LEARN, EARN or QUIT | My job/career advice for 2022 - YouTube

Are you learning or are you earning? If both, you're in a great place. If it's one or the other, that's good too. If it's neither, it's time to move on. You're wasting your life. Learn or earn. And if you're smart, hardworking, capable, and want to learn more about being successful, and maybe even how to build a billion dollar startup, click subscribe and hit the bell icon right now. That's what we do every week right here. Let's get started.

你是在学习还是在赚钱？如果两者兼顾，那你就处于一个很好的状态。如果只是其中之一，那也不错。但如果两者都没有，那该是时候改变了。你在浪费生命。学习或赚钱。如果你聪明、勤奋、有能力，并且想学习更多关于成功的知识，甚至如何建立一个价值十亿美元的初创公司，那就赶紧订阅并点击铃铛图标。我们每周都会在这里分享这些内容。让我们开始吧。

Learning is where you need to start. As early as possible and as quick as possible, it's important to become good at doing things. And that means either being a maker, which means design, product, and engineering, or being a hustler, management, sales, and marketing. The majority of people starting out in their careers really need to focus on learning first. My friend Steven Snofsky says, this is the protein before the carbs.

学习是你需要开始的地方。越早越快越好，掌握做事的技巧非常重要。这意味着你要么成为创作者，涉及设计、产品和工程；要么成为实干家，涉及管理、销售和市场营销。大多数刚开始职业生涯的人，真的需要先专注于学习。我的朋友史蒂文·斯诺夫斯基说，这是先吃蛋白质再吃碳水化合物。

All right, you say, how do you actually start? Well, first is learning about yourself. What do you like? What do you enjoy? What allows you to enter a state of flow? And then second, once you know that, you need to acquire those skills. Once you know you love design, can you spend the 10,000 hours it takes to become truly great at it? Well, if you answer that first part, the second part comes easy because you won't even feel the 10,000 hours. You'll just love doing it. Okay, okay, I got it. No, really. What do I do? You ask.

好的，你问，究竟该如何开始呢？首先是了解自己。你喜欢什么？你享受什么？什么能让你进入心流状态？然后，当你了解自己后，你需要掌握相关技能。如果你知道你热爱设计，你能否投入1万个小时去真正精通它？如果你能回答第一个问题，第二个问题就很容易，因为你不会感觉到那1万个小时的付出，你只会享受其中的过程。好的，好的，我明白了。你问：“那么，我具体该做些什么呢？”

Well, if you want to be a hustler, you got to learn to market or sell. Marketing is about helping other people communicate their problem and how their solution is the best. If you see a product, website, or service that you like and you have some improvements you can suggest, you got to build it or design it or write it yourself and then cold email them, offer to do it or just do it and send it to them. Sales on the other hand is about getting customers. So go get those customers without even asking.

好吧，如果你想成为一个奋斗者，你必须学会市场营销或推销。市场营销就是帮助别人表达他们的问题，并展示他们的解决方案是最好的。如果你看到一个你喜欢的产品、网站或服务，并且有一些改进建议，那么你需要亲自构建它、设计它或写出来，然后给他们发冷邮件，提出为他们做这些改进，或者直接完成并发送给他们。而销售则是关于获取客户。所以，去获取客户吧，甚至不用询问。

Send those customers to a founder and they'll always take your email. They'll always remember you. It's a great way to break in. If you're a builder on the other hand, well, you've got to build. There's power and being able to do that yourself and not rely on others. Create a problem to solve and then build a first version that solves that problem. When you're starting out, it sort of maybe doesn't even matter what that problem exactly is. A lot of people get hung up on this step. They wait for the exact perfect problem. It just has to be a real problem that your software can actually solve. It's no mistake that some of the best founders I've met started off by making gradebook software because they were still in school and they had access to teachers who were frustrated with their grade books.

将那些客户介绍给创始人，他们总会回复你的邮件。他们总会记住你。这是一个很好的切入方法。另一方面，如果你是一个开发者，你就必须专注于构建。能够自己动手做，不依赖他人，是一种力量。找一个问题来解决，然后构建出一个可以解决该问题的初版。在刚起步的时候，问题的具体内容可能并不那么重要。很多人在这一步卡住了，他们在等待一个完美的问题。只需确保这个问题是真实存在的，而且你的软件可以真正解决它。毫无疑问，我见过的一些最佳创始人一开始都是通过制作成绩管理软件起步的，因为他们还在上学，能够接触到对成绩册感到沮丧的老师们。

Many of them didn't stay in that education space. They ended up making billion dollar companies in lots of other spaces, but they learned to create in gradebook software. It's a great lesson. Creating you can only learn by doing. So don't let the idea get in the way of you starting. Once you create something, anything, then iterate to make it work and turn it into something really good. When you create something impressive that users love, it's better than a credential. It doesn't matter if you didn't go to Stanford. If you can point to a beautiful app or website or GitHub repo with elegant code that you created, you have done a thing that will almost always set you up to be a top 10% player off the bat with no credentials.

其中很多人并没有继续留在教育领域。他们最终在其他很多领域创立了价值数十亿美元的公司，但他们的创造力是在成绩管理软件中学到的。这是一个重要的教训。创造只能通过实践来学习。所以，不要让想法阻碍你开始。一旦你创造出某些东西，就不断迭代改进，使它变得更出色。当你创造出用户喜爱的令人印象深刻的东西时，这比任何资格认证都更有价值。即使你没有去过斯坦福大学，如果你能展示一个漂亮的应用程序、网站或是充满优雅代码的GitHub仓库，这就足够让你在起步时成为前10%的人才，而无需任何证书。

When I was 14, I got my first job cold calling the yellow pages in the internet section. And what I had was a website I could point to that had won design awards. It was for my junior high school underground newspaper. You know, after that, I cold emailed my way to my first coding job. It worked for me and it will work for you. Here's Bill Gates talking exactly about this, what it takes to create and learn how to be great at those things. If you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you'll be super good at it. I don't think that's quite as similar as that.

当我14岁的时候，我找到了一份通过电话簿的互联网部分进行冷拨电话的工作。我当时有一个网站，可以展示，它获得过设计奖项。那个网站是为我的初中地下报纸做的。你知道的，在那之后，我通过冷邮件拿到了我的第一份编程工作。这对我有效，也会对你有效。这里是比尔·盖茨谈论这一点，关于怎样才能在这些事情上做到出色。如果你在某件事上花费1万小时，你会变得非常出色。但我认为并不是完全一样。

What you do is you do about 50 hours and 90% drop out because they don't like it or they're not good. You know, you do another 50 hours and 90% drop out. So there's these constant cycles and you do have to be lucky enough, but also fanatical enough to keep going. And so the person who makes it to 10,000 hours is not just somebody who's done it for 10,000 hours. There's somebody who's chosen and been chosen in many different times. Bill Gates is absolutely right here. It's the 10,000 hours where you choose to do the same thing over and over again until you become great at it. That is learning.

你需要做的是投入大约50个小时，有90%的人会放弃，因为他们不喜欢或不擅长。接着你再投入50个小时，又有90%的人放弃。这样不断地循环，你不仅需要足够的运气，还需要足够疯狂地坚持下去。所以，那些最终累积了1万小时的人，不仅仅是做了1万小时的事情，他们是在许多不同的时间点上选择继续，并且被选择留下来做下去的人。比尔·盖茨说得非常正确，就是通过反复做同一件事累积1万小时，直到你变得非常出色。这才是真正的学习。

Let's talk about earning. What do I mean by earning? Well, I mean putting money in your pocket. What do you actually take home? The best way to do it, I think, is still equity. To make the most amount of money, you need to create true wealth by owning the stock of a company that became worth a lot of money. And when you started it, you owned 100% of something that wasn't worth anything, but then you made it something. In my book, this is the highest form of earning because you made it.

让我们谈谈赚钱。所谓赚钱是什么意思呢？其实就是把钱装进自己的口袋。你真正能拿回家的钱是多少？我认为，最好的赚钱方法还是权益持股。要赚最多的钱，你需要通过拥有一家取得巨大成功的公司的股票来创造真正的财富。当你刚开始创业时，你拥有了100%一文不值的东西，但后来你把它做成了有价值的企业。在我看来，这是最顶级的赚钱形式，因为这是你自己创造出来的。

But of course, you can also earn cash. Facebook and Google Pay engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stock. And at the high end, it's not unusual for execs to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That's crazy, but remember that Google made over $166 billion in total revenue. If you divide that out by 135,000 employees, that's over 1.2 million per employee in revenue. That's an amazing way to earn.

当然，你也可以赚取现金。Facebook 和 Google 的工程师每年可以赚到几十万美元的现金和股票。而在高层管理人员中，赚取数千万甚至上亿美元也并不罕见。这听起来很疯狂，但别忘了，谷歌的总收入超过1660亿美元。如果你把这个收入平分给13.5万名员工，每个员工就能创造超过120万美元的收入。这是一种惊人的赚钱方式。

But sometimes there's a catch. What if you're not learning? I gotta say, this is my opinion and my opinion alone. But for me, I feel like I need to be learning something, otherwise I'm dying. I'd be pretty unhappy in a place where I didn't get to learn about new things or grow my skills and abilities. That being said, let's take a step back. Millions if not billions of people on the planet make this trade-off every day, trading a portion of their happiness for financial stability. I'm not saying this is a bad situation. They can take care of themselves and their loved ones, and that's important.

但有时候会有个问题。如果你没在学习呢？我要说的是，这是我个人的看法，仅代表我自己。对我来说，我觉得如果我没有在学习什么东西，我就像在慢慢死去。如果我在一个不能学到新东西或提高我的技能和能力的地方，我会非常不开心。话虽如此，让我们退一步看。地球上每天有数百万甚至数十亿人做着这种权衡，牺牲一部分幸福来换取经济稳定。我并不是说这种情况不好。他们能够照顾自己和亲人，这很重要。

But if you really want to take steps to create things from nothing, you gotta be careful. You might end up in a cycle, earn money to spend it to get a bigger house or car or nicer things. You'll spend more money and more money over time, and before you know it, you're running on a hedonic treadmill. And the tricky thing about spending money to buy things that you don't want is they don't give you the satisfaction you really want. Here's philosopher Alan Watts talking about exactly that. Money never can buy pleasure, because all pleasures depend upon not putting down a symbol of power, money, but upon discipline.

但是，如果你真的想从零开始创造一些东西，你得小心。你可能会陷入一个循环，赚了钱就花掉，然后买更大的房子或更好的车或更好的东西。随着时间推移，你会花越来越多的钱。而不知不觉间，你已经在享乐跑步机上了。花钱买自己并不真正需要的东西，无法给你带来真正想要的满足感。哲学家阿兰·瓦茨对此有过很好的论述：金钱从来不能买来快乐，因为所有的快乐都不是靠金钱，而是靠自律。

In other words, now in Sausoleta, where I live, we have peer after peer full of fine boats, motor cruisers, sailing boats, all sorts of things, which nobody ever uses. Because they've been bought on the falling for the ad line that if you buy this thing, you will have pleasure. You will have status. You will have something or other. But then they suddenly discover that having a boat requires the art of seamanship, which is difficult but rewarding. Therefore, nobody has time for it, and all they do with the boats is have cocktail parties on them at the weekend.

换句话说，现在我住的Sausoleta，这里有一排排满是漂亮船只的码头，有摩托艇、帆船，各种各样的船只，但这些船几乎没人使用。因为大家都受到广告宣传的诱惑，认为买了这些船就会有快乐、有地位或者别的什么好处。但当他们突然发现拥有一艘船需要掌握航海技术，这虽然困难但很有成就感，因此没有人有时间来学习这门技术。最后，他们只能在周末的时候在船上举办鸡尾酒会。

If you know you want to create a startup, save the money. That boat or nice car or expensive clothes probably won't get you all the way to where you want to be. If you're young and still thrifty, don't change your lifestyle. That money you spend needs to be saved so that you can invest your time in creating your own startup or your own wealth engine. I have one other big warning for you. Sometimes these high paying jobs that feel meaningless are bullshit jobs. Here's David Grayber, an intellectual of the Occupy Wall Street movement, talking about why some of these bullshit jobs exist.

如果你知道你想创办一家初创公司，那么就把钱存起来。那艘船、漂亮的车或者昂贵的衣服可能不会让你达到你想要的位置。如果你还年轻而且还很节俭，不要改变你的生活方式。你花掉的钱需要被存起来，这样你才能投入时间去创建自己的公司或自己的财富引擎。我还有一个重要的警告要给你。有时候，那些高薪但让人觉得毫无意义的工作其实是空壳工作。这里是大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber），一位占领华尔街运动的知识分子，他在谈论为什么有些空壳工作存在。

The Soviet Union used to say, well, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. They make up jobs which are completely unnecessary. That makes sense because they had an ideology at full point. On the other hand, capitalism, that's exactly the thing that isn't supposed to happen. A private firm would never hire someone and put out good money to someone who they don't actually need. But in fact, if you talk to people who work for large corporations, they do it all the time. And that weird, sometimes the more you get paid, the more meaningless the job actually becomes.

苏联以前常说，“我们假装工作，他们假装给我们发工资。” 他们创造了一些完全不必要的工作。这可以理解，因为他们有一个完整的意识形态。另一方面，在资本主义社会，这种事正是应当避免的。私营企业绝不会花钱雇佣一个他们并不需要的人。然而，实际上，如果你和在大公司工作的人聊聊，他们也常常这么做。而且奇怪的是，有时候你工资越高，你的工作反而变得越没有意义。

You only get one life. It's too short to waste on things that you don't find fulfilling, even though they might make you comfortable. Hey, you gotta remember, if you choose a job you love, you'll never get one. You'll never have to work a day in your life. If you don't learn and you don't love it, you might have to leave once you earn enough to take the leap.

你只有一次生命，生命太短暫了，不值得浪费在那些让你感到舒适但却无法让你感到充实的事情上。你得记住，如果你选择了一个你热爱的工作，你就永远不会觉得自己在工作。你每天都会觉得是在享受生活。如果你不学习，也不热爱它，那么当你赚够了钱时，你可能不得不离开，去追求你的梦想。

Now let's talk about learning AND earning. If it wasn't obvious already, it's the best. If you start a company or are early enough, you can learn while you earn. For founders, this is easy math. As a founder, when you start a company, you start off with 100% of the pie. The pie might be worth zero at that moment, but you're gonna go make it worth something. If you do manage to get to product market fit, you could have a company with an exit in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or billions of dollars. If you own 10 to 30% of that company by then, you could be a cent a millionaire to billionaire. That's pretty crazy.

现在让我们谈谈学习和挣钱。如果还不明显的话，这两者结合是最棒的。如果你创业或在初创公司工作，你就可以在挣钱的同时学习。对于创始人来说，这是简单的数学。当你创办一家公司时，你起始时拥有100%的股份。虽然此时这家公司可能一文不值，但你会努力让它变得有价值。如果你成功实现了产品市场匹配，你的公司可能会有数千万、数亿或数十亿美元的退出价值。如果到那时你仍然持有公司10%到30%的股份，你有可能成为千万富翁甚至亿万富翁。这真是太疯狂了。

For employees, you might have 25 basis points, 0.25%, up to 2%, or more. It can still be an outrageously good outcome. You might not even have to take as big a risk. And being early means you might get less equity, but you're not starting at a point where the company is literally worth nothing. It can still be an amazing deal, especially if the company is growing very fast. When I was at Palantir, I was learning how to run teams and how to build product from scratch, but also earning equity in what ended up becoming a $40 billion company. When I worked at Y Combinator, I was learning to be an investor and learning how to work with startups at the earliest possible stage. But I was also earning some of the most valuable carry that exists in Silicon Valley as a part of that investment firm. And I'm learning and earning every day now as the founder and managing partner of my own venture capital firm. I learn every day from founders that I get to meet and the problems that they run across.

对员工来说，你可能会得到25个基点（0.25%）到2%或更多的股份，这仍然是一个非常好的结果。你可能不需要承担太大的风险。早期加入意味着你可能获得的股权较少，但公司此时的价值并非一无所有。这仍然是一个令人惊喜的交易，特别是如果公司增长非常快的话。 当我在Palantir工作时，我学习如何管理团队和从零开始构建产品，同时还获得了该公司股权，最终成为一家市值400亿美元的公司。在我为Y Combinator工作时，我学习如何成为一名投资者，以及如何在早期阶段与创业公司合作。同时，我也获得了一些在硅谷最具价值的分红。 现在，作为自己创办的风险投资公司的创始人兼管理合伙人，我每天都在学习和成长。我从遇到的创始人以及他们遇到的问题中学到很多。

When it comes to YouTube, I'm doing this for fun. I donate the proceeds from this channel to nonprofits like Code 2040. So while I don't earn here, I do learn a ton from all of you. So keep the comments and DMs coming. Hearing what resonates for you and helps you is what helps me learn the most of all. Finally, there are places where you don't get to do learning or earning at all. It might be working at a non-tech company, a consulting firm, and you're getting no equity in a low pay. Or what's worse, you might be working at a bad startup. Ugh, really sorry if that's true for you. I remember working for a startup as an intern my junior year of college. I got the internship through the Stanford career fair and I'd never worked at a bad startup before by then.

关于YouTube，我是为了娱乐而做这个频道的。我会把频道收益捐给像Code 2040这样的非营利组织。所以虽然我在这里没有赚到钱，但我从你们大家那里学到了很多。所以，请继续留言和私信我。听到你们的共鸣和帮助对我来说是最有价值的学习。 最后，有些地方，你既学不到东西也赚不到钱。比如在非科技公司或咨询公司工作，薪水低还没有股份。更糟的是，你可能是在一家糟糕的创业公司工作。如果这是你的情况，我真的很抱歉。我记得在大学三年级时，我通过斯坦福大学的职业招聘会找到了一份创业公司的实习工作，那是我第一次在一家糟糕的创业公司工作。

It was an enterprise software startup that raised money but never seemed to close customers. The founders spent a lot of time on business trips and I did a lot of work that summer, creating marketing material and mockups and prototypes and screenshots to use in sales pitches. But they didn't close an entire sale my whole summer. I don't think they ever did. The startup died and I didn't earn much because interns don't get paid a lot but I didn't learn very much either. It was basically a wash. I ate a lot of McDonald's and watched a lot of Hong Kong movies. This is sort of the secret truth of bad startups and I hate to say it but if you're in a situation like that, you should leave.

那是一家企业软件初创公司，筹集了资金，但似乎从未真正获得客户。创始人花了很多时间出差，而我那个夏天做了很多工作，制作营销材料、线框图、原型和截图，用于销售演示。但整个夏天他们都没完成一笔交易。我觉得他们好像从来没有成功过。这家公司最终倒闭了，而我也没赚到多少，因为实习生的工资本来就不多，而且我也没有学到很多东西。基本上，这段经历对我来说是一场浪费。我吃了很多麦当劳，观看了很多香港电影。这是糟糕初创公司的一个不为人知的事实，我不想这么说，但如果你遇到这种情况，应该尽早离开。

If you're not learning, you don't have a way to earn equity or even a good salary and especially if it's not fun or meaningful for you, you gotta quit. So what order do you do all of these things in? Here's what I recommend. Learn first, then earn. That's the best strategy. If you try and do it in reverse and you try to earn first, you'll probably still learn but maybe slowly and you don't know what you're going to give up. It might come at a great cost and you also might get trapped in that hedonic treadmill. Always remember, if you're not learning or earning, you gotta plot your exit to a place where you can. Just to close it out, I like this snippet of Tim Cook talking about his journey from where he started to the CEO of Apple.

如果你没有在学习，就没有办法获得股权或挣得好薪水，尤其是如果这份工作对你来说没有乐趣或意义，你就该辞职了。那么你应该按怎样的顺序来做这些事情呢？这是我的建议。先学习，然后再挣钱。这是最好的策略。如果你试图倒过来，先挣钱，你也许仍然能学到东西，但可能进展会很慢，而且你不知道你将会失去什么。可能会付出巨大的代价，还可能陷入享乐主义的陷阱。永远记住，如果你既没有在学习也没有在挣钱，你就应该计划退出，去一个可以让你学习或挣钱的地方。最后，我想引用一下蒂姆·库克谈论他从开始到成为苹果公司CEO的旅程中的一段话。

For me, the journey was not predictable at all and it goes back to the linking quote is the only thing I believe you can do is prepare. So that's it for this week. If you want to learn about other startup topics like what to do after you raise money or how to do design if you've never done it before, check out the latest videos on my channel where I dive into those topics and tons of other stuff. New videos here every single week. So don't miss them. Click subscribe and the bell icon right now. Turn on notifications for YouTube and you're going to get a little notification every time I post. Thanks for watching and I will see you next week.

对我来说，这段旅程完全无法预测，这也正好印证了那句话：你唯一能做的就是做好准备。这就是本周的内容。如果你想了解更多关于创业的话题，比如筹集资金后的步骤或者如何在没有经验的情况下进行设计，可以看看我频道上的最新视频，我会深入探讨这些话题以及其他大量内容。每周都会有新视频上线，所以不要错过。现在就点击订阅和铃铛图标，打开YouTube通知，每次我发布新视频时你都会收到提醒。感谢收看，我们下周见。