- Five to Thrive
- Posts
- #084 – World's Smartest Man & Success
#084 – World's Smartest Man & Success
Quote, Podcast, Article, Video, Tweet.
Good morning everyone,
Happy New Year!
Wishing you all a healthy and prosperous 2025.
Let’s jump in.
read online on my website
read time 3 minutes
#084 at a Glance:
Quote: Your ‘how’ and ‘why’.
Podcast: The Smartest Man In The World.
Article: How To Be Successful by Sam Altman.
Video: Chris Williamson Vlog – London Live Show.
Tweet: Why AI will inevitably get out of control.
Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“If your ‘why’ is strong enough, your ‘how’ will reveal itself.”
Podcast I listened to:
Chris Langan – The Smartest Man In The World
Chris Langan is an American horse rancher and former night club bouncer.
He is also responsible for scoring one of the highest IQ test results ever recorded in human history, somewhere between 195 and 210, dubbing him the ‘Smartest Man In The World’.
To put this into perspective, the average person's IQ is 100 and Albert Einstein's was 160.
In this discussion, hosted brilliantly by Michael Knowles, nothing is off limits.
God, aliens, cow-punching, quantum mechanics, psychedelic drugs, politics, the works.
What an incredible privilege it was to be able to listen to this.
[Podcast Length: 1 hour 58 minutes]
Article I read:
How To Be Successful by Sam Altman
Awesome article on ‘How To Be Successful’ by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
Concise, powerful, and extremely well-written.
These were my favourite takeaways:
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.
In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
Some super important concepts to remain cognisant of throughout 2025.
You can read the full article here.
Video I watched:
Chris Williamson Vlog – London Live Show
The other week, I watched this incredible BTS vlog of Chris Williamson’s live show in London in front of a sell-out crowd of 3,500 people.
It was so powerful and moving – easily one of the best videos he’s ever made.
The ending and comments section gave me goosebumps.
Reminder to self:
IT IS POSSIBLE.
You can watch the full video here.
[Video Length: 36 minutes]
Tweet I liked:
Why AI Will Inevitably Get Out of Control
Aligning AI is impossible because aligning the humans building AI is impossible.
@naval
— Navalism (@NavalismHQ)
11:02 PM • Dec 27, 2024
Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.
Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡
You can read all previous editions of Five to Thrive on my website here.
Think someone else will enjoy reading Five to Thrive?
They can subscribe here.
Get in touch with me via email ([email protected]) or you can also find me on LinkedIn.