Sam Altman's Method for Clear Thinking

Speaker: No, I'm a huge notetaker. Oh, tell me about that—there's all these like fancy notebooks in the world, yeah, you don't want those, um, you definitely want a spiral notebook because one thing that's important is you can rip Pages out frequently, and you also want it to lie like flat and open on the table, and if you like open pages you want them to like you know like be able to lay like this, whatever. You definitely want to be able to like rip Pages out.

I'm a big believer of like I take a bunch of notes and then I like clearly like rip them out so I can look at multiple Pages at the same time, and I can like crumple them up and throw them on the floor, and I'm done, like when our house cleaner comes in on like a, you know, whatever. There's just these pile of crumpled papers that I'm like type my notes in or whatever on the floor. You definitely want like a kind of paper that is, uh, like good to write on, which is a feel thing, but most paper is terrible to write on, huh? Um, you want a hard front and back to the notepad, so, and you also want something that can fit in a pocket.

I was about to say that I think the uniball micro point five pen, um, is the best pen overall, but the Muji 36 or 37 in dark blue ink is a very nice pen for other reasons, uh, so those are the two I would use, but I think this kind of notebook and one of those two pens is the right answer. And how many notes you're writing per day on that thing, uh? I go through one of these like every three, two or three weeks. Oh wow, so you're taking a lot of—well, this, you can see how much I've ripped out, like, this used to have like 100 pages inits, so that's how you think about it.

So you're going to basically take the notebook and then you rip out the pages you don't have completed notebook— I don't have completed notebooks. Wow, what inspired this? Where does this come from? Lots of trial and error, uh, many kinds of notebooks, many pens, many different systems—this one's really good. Another thing I've been thinking about when it comes to the influence of AGI on Creative mediums is just the competence with the written word is going up so much, and here's what I mean: there's now, you know, with Sora you can create videos using text as the input, you can do that with music, you can do that with images, and that's a big change in terms of the influence on of writing on our world again.

For me, like, writing is a tool for thinking most importantly, and I don't think that's going anywhere, and so I think it's like, it's really important that people still learn to write for this reason—in the same way that even if there's going to be like less traditional coding jobs, coding is a great way to learn to thing too, you should still learn to code. So when you say it's important that people learn to write, what does that mean? What it means to me is that I like figured out this tool to think more clearly. Now if there's a better way to think more clearly with a i, great, I would switch to that—definitely not found that yet.

When you're sitting down to write and you're thinking about creating a focus State, what is it that you're doing in your process to really create that? I used to think like, oh, I got to get in the perfect place and I got to like set a time that I'm gonna like go to this coffee shop and put on my noise cancell in headphones and I'm going to be in VAR mod, and now I will take any 11 minutes uninterrupted that I can get—like sitting in the back of a car, laying in bed, like whatever it is. I mean, if I do have like, if I had like a perfect thing it would be like, you know, Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and nothing scheduled, and that is great.

Like if I got to sit down and like, if I have to write like a long thing, I will try to set that up, but most of it happens in like short chunks in the back of a car. You know what I use a lot is I use the voice feature—I take it and I ask it to just clean it up, and I find chat gbt to be so helpful with that because I'm much more generative with my mouth than I am with my fingertips. Interesting, for me it's the opposite really. Yeah, I'm convinced there's ideas I would never have sitting in talking with people that I just need to sit and type for.

This is like, obviously a very common observation, but, but figuring out like the right amount of being with people, talking, you know, getting exposed to like a lot of ideas and then having some time alone to think, to write, to just sort of like do some deep work—whatever that is—I think obviously this is a super important pattern to a lot of people. Definitely to me, my sort of like roughly rough rhythm is I'm like, you know, in the office kind of non-stop all week, uh, I have no time to think—it's just like kind of crazy packed—and then on the weekends I have like long quiet blocks and I'm not really around people, and, uh, that cycle is very important to me.

H, and is that fractal? Like, do you sometimes take a few weeks, weeks off or anything like that? I used to, uh, I think that's like really good—like when I've taken like long chunks of time off I would do like a month of like non‑stop hanging out with people and then like a month of, you know, being in the woods, on the beach, whatever—that doesn't really happen anymore.