Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 897

This recent post by Sam Altman (of Y Combinator ) on how to achieve outlier success was just passed around our office. And it's so fucking good that I decided to regurgitate it here on the blog by listing all 13 of his thoughts along with some of his most salient points. All of the words below are his (not mine), but most of his words are missing. I wanted to make a more condensed version so that you could easily print out this post and affix it to your desk. I am about to do that. Thanks for a great post, Sam .

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1. Compound yourself

I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. 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.

3. Learn to think independently

Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.

4. Get good at “sales”

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.

Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.

5. Make it easy to take risks

It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

6. Focus

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

7. Work hard

I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

8. Be bold

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.

9. Be willful

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.

10. Be hard to compete with

Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

11. Build a network

Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.

12. You get rich by owning things

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

13. Be internally driven

The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

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Photo by NordWood Themes  on  Unsplash

I just discovered the work of Italian photographer, Paolo Pettigiani . He specializes in something called infrared photography, which is photography that captures the wavelengths of light that generally aren't visible to us humans.

Paolo shoots with a full spectrum Nikon D750. What this means is that the camera's sensor is sensitive to, well, the full spectrum of light: UV, visible, and infrared. Using this photography technique, he has coined something he calls "InfraScapes."

Here are a few of his photos from Dubai ( source ):

The reason these photos look the way that they do is because anything with chlorophyll -- such as grass and trees -- really reflects infrared light. The result is a generally muted landscape with pops of pink. Perhaps this could be used as a technique to visually evaluate the greenness of our cities.

All photos by Paolo Pettigiani

This week it was announced that Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has received the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is generally viewed as architecture's highest honor. (You also get $100,000.)

He's the 46th laureate and 8th Japanese architect to receive the honor. (As a side note, the only Canadian on the list is Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

Not only did he extend efforts to physically reconstruct his native hometown [after World War II] with buildings including Ōita Medical Hall (1959-60) and Annex (1970-1972 Ōita, Japan), and the Ōita Prefectural Library (1962-1966 Ōita, Japan, renamed Ōita Art Plaza in 1996), but also redefined mutual exchange between eastern and western societies, allowing Japanese vision to inform European and American design, particularly in the 1980s.

His first international commission outside of Japan was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which was completed in 1986. He was also one of the first Japanese architects to start working in the West at this time.

For the full media release, click here .