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Sam Altman's Blog on Productivity

1 points| jacky2wong | 2 years ago |blog.samaltman.com

5 comments

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andsoitis|2 years ago

Gold:

It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more! Independent thought is hard but it’s something you can get better at with practice.

and

Doing great work usually requires colleagues of some sort. Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your ambitions. I love being around people who push me and inspire me to be better. To the degree you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people—the cost of letting them take up your mental cycles is horrific.

chiefalchemist|2 years ago

> It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction.

This the key, isn't it? Great technical solutions to the wrong problem are no solutions at all. Full stop.

Collectively, we spend too much time bickering about tools (e.g., frameworks, programming languages, etc.) and not enough time on how to get better and better ends from those means.

Towaway69|2 years ago

Easier said than done, particularly the former. Worthless direction usually occurs having done something, the gold standard becomes knowing when to quit even having thought about it beforehand.

After all, it's very hard to predict the future.