‘Whatever comes easy to you..’: Sam Altman gave Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas one line of advice that changed his career

Aravind Srinivas remembers the exact question he once asked Sam Altman. Not what to build, or which model to bet on, but something more basic: how do you actually figure out what you are good at.Altman’s answer was to pursue whatever comes easy to you but seems hard to other people. Srinivas has repeated that line in interviews and podcasts since, and in a recent conversation that went viral on X, he explained why it landed the way it did. It was not new information to him. It put language to something he had already lived through, years before OpenAI existed and years before Perplexity, the artificial intelligence (AI) company he would go on to build, did too.

The question behind the question

Most career advice tells people to follow their passion. Altman’s version skips that step. Instead of asking what you love, it asks what costs you less effort than it costs everyone around you. The distinction matters because passion is subjective and hard to measure, while relative ease is something people can observe in themselves, usually only after they have already done the thing that revealed it.“Whatever comes easy to you…but seems hard to other people,” is how Srinivas recalled Altman’s reply. He called it a reliable way to identify a person’s real strengths, as opposed to their preferred ones.

A contest, not a classroom

Srinivas traces his own version of this…