Sam Altman: “Most people don’t take enough risk”

Yeah, I think people have terrible risk calculus in general. Even people who try to be really good about this are bad at it. The answer, I think, is almost always, A, you're wrong about what is risky and what is not risky, and B, most people don't take enough risk, especially early in your career. Being young and unknown and poor, that is actually a great gift in terms of the amount of risk you can take. And I think people don't capitalize on that enough. I think what risk actually looks like is not doing something that you will then spend the rest of your life regretting. And there's a quote, you know, people regret way more the things they didn't do and things that they did do. So if you really believe in something, there's an idea that you're super passionate about, you know, and you take a calculated risk to start a company, realizing you may forgo a couple of years of studying, coming on your job and whatever else, and, you know, maybe people call you a failure, whatever, that's a great risk to take. And if you don't take that risk, I think you have a very high chance that you end up regretting that. I think the wrong kind of risk to take is where people don't actually do things or don't commit to something because they don't want to fail, and they overrate the risk of failure and the reputation damage or embarrassment or whatever. I think one really important thing to strive for in your career is to be a doer, not a talker. And the reason that people don't do stuff, one is it's hard, and two is it's risky. And so you have these people that want to dabble in a bunch of different projects but never be all in on one. And I think it's this combination of work and risk and it's, you know, I think that's really bad. I think history belongs to the doers. And I think you should take a risk, actually do something. Don't just sit around and talk and organize and bring together groups and go to thought leadership conferences and whatever it is these people spend their time on, other than actually building something. And just take the risk of committing to what you have conviction on.