Posted 5 years ago
January 25, 2019 at 5:01 AM
2019年一月 25日 上午 5：01
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.
我观察了成千上万的创始人，并思考了很多关于如何赚大钱或创造重要的东西。通常，人们开始想要前者，最终想要后者。
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.
以下是关于如何实现这种异常成功的 13 个想法。一旦你已经达到了成功的基线程度（通过特权或努力），并希望投入工作将其转化为异常成功，这里的一切都会更容易做到。[1] 但其中大部分适用于任何人。
1. Compound yourself
1.复利化你自己
Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.
复利是神奇的。到处寻找它。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.
一个每年价值增长 50% 的中型企业在很短的时间内变得庞大。世界上很少有企业具有真正的网络效应和极高的可扩展性。但随着技术的发展，越来越多的人会这样做。 找到它们并创建它们是值得的。
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——你应该以你的生活为目标，沿着一条不断上升和向右发展的轨迹前进。走向具有复合效应的职业很重要——大多数职业都是线性发展的。
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.
你不希望从事的职业是，已经做了两年的人可以和已经做了二十年的人一样有效——你的学习速度应该总是很高。随着你职业生涯的发展，你所做的每个工作单元都应该产生越来越多的结果。有很多方法可以获得这种杠杆作用，例如资金、技术、品牌、网络效应和管理人员。
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.
专注于在你定义为成功指标的任何内容上再加一个零是很有用的——金钱、地位、对世界的影响，或者其他什么。我愿意在项目之间花尽可能多的时间来寻找我的下一件事。但我一直希望它成为一个项目，如果成功，将使我的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.
大多数人都陷入了线性机会的泥潭。愿意放过小机会，专注于潜在的阶梯式变化。
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，无论是对公司还是个人的职业生涯来说，商业中最大的竞争优势是长期思考，对世界上不同的系统将如何融合有广阔的视野。复合增长的一个值得注意的方面是，最远的年份是最重要的。在一个几乎没有人真正具有长远眼光的世界里，市场会给予那些这样做的人丰厚的回报。
Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.
相信指数，要有耐心，要有惊喜。
2. Have almost too much self-belief
2.有太多的自信
Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
自信是非常强大的。我认识的最成功的人几乎相信自己到了妄想的地步。
Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.
尽早培养。当您获得更多数据点，表明您的判断是正确的并且您可以始终如一地交付结果时，请更加相信自己。
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，就很难让自己对未来有相反的想法。但这是创造最大价值的地方。
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.”
我记得多年前埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）带我参观了SpaceX工厂。他详细谈到了火箭的每个部件的制造，但记忆中难以忘怀的是，当他谈到将大型火箭送上火星时，他脸上绝对肯定的表情。我离开时想：“呵呵，这就是信念的基准。
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.
管理自己的士气和团队的士气是大多数工作中最大的挑战之一。如果没有很大的自信，这几乎是不可能的。不幸的是，你越是雄心勃勃，世界就越会试图摧毁你。
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对未来的看法至少一次，当人们认为他们错了的时候。如果不是这样，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.
自信必须与自我意识相平衡。我曾经讨厌任何形式的批评，并积极避免它。现在，我试着总是假设它是真的，然后决定是否要采取行动。寻求真理是艰难的，而且往往是痛苦的，但它是将自信与自欺欺人区分开来的原因。
This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.
这种平衡还可以帮助您避免给人留下有权和脱节的印象。
3. Learn to think independently
3.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.
创业是很难教的，因为原创思维很难教。学校不是为了教这个而设立的——事实上，它通常会奖励相反的东西。所以你必须自己培养它。
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.
从第一性原理思考并尝试产生新想法很有趣，找到可以与之交流的人是在这方面做得更好的好方法。下一步是找到简单、快速的方法来在现实世界中测试这些想法。
“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，我会真正正确一次”是企业家的方式。你必须给自己很多机会才能走运。
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.
要学习的最有力的教训之一是，您可以弄清楚在似乎没有解决方案的情况下该怎么做。你这样做的次数越多，你就越相信它。勇气来自于学习在被击倒后可以重新站起来。
4. Get good at “sales”
4.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——你还必须能够说服别人相信你的信仰。
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.
在某种程度上，所有伟大的职业都会成为销售工作。你必须向客户、潜在员工、媒体、投资者等宣传你的计划。这需要鼓舞人心的愿景、强大的沟通技巧、一定程度的魅力和执行能力的证据。
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——尤其是书面沟通——是一项值得投资的投资。对于清晰的沟通，我最好的建议是首先确保你的想法清晰，然后使用简单明了的语言。
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.
擅长销售的最好方法是真正相信你所销售的产品。出售你真正相信的东西感觉很棒，而试图出售蛇油感觉很糟糕。
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.
擅长销售就像提高任何其他技能一样——任何人都可以通过刻意练习变得更好。但出于某种原因，也许是因为它让人感到厌恶，许多人将其视为无法学习的东西。
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.
我的另一个重要销售秘诀是，只要有重要的时候，就亲自出现。刚开始的时候，我总是愿意坐飞机。这通常是不必要的，但有三次它为我带来了职业生涯的转折点，否则就会走上另一条路。
5. Make it easy to take risks
5. 让冒险变得容易
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。承担风险很重要，因为不可能一直都是对的——你必须尝试很多事情，并在学习更多时迅速适应。
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.
在职业生涯的早期冒险通常更容易;你没有太多可失去的，而且你可能会得到很多。一旦你把自己弄到了一个基本义务的地步，你就应该试着让它更容易承担风险。寻找小赌注，如果你错了，你可以输掉 1 倍，但如果成功，可以赚 100 倍。然后朝那个方向下更大的赌注。
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，不要存太久。在 YC，我们经常注意到在 Google 或 Facebook 工作过大量时间的创始人存在问题。当人们习惯了舒适的生活、可预测的工作以及无论做什么都能取得成功的声誉时，就很难将其抛在脑后（人们有一种令人难以置信的能力，总是将他们的生活方式与明年的薪水相匹配）。即使他们真的离开了，回来的诱惑也很大。将短期收益和便利置于长期成就之上是很容易的，也是人类的天性。
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.
但是当你不在跑步机上时，你可以跟随你的直觉，把时间花在可能非常有趣的事情上。尽可能长时间地保持你的生活便宜和灵活是做到这一点的有效方法，但显然需要权衡取舍。
6. Focus 6. 专注
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.
我遇到的几乎每个人都会花更多的时间思考要关注什么，从而得到很好的服务。做正确的事情比工作很多小时要重要得多。大多数人把大部分时间浪费在无关紧要的事情上。
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.
一旦你弄清楚了该做什么，就要不可阻挡地快速完成你的少数优先事项。我还没有遇到一个非常成功的缓慢行动的人。
7. Work hard 7.努力工作
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.
通过聪明或努力地工作，你可以达到你所在领域的第 90 个百分位左右，这仍然是一项了不起的成就。但要达到第99个百分位，两者都需要——你将与其他非常有才华的人竞争，他们有好的想法，愿意做很多工作。
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.
极端的人会得到极端的结果。大量工作会带来巨大的生活权衡，决定不这样做是完全理性的。但它有很多优点。与大多数情况一样，势头会复合，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.
而且它通常非常有趣。生活中最大的乐趣之一就是找到你的目标，擅长它，并发现你的影响对比你自己更重要。YC的一位创始人最近表示，在离开一家大公司的工作并努力实现最大的影响后，他感到非常惊讶和充实。为此努力工作应该受到庆祝。
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.
我并不完全清楚为什么努力工作在美国的某些地区变成了一件坏事，但在世界其他地区肯定不是这样——美国以外的企业家所表现出的精力和动力正在迅速成为新的基准。
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.
你必须弄清楚如何在不筋疲力尽的情况下努力工作。人们为此找到了自己的策略，但几乎总是有效的策略是找到你喜欢和你喜欢花很多时间在一起的人一起做的工作。
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.
我认为那些假装你可以在职业上取得超级成功而不需要大部分时间（在你生命中的某个时期）工作的人是在做伤害。事实上，工作耐力似乎是长期成功的最大预测因素之一。
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.
关于努力工作的另一个想法：在你职业生涯的开始就去做。努力工作就像利息一样复利，你越早做，你就越有时间让收益得到回报。当你的其他责任较少时，努力工作也更容易，这在你年轻的时候经常发生，但并非总是如此。
8. Be bold 8.大胆一点
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.
我相信做一个艰难的创业比做一个容易的创业更容易。人们希望成为令人兴奋的事情的一部分，并觉得他们的工作很重要。
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.
如果你在一个重要问题上取得了进展，你就会不断有人想要帮助你。让自己变得更有野心，不要害怕去做你真正想做的事情。
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模因公司，而你想创办一家基因编辑公司，那就去做吧，不要再猜测了。
Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.
追随你的好奇心。对你来说似乎令人兴奋的事情，对其他人来说往往也会令人兴奋。
9. Be willful 9.任性
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，你可以让世界屈服于你的意志，而且在令人惊讶的百分比下——大多数人甚至不去尝试，只是接受事情的本来面目。
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.
人们有巨大的能力让事情发生。自我怀疑、过早放弃和不够努力的结合使大多数人永远无法发挥自己的潜力。
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.
问你想要什么。你通常不会得到它，而且拒绝往往会很痛苦。但是当这起作用时，它的效果出奇地好。
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.
几乎总是，那些说“我会继续前进，直到成功，无论遇到什么挑战，我都会弄清楚它们”的人，并且是认真的，继续成功。他们坚持足够长的时间，给自己一个机会，让运气如他们所愿。
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是我的基准。他们讲述了太多的故事，我不建议尝试复制（将信用卡用完在孩子们用来装棒球卡的九个插槽三环活页夹中，每顿饭都吃一元店的麦片，与强大的根深蒂固的利益进行一场又一场的战斗，等等），但他们设法生存了足够长的时间，让运气如愿以偿。
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.
要任性，你必须乐观——希望这是一种可以通过练习来改善的人格特质。我从来没有遇到过一个非常成功的悲观主义者。
10. Be hard to compete with
10.难以与之竞争
Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.
大多数人都明白，如果公司难以与之竞争，它们就更有价值。这很重要，而且显然是正确的。
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.
但这对你个人来说也是如此。如果你做的事情可以由别人来做，那么它最终会做到，而且花的钱更少。
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.
变得难以与之竞争的最好方法是建立杠杆作用。例如，你可以通过建立个人关系，建立一个强大的个人品牌，或者通过擅长多个不同领域的交叉点来做到这一点。还有很多其他的策略，但你必须想办法去做。
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.
大多数人都会做和他们一起出去玩的大多数人会做的任何事情。这种模仿行为通常是一个错误——如果你在做其他人都在做的事情，你就是一个不难被竞争上的人。
11. Build a network 11. 建立网络
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。发展一个有才华的人际网络——有时是紧密的，有时是松散的——是一个伟大职业生涯的重要组成部分。你认识的真正有才华的人际网络的规模往往会成为你所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.
建立网络的一个有效方法是尽可能多地帮助人们。在很长一段时间内这样做，是我获得大部分最佳职业机会和四项最佳投资中的三项的原因。我经常感到惊讶的是，由于十年前我为帮助一位创始人所做的一些事情，好事经常发生在我身上。
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.
建立网络的最佳方法之一是建立真正照顾与您一起工作的人的声誉。过于慷慨地分享好处;它会 10 倍地回到你身边。此外，学习如何评估人们擅长什么，并将他们放在这些角色中。（这是我学到的关于管理学的最重要的东西，我没有读过太多关于它的文章。你希望有一个名声，那就是推动人们足够努力，让他们取得比他们想象的更多的成就，但又不能太努力以至于筋疲力尽。
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.
每个人都在某些事情上比其他人更好。用你的长处来定义你自己，而不是你的短处。承认你的弱点，并弄清楚如何解决它们，但不要让它们阻止你做你想做的事情。 “我不能做X，因为我不擅长Y”是我经常从企业家那里听到的一句话，几乎总是反映出缺乏创造力。弥补你的弱点的最好方法是雇用互补的团队成员，而不仅仅是雇用那些擅长和你一样的人。
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.
建立网络的一个特别有价值的部分是善于发现未被发现的人才。通过练习，快速发现智力、动力和创造力变得更加容易。最简单的学习方法就是结识很多人，并跟踪谁会给你留下深刻印象，谁没有给你留下深刻印象。请记住，您主要在寻找改进速度，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.
当我遇到一个新朋友时，我总是试着问自己：“这个人是自然的力量吗？对于寻找可能完成伟大事情的人来说，这是一个非常好的启发式方法。
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一个杰出的人来押注你，最好是在你职业生涯的早期。毫不奇怪，最好的方法是竭尽全力提供帮助。（请记住，您必须在以后的某个时候支付这笔款项！
Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.
最后，记得把时间花在支持你抱负的积极的人身上。
12. You get rich by owning things
12.你通过拥有东西而致富
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.
我童年最大的经济误解是人们从高薪中致富。虽然有一些例外——比如艺人——但在福布斯榜单的历史上，几乎没有人拿到薪水。
You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
你通过拥有价值迅速增加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、房地产、自然资源、知识产权或其他类似事物的一部分。但不知何故，你需要拥有某件事的股权，而不仅仅是出卖你的时间。时间只能线性扩展。
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 13. 以内部为导向
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;他们做他们所做的事情是因为他们想给别人留下深刻印象。这很糟糕，原因有很多，但这里有两个重要的原因。
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.
首先，您将致力于达成共识的想法和达成共识的职业轨道。 你会非常在乎——比你意识到的要多得多——如果别人认为你在做正确的事情。这可能会阻止你做真正有趣的工作，即使你这样做了，其他人也会这样做。
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.
其次，您通常会错误地进行风险计算。您将非常专注于跟上其他人的步伐，即使在短期内也不会在竞技游戏中落后。
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.
聪明的人似乎特别容易受到这种外部驱动行为的影响。意识到它会有所帮助，但只有一点点——你可能不得不非常努力地工作，以免落入模仿陷阱。
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.
我认识的最成功的人主要是内部驱动的;他们做他们所做的事情是为了给自己留下深刻印象，因为他们觉得有必要在世界上做点什么。在你赚了足够的钱来购买你想要的任何东西，并获得了足够的社会地位，以至于获得更多不再有趣之后，这是我所知道的唯一能继续推动你达到更高水平的表现的力量。
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.
这就是为什么一个人的动机问题如此重要的原因。这是我试图了解某人的第一件事。正确的动机很难定义一套规则，但当你看到它时，你就知道了。
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.
杰西卡·利文斯顿（Jessica Livingston）和保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）是我的基准。YC在最初的几年里被广泛嘲笑，当他们刚开始的时候，几乎没有人认为它会取得巨大的成功。但他们认为，如果它奏效，对世界来说将是件好事，他们喜欢帮助别人，他们相信他们的新模式比现有模式更好。
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.
最终，你将通过在对你来说很重要的领域进行出色的工作来定义您的成功。你越早朝这个方向开始，你就能走得越远。很难在你不痴迷的任何事情上取得巨大的成功。
[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:
[1] 我在 HN 上写的一条评论回复：
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.
我对基本收入感到兴奋的最大原因之一是，它将通过让更多人自由承担风险来释放人类潜力。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 :(
在那之前，如果你不是天生的幸运儿，你必须先爬一段时间，然后才能进行大的挥杆。如果你出生在极端贫困中，那么这是一个非常困难:(
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.
机会分配如此不均，这显然是一种难以置信的耻辱和浪费。但是我亲眼目睹了足够多的人出生时，甲板对他们不利，并继续取得令人难以置信的成功，知道这是可能的。
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
我深深地意识到，如果我不是生来就非常幸运，我个人就不会有今天的成就。
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.
感谢布莱恩·阿姆斯特朗、格雷格·布罗克曼、道尔顿·考德威尔、黛安·冯·弗斯滕伯格、麦迪·霍尔、德鲁·休斯顿、维诺德·科斯拉、杰西卡·利文斯顿、乔恩·利维、卢克·迈尔斯（6 稿！）、迈克尔·莫里茨、阿里·罗加尼、迈克尔·塞贝尔、彼得·蒂尔、特雷西·杨和希文·齐利斯审阅了本文的草稿，特别感谢 Lachy Groom 帮助撰写了本文。