Notes from Paul Graham’s essay - How to do great work
You have to be really ambitious in life to do great work.
First step - Decide what to work on
The work that you choose to do must have qualities
- It has to be something that you have natural aptitude for.
- You have to have a deep interest.
- It should have scope to do great work.
What if you aren’t sure about what to work on? Well, just start working, keep guessing and switching, it’t not a bad thing to try different things. It gives a great clarity on how things work interconnected if you work on multiple things.
Keep working till your interests converge and one day the work you are doing will become great.
Once you find somehting that you are interested in, keep exploring and learning so that it keeps you on the frontiers of vast knowledge and knowledge as seen from afar is smooth but once you learn more you will notice that it’s full of gaps.
Filling these gaps is what makes the work you do great. All the great people who did great work filled these gaps and the work they have done made them great. Work on these gaps.
Four steps:
- Choose a field
- learn enough to get to frontier
- notice gaps
- explore proimising gaps
Work in big blocks to time. Dont work too hard - working too hard yeilds diminishing returns.
Finish what you start even if it’s hard. Best things happen in final stages of project.
Explore more - per day procrastination vs per project procrastination. Per project procrastination is particularly bad as you end up postponing the whole project for years.
Dont underestimate the power of consistency. If you write one page a day you will end up writing a book in an year.
Style is doing things in a different way without trying to. Trying to is affectation(pretentious)
Avoid affectation -> By being earnest -> By being intellectually honest -> Maintain a slight pressure in opposite direction. Start agreeing that you are mistaken when you are mistaken.
Talking or writing about things you are interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When an idea seems obvious and novel, it’s a probably a good one.
There is nothing bad with copying ideas. You learn better by reproducing someone else’s work.
Arguably, the best line in the whole essay - ** Copying doesn’t necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old one **
Nurture and protect your morale like a living organism
Doing great work is depth first search. The root node is the desire to do great work. If you don’t succeed, backtrack and try again(as opposed to try and try again until you succeed)