樂於出差，儘管許多時候很多人認為不必要，但這麼做為我帶來職業生涯的3次轉捩點，如果我當時沒有這麼做，或許我不會是現在的我。

5. Make it easy to take risks 自在地迎接風險

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.

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.

大部分人高估風險，低估報酬。但你不可能每一次都對，你必須嘗試好幾次，在習得更多經驗後也懂得更快適應。

剛出社會時，你應該要更自在地冒險，因為你沒有太多可以失去，卻可能有豐厚報酬。只要確保自己可以顧好基本的責任義務，去冒險吧。找到那種輸了會失去1，但成功了會獲得百倍報酬的賭注。如果成功了，往同樣的方向加大押注。

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.  

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.

但不要蹲太久。我在創投公司注意過一個問題，許多有心創業的人花了好長的時間在Google或臉書工作。在那裡他們過得舒服，有一份可預測的工作，因為承擔什麼任務都可以做得很好而留下好的名聲。久而久之，你會難以離開這樣的生活。即便他們真的跳出去了，依然覺得回鍋的誘惑難以拒絕。這是人的天性，我們喜歡短期的報酬和便利，看不到長期的成果。

6. Focus 專心致志

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

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.

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.

專注可以讓工作成果倍增。

每一位我認識的人，都願意花時間思考值得專注的事。在對的地方下功夫，遠遠比拉長工時重要。大部分人把時間浪費在不重要的事物上。

一旦釐清了自己想要什麼，別讓什麼攔阻你去快速著手那些優先事項。我還沒有看過極度成功，卻動作龜速的人。

7. Work hard 努力不懈

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

你可以靠聰明或努力成為領域中的前10%，但要成為前1%的佼佼者，通常是天賦與努力兼備。

但是日以繼夜往往需要生活上的許多犧牲，權衡之下，放棄努力往往是合理的抉擇。但努力不懈有很多好處，在多數情況下，衝勁會愈滾愈強勁，成功會帶來更多成功。

過程中你會非常享受。在使命感中找到樂子，並做到超群絕倫，漸漸地你會發現你帶來的影響比自己意識到的還要大。

你必須找出拚命，卻不燃燒殆盡的方式。很多人已經找到自己的解方，但一個幾乎對任何人都管用的方法是，找到一群你願意長時間相處的人，然後一起努力。

8. Be bold 無所畏懼

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.

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.

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.

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

果大家都想開一家做梗圖（meme）的新創，而你想用基因編程創業，去做吧。我相信比起輕鬆創業，人們更願意著手難的事。人們會想加入令人興奮的志業，會希望自己的工作很重要。

如果你在重大問題上取得進展，會有源源不絕的人想要幫助你。盡可能放大你的野心，不要害怕去從事你真的想做的事。

跟隨你的好奇心，那些讓你興奮異常的事，往往對其他人也吸引力十足。

9. Be willful 堅定不移

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

很多人不知道，很多時候，你可以讓世界照著你的意志運作，但大多數人甚至不願意嘗試，只是一味接受事情有自己的脈絡。

人們有巨大的潛力創造事物。但基於種種原因，像是自我懷疑、太早放棄和不夠積極，都導致大部分人甚至無法觸及自己的潛能。

說出這樣的話的人往往更成功，「我會繼續做，直到成功，不論遭遇什麼挑戰，我都會找出解方」。他們的堅持，足以讓自己有機會在努力的路上與幸運相遇。

保持堅定，你必須樂觀，這是可以透過練習精進的人格特質。我還沒有遇見極度成功的悲觀主義者。

10. Be hard to compete with難以挑戰

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

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.

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.

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.

那些有價值的企業，往往難以挑戰。放在人身上也一樣。如果你做的事，別人來做也一樣，最終別人的確會用更低的薪水把你的工作搶走。

保持競爭力的方式是建立影響力，像是建立個人品牌，或是善於跨界。不要身邊的人做什麼，就跟著模仿。如果你只是複製，跟你競爭一點都不難。

11. Build a network 打造人際網路

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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

偉大的事業需要團隊。建立人才網絡是打造偉大職涯不可或缺的。人才網絡的規模，經常牽動你所締造成就的大小。

建立人脈網的最有效方式在於盡你所能為他人提供援助。我職業生涯中的最佳契機，大都是這樣促成的。許多時候，我驚喜於10年前對他人的鼎力相助，在多年後依然帶給我善的循環。

另一個建立人脈網的方式，在於真心關注與你共事的人。慷慨地分享工作成果，你會獲得10倍以上的回報。同時，你也要學習評估他人的強項，讓人才適得其所。

你會希望在別人眼中，你是一個可以激勵他人超越自我的人，卻又不致於把他們逼到難以負荷。

12. You get rich by owning things資產決定財富

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.

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

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.

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

我童年時期對財富最大的誤解是，人們因為薪資變富有。儘管有些例外，但Forbes榜單上，幾乎沒有人是靠薪水上榜的。

人們靠著快速增值的事物，而變得富有。這可能事業、不動產、天然資源、智慧財產或是類似的資產。

你不能只用時間換取金錢，因為時間換取的薪資只會慢慢地線性成長。

讓事物迅速增值的最佳方法就是大量製造人們想要的東西。

13. Be internally driven心之驅動

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.

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.

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.

[1] A comment response I wrote on HN: