How to (Start to) Be Successful
The Neurobiological Prerequisites for Sam Altman's 13
I’ve been carrying around Sam Altman’s blog post “How To Be Successful” since he published it. Not in the bookmark-and-forget way. It stuck. In the I would like to carry this with me as I reason about the future kinda way.
This year, while building AgentSee (trying to formalize everything I’d learned about human agency and motivation), I finally saw what Sam’s essay was missing.
Sam describes what successful people do. He doesn’t explain why most people can’t do it.
Every single one of his thirteen principles requires specific neurobiological conditions that some people don’t have access to most of the time.
1. Compound yourself
2. Have almost too much self-belief
3. Learn to think independently
12. You get rich by owning things
Sam’s advice isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete. He’s describing the output without mapping the system that produces it.
What follows is my attempt at mapping what’s actually required for each principle to work. The biological prerequisites that need to be in place before the advice becomes executable.
Compound yourself
“You want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.”
“Trust the exponential, be patient.” That assumes you can think long-term. This is a real challenge for most people. Not because they’re impatient, but because their internal planning systems are compromised.
Long-term thinking requires (full cognitive bandwidth) specific neural conditions that stress degrades within hours.1 When you’re in crisis, your planning horizon contracts from years to weeks to days. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s biology doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: focusing you on immediate survival.
So start compounding at whatever timescale you actually have access to. In crisis, compound over hours: one small aligned action makes the next one slightly more possible. When stable, compound over weeks. When regulated, think in years. Same mechanism, different timescales. The exponential curve still works. You’re just starting where you actually are instead of where Sam assumes you are.2
Have almost too much self-belief
“Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.”
Self-belief isn’t generated by deciding to believe in yourself. That IS delusion, and your body knows it.
True self-belief stems from accumulated evidence that your actions produce results.3 Small successful actions create narrative updates (”I’m capable”), which enables more sophisticated action, which generates more evidence. This is what Altman observes as “self-belief.” It’s not a mindset. It’s a track record your nervous system actually trusts.
This is also what underlies agency: the capacity to recognize what you want and act on it. Agency isn’t a trait. It’s a state you enter when you become aware of your desire and the small capacity you have in a moment, to act on it. Do this and your nervous system gets enough evidence that action works.
When your previous attempts to change things resulted in failure or punishment, your brain learned action doesn’t work. This pattern without a meta-awareness of the pattern converts to learned helplessness, and it develops from accurate pattern recognition, not psychological weakness.4 If control (awareness of your awareness) wasn’t actually available in your environment, learned helplessness was the correct adaptation.
You can’t build self-belief through affirmations. You build it through repeated small experiences where you take action and observe the result. Start small enough that success is genuinely achievable given your current constraints. Each success updates the pattern. The belief follows the evidence.
Learn to think independently
“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.”
Independent thinking isn’t contrarian thinking. Contrarians merely disagree with consensus, which can itself be mimetic (counterculture conformity). Independent thinking means generating your own models. You might arrive independently at consensus or deviate from it based on evidence. Altman means the first. Thinking from first principles rather than copying conclusions.
Copying what others do isn’t intellectual sloth. It’s evolutionarily adaptive. 5 When you’re in threat mode (financial instability, social precarity, chronic stress), your brain identifies deviation as dangerous. If questioning consensus could cost your job or relationships, conformity is biologically rational.
Build capacity wherever you are. Notice when something doesn’t align with your experience. Examine one belief at a time: is this actually true or just what you’ve been told? Find domains where deviation has low stakes. This enables that agentic feedback loop instead of learned helplessness. Practice where being wrong won’t destroy you. Each time independent thinking produces useful results, your brain learns deviation can be rewarding.
Get good at sales
“All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc... The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling.”
“Genuinely believe in what you’re selling” isn’t motivational advice. It’s metabolic efficiency.
When you sell something misaligned with your values, you create cognitive dissonance. This isn’t just unpleasant. It’s metabolically expensive.6 Your brain burns extra resources reconciling the gap between what you’re doing and what you believe. Meanwhile, the internal conflict shows. Humans detect inauthenticity through micro-expressions, word choice, energy level. You can’t hide it.
Sales also means repeated rejection. If you hear “no” as evidence you’re worthless rather than information (wrong timing, wrong fit, they don’t need this), you can’t persist long enough to find the “yes.” That’s emotional regulation. Maintaining stable self-concept despite external feedback.
Identify what you genuinely believe is valuable (what you’d recommend even unpaid). Build emotional capacity to separate rejection of your offering from rejection of you. Sales becomes natural when you’re solving problems you care about for people who actually need solutions.
Make it easy to take risks
“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.”
Risk tolerance is a function of your current resource buffer and your brain’s learned assessment of what failure costs. Not some fixed personality setting.
When you have financial stability, secure relationships, and stable housing, failure is bounded. When you don’t, the same risk threatens survival. Your threat detection systems override probability calculations when they perceive existential danger.7 If previous risks destroyed you, or if this risk could cost housing or health insurance, your brain accurately identifies danger.
Build buffer that makes failure survivable: financial runway, stable relationships, emotional regulation for handling setbacks. Then take risks small enough that failure won’t destroy you. Each small risk that doesn’t fail catastrophically updates your brain’s assessment. Risk tolerance builds through evidence that failure is survivable.
Focus
“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.”
Most focus problems aren’t attention problems. They’re alignment problems.
When you’re working on things you think you should care about rather than things you actually care about, everything feels like effort. The work depletes you instead of energizing you. Again this isn’t slacking. It’s a signal that you’re operating from internalized obligations rather than authentic interest.8
Sustained attention also requires metabolic resources. Your prefrontal cortex is expensive to run.9 When you’re sleep deprived, undernourished, or chronically stressed, executive function degrades first. You can’t discipline yourself into focus when your brain lacks the resources to sustain it any more than you can win the lottery without buying a ticket.
Identify what you care about right now (not what you should care about). Match work to your current capacity. At low energy, you have maybe 15 minutes of quality focus. Use it on what matters most. At full capacity, you have hours. The force multiplication comes from alignment (caring) plus capacity (energy), not willpower.
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.”
Notice the framing: “you will be competing.” That’s extrinsic motivation. It depletes.
The people who actually reach the 99th percentile usually aren’t grinding through competition anxiety. They care about the work itself. Intrinsic motivation generates energy. Extrinsic motivation burns it.10 That’s why “work harder” fails as advice. It assumes effort is a choice independent of what’s driving it.
The other thing Altman’s advice assumes is consistent capacity. That you can decide to “work a lot” and then do it. But humans oscillate. Some days you have hours of deep focus available. Some days you have fifteen minutes before your system needs recovery.
The 99th percentile isn’t reached by grinding regardless of state. It’s reached by matching effort to capacity over years. Slow and matched to capacity beats sprints that burn you out. At low capacity, “working hard” might mean protecting tomorrow’s energy. At full capacity, it means deep exploratory work. Sustainable elite output comes from caring authentically and matching effort to bandwidth, not from forcing output when the system can’t sustain it.
Be bold
“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.”
This isn’t motivational fluff either. Ambitious problems generate intrinsic motivation more readily than trivial ones.11 The brain treats resolving meaningful uncertainty as inherently rewarding. Easy projects lack this pull, requiring willpower to supply all the momentum.
But you can’t fake caring about a bold mission. Authentic engagement activates the systems that create sustainable drive. Forced engagement requires constant effort without that replenishment. Your nervous system knows the difference even when you don’t.
And bold thinking requires bandwidth. Generating ambitious visions, tolerating uncertainty, recruiting others: these depend on circuits that chronic stress degrades.12 At depletion, your planning horizon collapses to survival. “Be bold” is useless when the neural capacity for bold thinking is diminished.
The goal isn’t “be bold.” It’s finding something you genuinely care about that’s worth sustained effort. That often means something hard, but not always. Your identity needs to anchor in “someone who attempts meaningful things,” not “someone whose specific attempt succeeds.” If you do that consistently enough, boldness is a byproduct, not the thing you aim for.
Be willful
“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.”
“Most people don’t even try” isn’t apathy. It’s behavior learned from residing in environments where trying genuinely didn’t work.
Maybe this is where we should take stock. In a stable environment, that is its own kind of privilege.
Your brain has circuits that track whether effort produces results in your environment.13 When you push and things move, these circuits encode: effort works here. When you push and nothing changes, they encode the opposite. If your previous efforts were punished, ignored, or irrelevant to outcomes, your brain learned the accurate lesson. That learning doesn’t automatically update when you enter environments where control is actually available.
The systemically unmotivated, or nervous systems doing their job?
It should also make us question what we’re actually measuring when we talk about who “has what it takes.” How much of success is talent and how much is just growing up somewhere your effort could land? How many people never got the chance to learn that trying can work because nothing in their environment ever let it?
This is why it matters. Not because willfulness is a nice trait to have. Because there are people, good people, capable people, written off as failing to try hard enough when really their nervous system is running exactly the program their environment installed.
The difference between willfulness and stubbornness: willfulness adapts based on feedback while maintaining direction. Stubbornness ignores feedback because admitting failure feels threatening. One learns. One doesn’t.
So don’t be stubborn, be open to putting yourself in different environments. Find domains where your actions demonstrably change outcomes, even if they are small ones. Each successful “bending” updates your controllability circuits. Willfulness grows from accumulated evidence that effort produces results, not from deciding to believe it.
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. 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 trap: trying to be hard to compete with by copying what other hard-to-compete-with people did. That’s still mimesis.14
Uniqueness comes from following genuine curiosity wherever it leads, including into weird combinations. When you pursue intersections that fascinate you (not intersections that seem strategic), you end up somewhere competitors can’t easily reach. It puts you outside their distribution. It is not a guaranteed path to success, but it creates a position that is hard to compete with, because they would have to care about the same novel combination. They don’t.
The problem with doing what everyone does: you’re competing on execution. There’s always someone willing to work harder.
But “follow genuine curiosity” assumes you know what that is. Many people don’t. If you’ve spent years optimizing for external validation, the signal for what you actually want may be buried or suppressed entirely. (This might require you to spend time with yourself, alone, quietly. Perhaps even without a phone. I know, dear God, oh my.) Desire recognition is a capacity you can build. Some people have intact access to it. Others have to rebuild it.
Start by noticing what holds your attention when nothing is forcing it. What do you return to when no one is watching or rewarding you? Run small experiments without strategic justification. The goal isn’t to find your moat. It’s to restore access to the wanting signal that would guide you there.
Build a network
“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.”
Strategic networking doesn’t work. People detect it.15
When you’re helping someone while calculating returns, you’re performing care rather than providing it. Humans evolved exquisite sensitivity to social defection (fancy way of saying: seeing through bullshit). The mismatch between your actions and your intent leaks through micro-expressions and attention patterns.
What’s that old Hollywood saying? “The hardest thing to fake is sincerity.”
When you’re in survival mode, every interaction gets evaluated for immediate return. Long-term relationship investment feels like a luxury you can’t afford. Building a genuine network requires baseline stability. Not wealth, but enough security that you can help without requiring immediate payback.
The paradox: you can’t network your way to stability, but you need stability to network effectively.
Find one person you genuinely want to see succeed, in a domain where helping doesn’t deplete you. Care for them without keeping score. Let the relationship develop on the timescale of years, not transactions. Networks that actually support you get built through accumulated genuine caring, not strategic relationship management.
I’m building this way myself. Slowly. One person at a time.
You get rich by owning things
“You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value... you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.”
Choosing equity over salary requires variance tolerance: accepting unpredictable outcomes instead of guaranteed ones. Your threat detection systems treat variance as danger.16 When you’re already stressed, taking equity feels like gambling with survival money. Because it is.
People who choose equity usually have buffer absorbing the variance: savings, a partner’s income, low costs, family wealth. Without buffer, the variance tolerance required for equity decisions isn’t neurobiologically available. This isn’t moral commentary. It’s mechanism.
Long-term thinking matters here too. Equity pays off over years. Salaries pay off now. When chronic stress has collapsed your planning horizon to “make rent,” the long-term value of equity is invisible to the circuits that would evaluate it.
Build buffer that lets variance feel survivable. Reduce fixed costs. Extend your planning horizon by stabilizing the layers beneath it. Then, when ownership opportunities appear, you’ll have the capacity to evaluate them rather than defaulting to certainty because uncertainty feels unbearable.
Be internally driven
“Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people... The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven.”
The reason external drive fails at the highest levels isn’t moral. It’s metabolic.
When motivation comes from impressing others, you’re constantly regulating the gap between performance and authentic state. That regulation is expensive.17 Intrinsic motivation generates energy because the activity itself is rewarding. Extrinsic motivation burns energy managing the performance.
But “be internally driven” assumes you have access to your internal drives. If nothing feels compelling, your reward circuitry might be blunted.18 If you learned that authentic interests were dangerous, you suppressed them. If survival required optimizing for approval, external drive was the correct adaptation.
You can’t choose to stop caring what others think. Social approval was survival for most of human history. Those circuits are deep. “Being aware of it helps, but only a little,” Altman admits. Willpower can’t override evolutionary programming for long.
The path isn’t deciding to be internally driven. It’s restoring access. Meet basic needs, build safety, run small experiments to discover what actually generates energy versus what depletes it. Internal drive is already there. The question is whether it can survive contact with a world that constantly redirects your attention toward external metrics. I have much MUCH more to say on this, and I think this is where technology can play a role in either direction. But that’s for another essay.
What I’m Actually After
I’m not setting out to reverse-engineer success. I seek to understand cognitive limitations. What are they generally? What are mine specifically?
Everything I’ve built this year came from chasing that disconnect. I’ve carried Sam’s essay around for years. I agreed with it. But much of what he said didn’t resonate, and much of what I’ve tried to do hasn’t felt natural.
That gap led me to ask different questions. Not “what should I do?” but “what am I actually interested in? What’s going on here? Is something broken? If so, why? What role does technology play? Culture?”
The models and frameworks are second-order effects of that inquiry. I’m building in the direction that’s hardest while trying to follow the principles I’ve outlined above.
That’s how I realized Altman’s principles aren’t practices you force. They’re descriptions of what functioning optimally looks like from the outside.
When the substrate is there, when you have the biological and psychological foundation, those behaviors follow naturally. Internal drive isn’t a discipline problem. Willfulness isn’t a personality trait. Focus isn’t about willpower. They’re byproducts of having the right internal conditions paired with the right external environment.
Start where you actually are, not where you think you should be. Build the foundation before the strategy. The principles become executable once the prerequisites are in place.
Long-term thinking (full cognitive bandwidth) depends on intact prefrontal cortex function for temporal abstraction (thinking across time), hippocampal-cortical circuits for episodic future thinking (imagining yourself in future scenarios), and regulated cortisol levels. Common stressors (hunger, exhaustion, acute stress) impair these systems. Recovery time ranges from under an hour (eating, waiting for cortisol to clear) to months (chronic stress, HPA axis dysregulation). See shields2016 meta-analysis; arnsten2009.
This is bandwidth-matched action: scaling the type of work to your current biological capacity rather than forcing approaches that require resources you don’t have. I’m working on a four-question assessment that may roughly indicate available bandwidth: Can you see multiple possible futures right now? Can you consider being wrong without defensiveness? Does anything feel genuinely interesting? Can you plan multiple steps ahead? More “yes” answers suggest more capacity for complex, long-horizon work. Fewer suggests you’re operating in reduced mode, where simpler and shorter-term actions are what’s actually accessible. Compounding works at all levels. The timescale changes, not the mechanism.
I call this the coherence-agency bootstrap: small successful actions create narrative updates (”I’m capable”), which increases coherence between beliefs and reality, which enables more sophisticated agency. The underlying mechanism is volitional efficacy: the learned expectation that your actions produce intended results.
Learned helplessness research: Maier & Seligman’s controllability studies show this develops from accurate pattern recognition in environments where control genuinely wasn’t available. See maier2016; baratta2023.
Mimetic behavior is the brain’s default energy-conservation strategy. When your nervous system perceives threat (financial instability, status anxiety), mimesis becomes even more dominant because deviation looks dangerous.
Cognitive dissonance creates metabolic cost through prefrontal resources spent reconciling the gap between actions and beliefs. The brain optimizes for energy efficiency, making sustained misalignment expensive. This is consistent with allostatic load research (sterling2020).
The amygdala (threat detection) overrides prefrontal probability calculations when it perceives existential threat, based on either current stakes or past patterns. See arnsten2009 on stress effects on prefrontal function.
Self-Determination Theory distinguishes intrinsic motivation (self-generated engagement) from introjected motivation (internalized obligations that still feel like external pressure). The latter depletes; the former generates energy. See ryan2000a; deci2000.
The prefrontal cortex uses roughly 6-7.5% of the brain’s energy for control work. Your brain uses about 20% of your total resources while only accounting for 2% of your total mass. When metabolic resources are depleted (sleep deprivation, undernourishment, chronic stress), executive function degrades first. See lim2010 meta-analysis on sleep and executive function.
Intrinsic motivation operates through dopaminergic circuits that generate genuine interest. Extrinsic motivation requires constant prefrontal regulation of the gap between performance and authentic state. The metabolic difference explains why one sustains and the other depletes. See salamone2012; odoherty2003.
Novel challenges in the right difficulty range trigger dopamine activity in reward-anticipation pathways. The brain treats resolving meaningful uncertainty as inherently rewarding. See dopaminergic pathway research: odoherty2003.
Cortisol impairs prefrontal function, including the circuits required for generating ambitious visions and tolerating uncertainty. At high chronic stress, planning horizon collapses to immediate survival. See shields2016; arnsten2009.
Controllability detection operates through vmPFC circuits that track whether effort produces results in your environment. When these circuits learn control is available, they enable persistent action and actively inhibit stress responses. See Maier group: amat2005; maier2016; baratta2023.
Mimesis: copying what others do. The brain defaults to this because independent path-finding requires prefrontal resources for generating alternatives, tolerating social risk, and sustaining effort without external validation. The neuroscience of genuine interest involves distinct circuits: wanting (incentive salience), liking (hedonic response), and learning (predictive associations). The anterior insula translates bodily signals into conscious awareness of what you actually want, distinguishing authentic desire from internalized expectations. When you follow genuine curiosity, your wanting circuits are firing for that specific path. Competitors would need your desire architecture to replicate it. They don’t.
Humans evolved sensitivity to social defection. Transactional networking creates detectable mismatch between performed care and actual intent, which leaks through micro-expressions and attention patterns.
The amygdala treats variance as potential threat. Without buffer to absorb potential losses, equity decisions trigger threat responses that bias toward certainty. This is rational threat detection, not risk aversion as personality trait.
External motivation requires prefrontal regulation of the performance-authenticity gap. This regulation is metabolically expensive and depletes over time. Intrinsic motivation doesn’t require this regulation because the activity itself generates reward.
Reward circuitry can be blunted by chronic stress, depression, or sustained reward-prediction errors. When dopaminergic systems are suppressed, nothing feels compelling regardless of objective value. This is a framework inference consistent with research on anhedonia and mesolimbic dopamine dysfunction.