Sam Altman on willpower, Paul Graham's principles for making new things, and the build-measure-learn feedback loop

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Sam Altman on willpower

“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.

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.

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.“

Source: How To Be Successful by Sam Altman

2: Paul Graham's principles for making new things

“I like to find
(a) simple solutions
(b) to overlooked problems
(c) that actually need to be solved, and
(d) deliver them as informally as possible,
(e) starting with a very crude version 1, then
(f) iterating rapidly.

This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives you all the advantages other people forgo by trying to seem legit.

If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition.

If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience.

And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.“

Source: Six Principles for Making New Things by Paul Graham

3: The build-measure-learn feedback loop

The build-measure-learn loop is a rapid experimental cycle founders use to ship something quickly, gather real-world feedback, and use those insights to iterate toward what users actually want.

Source: The Lean Startup by Eric Reis

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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