When to Be Contrarian - Sam Altman (OpenAI)

I was wondering how you verify that your idea is non consensus enough to pursue. I mean, first of all, what you really want is to be right. Being contrarian and wrong still is wrong. And if you predicted like 17 out of the last two recessions, you probably were contrarian for the two you got right. Probably not even necessarily, but you were wrong 15 other times. And so I think it's easy to get too excited about being contrarian. And again, the most important thing to be right and the group is usually right. But where the most value is is when you are contrarian and right. And that doesn't always happen in like sort of a zero or one kind of way. Everybody in the room can agree that AI is the right place to start a company. And if one person in the room figures out the right company to start and then successfully executes on that and everybody else thinks, ah, that wasn't the best thing you could do, that's what matters. So it's okay to kind of like go with conventional wisdom when it's right and then find the area where you have some unique insight in terms of how to do that. I do think surrounding yourself with the right peer group is really important and finding original thinkers is important. But there is part of this where you kind of have to do it solo, or at least part of it solo or with a few other people who are going to be your co founders or whatever. And I think by the time you're too far in the how can I find the right peer group? You're somehow in the wrong framework already. So learning to trust yourself and your own intuition and your own thought process, which gets much easier over time. No one, no matter what they say, I think is truly great at this when they're just starting out because you kind of just haven't built the muscle and all of your social pressure and all of the evolutionary pressure that produced you was against that. So it's something that you get better at over time and don't hold yourself to too high of a standard too early on, it's.