Sam Altman: “Most people don’t take enough risk” “I think people have terrible risk calculus in general… 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, unknown, and poor, is actually a great gift in terms of the amount of risk you can take.” Sam continues: “I think what risk actually looks like is not doing something that you will spend the rest of your life regretting… So if you really believe in something—if there’s an idea you’re super passionate about—and you take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forego a couple of years of steady income and maybe people call you a failure, 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.” Sam believes most people overrate the risk of reputation damage and embarrassment from trying and failing. It’s worse to not even try: “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 is 1) it’s hard, and 2) 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… I think that’s really bad. I think history belongs to the doers, and I think you should take a risk and actually do something.” Video source: @ycombinator (2016)