This is from a blog post called “How to Be Successful“, which begins with the observation that (in the startup world) most people start off wanting to make a huge amount of money but end up wanting to create something important.
Point one of thirteen is “Compound Yourself” – applying the idea of compound or exponential growth to career development:
You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
Sam Altman – How to Be Successful