I recently listened to an interview clip with Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT, in which he talks about his ideas on thinking more clearly. Given the success he’s had as a start-up founder, president and partner at Y Combinator, VC investor, and CEO of OpenAI, I was curious to hear his opinions. Here are a few takeaways:

• Altman, a big fan of spiral notebooks, takes tons of notes. He’s particular about the type of notebook he uses. The notebook is a way for him to capture things, and ripping pages out allows him to easily compare and think about what he’s captured. He creates piles of crumpled notebook pages as part of his process and goes through a notebook every two to three weeks.
• Writing is important to Altman because it’s a tool that helps him think more clearly. It’s important for people to learn to write so they can learn to think more clearly.
• Altman is better at generating ideas when he’s sitting alone and writing than when he’s conversing with others.
• Anytime he gets 11 minutes or more free, often in the back of a car, he writes and thinks.
• Figuring out the balance between being with people, getting ideas, and having time alone to think and write is important. His thoughts on this reminded me of the framework I read about in A Technique for Producing Ideas.
• His weekends, with long, quiet blocks of time to think and write, are important to him.

Altman’s process is surprisingly simple and low tech: a good pen (he recommends his favorites), a spiral notebook, and time to think and write.

Given OpenAI’s dominance in the AI market, it stood out to me that he believes writing is still critical as a thinking tool and he writes regularly using pen and paper, not ChatGPT.

The interview clip with Altman is short. If you’re interested in listening to or watching it, go here.