Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has given a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). . It’s a wide-ranging chat that covers everything from Newell’s earliest jobs to his current daily routine (“get up, work, go scuba diving”) and at one point Newell, by any metric one of the most phenomenally successful entrepreneurs on the planet, is asked for his advice on success in life. Why do some succeed where others fail?
“There’s no ‘one size fits all’ thing, each person has to kind of figure that out for their own,” says Newell. “It’s an inconvenient truth that there are no simple slogans. There’s no simple thing that you can do. Everything that is a good idea for one person at a certain point in time, it was a terrible idea for somebody else.”
You can almost hear the LinkedIn grifters rending their hair and gnashing their teeth at this point. Where’s the ‘always on’ mindset Newell?
“The tactics I would suggest are: make sure that you have people around you that you can trust,” continues Newell, “that you can have transparent communications with and just engage with them to sort of think about how you can get better. But it’s never like ‘follow your passion’. Sounds like a great idea, but lots of people follow their passions right into a crater, you know?
“And then there’s a selection bias, or a survival bias, where people who are successful then go back and say ‘it’s because I wear a yellow shirt. Everybody should wear a yellow shirt!’ And it’s correlation, it’s not causation.”
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Newell has long been known for his focus on surrounding himself and others with the best talent around: one former Valve exec says his superpower is that he “delighted in people on the team just being really good at what they did”. These days Newell’s interests extend far beyond Valve (he co-founded a neuroscience company and a marine research firm) and his personal time seems focused there, but this principle holds.
“The tactic I would strongly suggest is think about the people that you work with and collaborate with and make sure they’re the best people you can find,” says Newell, “because they’ll help pull you through whatever developmental challenges that you might have. And each person’s challenges are going to be different. Some people have motivational challenges. Some people have training, have knowledge gaps. Some people haven’t found which field they really are going to contribute the most in. And so the advice for each one of those people is going to be different and contingent on where you’re coming from.
“Achieving those kinds of things… it’s going to be idiosyncratic, independent, and the key is to have the people around you who will help you make that progress. It’s just a lot easier when you know you have somebody who can slap you upside the head and say you’re being stupid: ‘stop it’, right? Or ‘you really need to take a risk here’, or things like that, who are giving you good advice. But that’s really tactical, right? There are lots of examples of people who haven’t had that sort of social graph around them to help them, but it certainly makes it easier. It simplifies the challenge. It doesn’t define the challenge that people are going to be facing.”
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