How To Do Great Work – Paul Graham

PVC

This essay is a long read but I highly recommend you read the entire piece as it is a gold mine of great strategies.

The following notes are distilled sections of the essay that I found useful:

Something you have natural aptitude for
Something you have deep interest in
Something that offers scope to do great work
- Ignore this one, ambitious people are already too conservative about this
If your not sure what to work on, guess
- Biggest discoveries come from making connections between different fields
What are you excessively curious about? (this is what you are looking for)
- Curious to a degree that would bore most people.
- Curiosity is the best guide – it knows more than you do about what is worth paying attention to
A field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it
- If it doesn’t, it’s not for you
- Fields aren’t people, you don’t owe them loyalty – don’t be afraid to switch
A good idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it
- Ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting and rich with implications
What would be good ideas for someone else to explore?
- This ensures your subconscious won’t shoot down the ideas because they are too risky or too much work
If you were going to take a break from “serious” work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do?
- The answer to this is probably more important than it seems

Develop a habit of working on your own projects
If you manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own
Need to preserve excitingness
In many cases the recipe for great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects

Start lots of small things
- Big things start small and you can rarely predict how things will unravel
- Experiments, side projects, or talks can grow into something bigger
Error on the side of starting
- Even though it sounds more responsible to conduct the proper research first, it’s more fun to learn by trying
Start small and evolve – the final version will be more clever and ambitious than anything you could have planned
- Great things are always made in successive versions
- Begin with the simplest thing that could possibly work
- Let your designs evolve rather than be pre-planned (more natural)
Young people often make the mistake of being too conservative (inexperience creates the fear of risk)
- Failing is valuable
- There is no better source of questions than the ones you encounter by working on something slightly too hard.

Try to arrange large blocks of time to work in, otherwise you will shy away from the hard tasks
It’s harder to start working than to keep working
- You will often have to trick yourself to get over the initial threshold
- Tell yourself “I’ll just read over what I have so far”
- Lots of great things start with “How hard can it be?”
- Exaggerate the importance of what you’re working on, at least in your own mind
Finish what you start even if it turns into more work than expected
- A lot of great work happens in what was meant to be the final stage

Many people discover what to work based on a chance meeting or some book they happened to pick up
Meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions
Need to caste a wide net and the right thing will be caught at some point

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance
Instead at each stage do whatever seems the most interesting and gives you the best options for the future.

Per-project and per-day
Per-project procrastination is much more dangerous
- Putting off an ambitious project from year to year because the time isn’t right
- Per-project procrastination doesn’t set off the same alarms that per-day does – you’re too busy working on something else to notice
Ask yourself: “Am I working on what I most want to work on?”
- When young it’s ok if the answer is sometimes “no” although be careful as you get older

Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you’re interested in
Don’t get a lot done every day, get something done (rather than nothing)
Doing work that compounds creates exponential growth:
- The more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more
- The more fans you have, the more new fan’s they’ll bring you
The problem with exponential growth is that is flat in the beginning
- We underrate exponential growth in its early stages
Need to focus on consciously investing in exponential growth

Colleagues don’t just affect your work, they affect you
- Work with people you want to become like, because you will
It’s better to have one or two great ones rather than a bunch of pretty good ones
Sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights
- They can see and do things that you can’t

You’re more likely to do great work if you’re an optimist
High morale helps you to do good work, which increases your morale and helps you to do even better work
- If you’re stuck switch to easier work to help get the cycle started
It’s not necessarily a bad sign to struggle any more than it’s a bad sign to be out of breath when running
If the work is too hard and you fail, so what?
- Lots of people have worse problems than that
- You will be lucky if that is your worst problem

Youth: energy, time, optimism, and freedom
- Time is something the youth typically never realize the abundance they have
- Time can be used as an advantage by using it in slightly frivolous ways
- Learning something you don’t need to know
- Building something just because it would be cool
- Becoming freakishly good at something
Age: knowledge, efficiency, money, and power
- One of the most important kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don’t have to worry about

If you’re ambitious, you need to work; it’s almost like a medical condition
People who do great work are not necessarily happier than others, but their happier than they’d be if they didn’t
If you’re smart and ambitious, it can be dangerous not to be productive
- People who are smart and ambitious but don’t achieve much tend to be bitter

Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination. In popular culture they’re opposed. But popular culture has a broken model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking are opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict.

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