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Key Takeaways OpenAI’s chief economist, Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, goes against traditional career advice.
He says not to look at successful people’s resumes and not to try to replicate their success.
In his words, a successful person’s resume often omits periods of failure and uncertainty.
Are you looking at the careers of successful people, trying to retrace each step they took to get to where they are? It’s a futile endeavor, says OpenAI’s chief economist Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji.
Chatterji, who is also a distinguished professor at Duke University, said in a recent interview on the Summation podcast that job-seekers often study success in the hopes of making it their own. Conventional wisdom advises them to look at other people’s resumes and try to replicate their wins. This is “relatively bad advice,” Chatterji said.
“People often say something like ‘success leaves clues,’ meaning you should follow the paths of other successful people,” Chatterji said.
However, a successful person’s public resume often omits times of uncertainty, failure and hardship. It is the polished version of their history, not the most truthful. Economic moments shaped the choices they took; their success depended on the environment they lived in, he said.
“The path that they took whenever they took it was very context dependent,” Chatterji said. “Very rare to find someone self-aware enough to say, you know, the way I did it won’t work for you anymore. It won’t work for anybody.”
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