Growing Up: the KGB and OpenAI's how to be successful

Hey team,

My interview with former KGB spy, Jack Barsky is out! So cool. Hope you enjoy.

First up though, I'm bringing you some wisdom from OpenAI's Sam Altman on How To Be Successful.

(In case you missed the memo on OpenAI / ChatGPT... ChatGPT is the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. Pretty sure it set the record for fastest growing user-base with over 100 million users within 2 months and has since had over a billion visits... so I assume everyone knows about it?? I met someone the other day who'd never heard of it. So just in case...)

How to be successful, by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, from his 2019 blog post)

(Credit to the A Few Things... weekly email where I first learnt about the blog post. Think I will follow suit and try to revisit this every few months.)

Some of my favourite snippets:

On self-belief / self-awareness:

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.

On selling:

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 evangelise 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.

...
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.

On being too comfortable:

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.

On persistence / optimism:

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.
...
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.

On taking time out:

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.

(That's just confirmation bias for me right now... I've left the hedge fund and looking out for 'my next thing'...i.e. another London-based fund where I'm in an investing role (not sales) and get to use the *understanding humans* skills I'm picking up by interviewing former KGB agents for example... last month's thought was VC. This month's thought is short-selling for fraud. TBD whether any of those type of short-sellers exist in London. Let's see where I actually end up... but yay for finally de-traumatising myself from the workplace after all these years post investment banking analyst shambles. Can't wait to get back into it :) + always open to suggestions...
Another quote from the blog "A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career."... I guess this is what I'm really after... will keep you posted if fantasy somehow becomes reality... first step, taking a bet on myself, complete.)

On being obsessed:

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.

This week on the Growing Up with Delia Burgess podcast

Ep. 49 - Jack Barsky: ex KGB spy
Jack Barsky was born Albrecht Dittrich in East Germany, 1949. Whilst at uni he joined the KGB and was sent to the US as a spy from 1978 to 1988. He was eventually exposed after the Cold War. After his story became public Jack published Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy.

All up we spoke for over 4 hours & I learnt:

How Jack's relationship with women (and his mother) had a lot to do with him going down this route... and how the communist indoctrination in East Germany was an easy sell...from his book:
"For me, the loop was closed: Hitler was Satan incarnate; the Soviet Union had defeated Hitler; Ernst Thälmann had died fighting Hitler; and the East German Communist Party was now continuing Thälmann's fight against the neo-Nazis in West Germany and their American patrons.
At that moment, I swore that if I ever got a chance to make a major contribution to the destruction of the evil forces of fascism and capitalism, I would do my best. This vow became a driving force behind decisions I would make in future years."

(Spoiler alert, he ends up loving the West and the FBI agent who ultimately apprehended him ended up becoming a close friend and godfather to his daughter! Crazy world.)

Just in... Jack just reposted my LinkedIn post and said 'One of the best interviews I ever had, and I had well over 100. It is always a pleasure to speak with somebody who goes much deeper and far beyond "the story".' So nice! From my very awkward first interview with @Tony Burgess... we're getting somewhere guys! 50th ep next week :)

Happy second half of the week to you all...

xx Delia

P.S. As always, feel free to share. (Especially to that 'eminent' friend of yours who's looking to take a bet on someone... (NB: in a strictly professional sense... it's a minefield out there...))

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Hi! I'm Delia Burgess

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