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How to Do Great Work

• hyperthesis 3y ago
  PSA: This is much longer than pg's other essays. There are multiline gaps between sections that can seem like the end.
• vonnik 3y ago
  Mary Helen Immordino Yang has some interesting thoughts about how to change education to make it nudge kids towards doing more interesting work: https://youtu.be/S8jWFcDGz4Y https://youtu.be/S8jWFcDGz4Y
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    Summary?
• aman_jha 3y ago
  An essay worth waiting months to read
• Graffur 3y ago
  [flagged]
• jaqalopes 3y ago
  I'm surprised how many negative responses this essay has received. If you read it as prescriptive, "Do these steps and you will achieve greatness," then yeah obviously he is skimping on the "why" of it all. But as he says at the very top, this essay is actually descriptive. This is an analysis of how great work comes about, based on looking at many cases of "it." Your own mileage may vary. For my part, I found it perfectly thought provoking; not a strict roadmap to follow, but a set of observations against which to measure my own experiences and ideas, and see if I can't improve on what works for me. I appreciate anyone who is trying to dig deeper into how human beings can better themselves and create meaning in our indifferent universe.
• hyperthesis 3y ago
  What if the answer (to a gap) is in another field, where you have no interest and no aptitude? Should you force yourself to learn that field for years to get to the good stuff? Or, stop at the extent of your aptitude and interest?
• kepano 3y ago
  "The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going." I very much agree with this sentiment. That's how you find good problems to solve. In general, we don't teach enough about "problem finding" which is arguably harder and more important than problem solving.
  • dkqmduems 3y ago
    There's another word for this...play?
    • xyzelement 3y ago
      It's not exactly play, it's more like focused exploration. Eg Columbus setting sail without knowing what he would find. You wouldn't say he was playing but you would say he was discovering.
      • moneywoes 3y ago
        Ideation and customer discovery? Market research?
      • tough 3y ago
        I mean the guy was going for a shorter trip to the indias and found out the americas I'd call that mostly luck lmao Took courage to go to the end of the world, for sure, but still god damn luck too
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ignoramous 3y ago
  https mirror: https://archive.is/4ZlRl https://archive.is/4ZlRl
• travisjungroth 3y ago
  > Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application is about intersections, and the combinatorics brings novelty right to your nose. Pick a random combination of tech, domain, and theory and it’s unlikely to have been explored. It’s unlikely to be useful, but that’s what makes it exploration and not farming.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works. I really believe that this is the best time to be a polymath, or at least have a broad spectrum of knowledge and references to look into and pull information from; and that being a true generalist that can dive as deep as needed enables you to build great stuff. But maybe that’s just my experience.
    • wsintra2022 3y ago
      I second that, I feel like right now, with the rise of ML tools in audio production, demucs, audio to midi, voice clones etc, the rise of image generation and text. Coupled with some coding skills and interests in many different fields I could not get bored in a million years because there can be so much to jump into and learn/create/explore
    • travisjungroth 3y ago
      > It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works. It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well: > The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside. The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other. Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  > Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. I spend eight hours+ a day supporting my addiction to food and shelter. Why would I spend my free time working toward “greatness” instead of doing hobbies I enjoy and spending time with friends and family? Any other time I have I’m spending working out and training for runs - neither of which I will ever be great at.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Sometimes that side work prepares you for a day job that's more enjoyable and/or pays better.
    • saiya-jin 3y ago
      Sure, but also sometimes you waste your life working thinking you kick ass left and right, till you arrive at certain point, ie retirement and realize you actually wasted your life, and no amount of money can change that. Sure, you have a some freedom ahead of you, but only as much as your health, finances and other circumstances allow you to, and this is usually less than people project earlier. Plus family happens now for many of us, and not later. Kids need their parents, not their money. Its a grave mistake that hurts badly your closest ones for life to prioritize excellence in 1 direction over everything else, especially them. I'll always have endless amount of respect of people raising their kids properly themselves into mature, happy adults who know what they want in life and go for it, even if it means they just worked to live. I don't have even a cubic picometer of respect for folks who end up doing the opposite, regardless of what they achieved professionally. This world needs new generation of balanced adults much much more than some search optimized by 0.1% or some marginally improved social graph monetization. Of course not everybody wants, needs or can create a family, that's fine but another topic, then I agree with you more.
      • scarface_74 3y ago
        After staying at a job for too long by 2008 and barely surviving the recession at a startup until 2012 and also getting married the same year and (gladly) becoming the father to my then 9 and 14 year old stepsons, I changed jobs six times and pushed myself to get ahead until 2020 and falling into a mid level position at BigTech (cloud consulting department). I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”. I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely. I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 I’ve never been happier not trying to be “great” and being “content”
• fnord77 3y ago
  also: - Don't have any chronic diseases or pain that will distract or dull your attention - Have a stable source of income or enough wealth to let you try and fail at a lot of things - Have stable family and friends - Don't have optimism beaten out of you at a young age etc
  • badtension 3y ago
    I am amazed how many people take their fortunes for granted and then preach about how they "worked harder than anyone else hence deserve much more than the others". You have to be incredibly lucky to get to that point. In case of chronic illness (like brain fog) you are pretty much destined to fail.
    • helicalmix 3y ago
      I’m also amazed how people will take a self-improvement article like this, and take it so personally. Like yes, pg was lucky to have a lot of things work out for them, but that doesn’t mean his advice here (which encompasses more than just “work hard”) is invalid for everyone just because it’s invalid for some people.
      • 331c8c71 3y ago
        It's a post-factum rationalization of personal experience possibly mixed with some anecdata. Fine as a motivational material but that's all this is.
        • helicalmix 3y ago
          I get what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s a survival bias for all winners. But the pendulum swings too far if you believe you can’t learn anything at all from winners. Can you say that, for all winners of any field, there’s no correlation between the winners and the losers that is not attributable to luck?
          • 3y ago
• wackget 3y ago
  It's 2023. Why do many websites featured here still not use HTTPS?
  • tim333 3y ago
    I quite like being able to do stuff simply. There's a lot of moaning as to what happened to the old internet where you could just put something up, why does it all end up gate keeped on medium, facebook and the like, and then when someone just puts some text on the web everyone moans that it isn't encrypted like medium, facebook and the like.
  • ghqst 3y ago
    see http://n-gate.com/software/ http://n-gate.com/software/
  • nullandvoid 3y ago
    I mean it's a blog, with no ability to sign in / risk leaking any PI. Adding HTTPS would only waste CPU cycles serving the page.
    • lkschubert8 3y ago
      I suppose someone could mitm impersonating pg? Seems like a low risk though.
    • mgamache 3y ago
      Sure, but there's a wider context of encrypting all internet traffic to provide less context for the stuff that is sensitive.
    • nyc_pizzadev 3y ago
      What about an inbetween actor changing the content? Or someone just hijacking the website?
    • seanhunter 3y ago
      This is a common attitude that I think overlooks a big part of the benefits of secure transport. If all your traffic is TLS then you have a number of benefits, including principally 1) Noone can MITM the traffic. They can't insert anything in stream or do anything else funky that they absolutely can with clear traffic if they own your route somehow. 2) The amount of information leakage is less due to chaffing. Consider a situation where all your sensitive traffic is HTTPS and all your other traffic is HTTP. In that world a bad person monitoring your traffic may not know the details of your sensitive traffic, but they know that the metadata of any HTTPS indicates sensitive traffic. If everything is HTTPS on the other hand literally any of the metadata could be sensitive or non-sensitive and they have no way of telling. The more non-sensitive traffic is encrypted the greater the benefit of this protection. So given those are pretty significant benefits for visitors to your site it's nice to provide the option of HTTPS. On a seperate note, the amount of CPU cycles consumed by serving HTTPS these days is really trivial especially if you use a EC cert or similar.
• cushychicken 3y ago
  Another thing you need: patience. I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have: - enough experience and context to do great work, and - the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE job. The choices he made affected where I am now, but he definitely made some sacrifices on my behalf.
  • grrdotcloud 3y ago
    Similar but more confidence. And ignoring all self doubt and imposter feelings has made my career way less stressful.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    This is an important point….. Great work and your craftsmanship/experience/wisdom/capabilities are interrelated. Being able to do great work is partly a function of your ability to work.
  • moneywoes 3y ago
    > the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications Whss as t does this entail, business context?
  • zengid 3y ago
    Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
  • skmurphy 3y ago
    I think people can do great work at any age. Sometimes newcomers look at a long-standing problem and discover or design a new approach that is substantially better. Other times established experts can leverage the breadth of their experience to develop a better solution or offering. For me, the key elements are the desire to create something of value or make a contribution, a willingness to collaborate to extend what you can accomplish, and the self-discipline to work hard for extended periods of time.
• urs 3y ago
  Just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to share Richard Hamming's classic talk from '86, "You and Your Research." Then I realized that the funny part is that PG has already linked to Hamming's talk on his site (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), and mentioned it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048). There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely. In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work." I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it. Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup… (Hamming’s talk has been shared countless times here and this feels like PG’s contribution to a similar idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778036)).
  • interroboink 3y ago
    There's an unspoken aspect of the word "important" here — important to you, or important to the world (society, etc)? From Hamming: "I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things." It seems he is talking about the important to the world aspect. He wants to have a big impact on the world, and be where the action is. The goal is to make a name for yourself, or to at least have a hand in the next big transformations. But there is also the "important to you" aspect. In Hamming's case, those two notions of importance align. But not so for everyone. Quoting again: "I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another." So, he is happiest when working on problems that have big "important" implications for the world. Good for him; I'm glad he discovered that about himself, and followed what made him happy. So now for my actual point: I'd encourage a person to actually first and foremost focus on what is important to them personally — what makes them happy — rather than what seems "important" from some external perspective. I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy. But to put that choice on a pedestal as though it is the True Goal — to put "important to society" above "important to oneself" is putting the cart before the horse. It's how you get a bunch of unhappy people chasing after other people's dreams. It's actually somewhat touched upon in TFA, with: "The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious." Indeed — like Hamming was. But not everyone is, and not everyone needs to be to be happy. I am just slightly irked by our somehow reserving the word "great" for ambitious people's accomplishments.
• travisgriggs 3y ago
  Hmmm… > At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. I’m 53 and some of my greatest joys still come from well executed Lego builds. Wonder if I’m stuck in a rut :/
  • borski 3y ago
    Nah. I literally have a LEGO brick tattoo. Never let that die.
  • Swizec 3y ago
    I “rediscovered” LEGO in my early 30’s. Turns out when you’re an adult, LEGO isn’t that expensive and you can just buy a set. Walk into a store and walk out with a brand new set! It’s an amazing and dangerous freedom. 3 short years later and I have more sets than space. Now all I need is the time and space I had as a kid to treat LEGO as a tool for invention. Build stuff out of imagination, not a blueprint. Then again, as an adult, I could also get a bunch of power tools and “play with LEGOs” without using actual LEGOs … hmmmm
    • rizky05 3y ago
      [dead]
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    I used to be thrilled with big sets because they were… well, big. Now, I find Lego building relaxing with the occasional delight at a technique the master builders came up with to create some sort of texture or shape using those bricks.
    • 2snakes 3y ago
      new legos are the devil because all the creative thinking is done behind a desk at lego. (not my thought, just repeating)
  • 3y ago
• _x5ft 3y ago
  I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.
  • DaveSchmindel 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • smokel 3y ago
    Perhaps I am a bit too cynical here, but I think that it is harder to criticize a long-winded article than a short bold statement -- thereby making it slightly more comfortable to publish. For a critical reader, it takes a lot of effort to read the entire article, then check that its flaws are not nullified by some additional arguments, etc.
  • williamstein 3y ago
    > "Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small." I scrolled up and down quickly through the essay, and the above was the very first thing I randomly read.
    • _x5ft 3y ago
      I find that quote rather condescending. It’s also an excuse in disguise.
      • 331c8c71 3y ago
        "You are special (if you made it so far)" part is a cheap manipulation imo.
  • grrdotcloud 3y ago
    Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
• rmorey 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • la_fayette 3y ago
    I read the text of PG and now found this summary, which fully sums it up. Thank you.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    > offers scope for groundbreaking work Hah, and make sure to be a genius with a workaholic attitude, otherwise the 100 people that are like that will make the groundbreaking discoveries a few years before you. The more people alive and able to work on research, the higher the bar gets. For most people, implementing existing bleeding edge knowledge is already an achievement.
    • MichaelRo 3y ago
      Well put. What the article (and others like it) lacks is the fallback, the plan B, the exception handling. There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and end up with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser. So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99th guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries. Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".
  • carabiner 3y ago
    Who is Claude?
• cookie_monsta 3y ago
  It feels like this takes a very narrow definition of greatness which is more aligned to innovation and "What will make you famous" or "What will be commercially successful". From plant life and human health all the way up to nation states, there are lots of people doing great work just making sure that things keep running smoothly.
  • varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    There are also lots of innovations in keeping things running smoothly. And the wonks in those fields recognize those innovations and those innovative folks do tend to enjoy _some_ level of fame or notoriety (if not at a general public level).
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Curiosity is key. I know people who are perfectly content following obscurity with curiosity and the world would not consider them successful by monetary measures.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    IMO he’s talking about innovation and creation as “great work”. Sure there’s vast numbers of people doing great work that isn’t innovation and creation. You’re dismissing the insights here too quickly if you’re just wanting to find fault with the intersection of the term “great work” with all the people in the world doing all sorts of different types of great work. This is about creation and innovation as great work.
  • masto 3y ago
    It’s Paul Graham. He’s a poster child for essays about how there’s one way to do things. If you want to have a successful internet business, code in lisp.
  • andai 3y ago
    Both are necessary. I think the difference is that Group A (keep things running) without Group B (explore new territory) would have kept us in the stone ages. However, that is not to understate their importance: a humanity consisting entirely of Group B would be much more unstable, and possibly have gone extinct. It's similar to the Rogue Bees: https://www.mrdbourke.com/what-if-you-did-the-exact-opposite-like-the-rogue-bees-do/ https://www.mrdbourke.com/what-if-you-did-the-exact-opposite... Although rogue bees (as a small portion of the population) are actually essential to a hive's survival.
• mmargerum 3y ago
  Why doesn't paul take some of that cash horde and put it into the LISP community? Maybe he does?
  • black_13 3y ago
    [dead]
• oldstrangers 3y ago
  Can we get Paul an SSL cert?
  • throw_pm23 3y ago
    How did it hold you back that it was plain http?
    • oldstrangers 3y ago
      That's irrelevant obviously but Chrome pushing a bunch of 'not secure' warnings at me isn't ideal.
• lewisjoe 3y ago
  "Follow your interest/passion" - is such an easy advice. However in some societies / economies, it's simply not possible. Where I'm from (India), where a majority of my generation has to lift their families from money problems, there's no option of following passion. There's only "learn/do what makes money". It's not entirely a bad thing though. For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc). The other alternative is to spend precious younger years of my time in search of "passion". This happens too, but mostly from folks who already have financial freedom to explore and experiment, who are relatively scarce in some societies.
  • kubb 3y ago
    I'm surprised Paul gets upvoted so much, no matter what platitude he serves up. His writing is good for a software engineer, but doesn't hold a candle to a capable journalist or writer. Basically it feels like you're reading a documentation page about the last idea he's had in the shower.
  • codethief 3y ago
    > "Follow your interest/passion" - is such an easy advice. > For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc). No one said you first had to sit down, ponder hundreds of life options and then choose your passion. Passion might also come to you as you progress in whatever field you're in. Put differently, you might as well follow your natural inclinations (whatever you find somewhat interesting in the moment) or submit to life/financial constraints (choose a promising career path), and as you become better and better at what you do, develop a passion for it.
  • badpun 3y ago
    India is essentially at the development stage matching that of XIX century Europe and the US. Back then, nobody was following passions, and everyone was just starting practical businesses and investments which will (hopefully) bring in some money. Now it's India's turn to go through that phase.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• zug_zug 3y ago
  I haven't finished this yet, will take more than one sitting to digest, but I'm already 90% sure I'm going to disagree with this one a lot. I like to validate people's advice by playing it out in hypotheticals, so let's take some random fields people may think they want to be great at, and apply this advice: chess, piano, philosophy, quantum physics, soccer. I think it's self-evident that his algorithm isn't suited for the wide set of cases. Here's my alternative proposal: - If you're interested in a field, first ask, what % of people who dedicate their life to that field get any kind of fame/wealth/recognition (or whatever greatness means to you). So if we're talking chess, and you're already 14 and can't play, you have a 0% chance of getting to the top 100. Or if it's being a famous writer good to know what your base odds are. - Look up people who RECENTLY (within 30 years) succeeded in this field and look for patterns. I know 0 famous philosophers of the last 30 years, but the closest ones would probably be youtube philosophers. So maybe that's the current meta. - Look at the power-structures that determine success in the field (soccer is a fair game, art is judged by a few powerful tastemakers, news may be judged by clicks, some academia is judged by splash), decide if you are okay with the system and think you can excel in this system. Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear." That's all I got for now, it's his blog post not mine.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • mistermann 3y ago
    Watch out for this during your analysis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
  • ianbutler 3y ago
    > Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear." I think this is terrible advice for doing great work, probably good advice for doing shallow work that gets you paid. Great does not (always) mean wealthy, popular or well liked. Plenty of writers went through life with people telling them they sucked and then eventually people got it. Look at Charles Bukowski for example.
• smokel 3y ago
  I quite like to read an article like this from time to time, because it can be motivating when your ambitions are low. However, I also believe that it can be detrimental and even lead to burn-out or depression if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success. This seems like a recipe for disaster. Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? The concepts of "thrownness" and "survivorship bias" might be relevant to look up in this context. Is it possible to train curiosity, ambition, intelligence, passion, perseverance, if you did not grow up with it?
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    I think that it shouldn't lead to burnout if you keep the "play" or "interest" aspect. It's not "I have to find something at the frontier, so I have to pursue this until I get there." It's "I'm interested in this, and so I'm pursuing it because I want to." > Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? Yes and no. Yes, they stumbled on a promising gap by accident. No, it's not pure chance. Their odds go way up by being out there stumbling around, looking at things they find interesting.
  • the6thwonder 3y ago
    > if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success. What's the point of motivation of you don't believe what you do matters? The antitode to these kind of arguments is always to bring it to a closer level. Can you control how clean your house is with work? Would hard work help you tend to a farm better? Where does it stop helping you?
  • ren_engineer 3y ago
    >Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? to some degree, but it's not like you can luck your way into writing an app by slapping the keyboard. The degree of success might differ, but generally there's some kind of barrier of entry in terms of the work to learn the base skill needed. Right place at the right time is a thing, but plenty of people miss out because they don't even try at all
• snihalani 3y ago
  can I sell pg a https cert plz
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  I feel like I’m doing my greatest project at the moment. I enjoy PGs work but I’m not a fanboy. However in this case it’s uncanny that the path of this work I am doing is precisely as he has described here. I kinda knew already I was making something special but it’s almost like PG has been leaning over my shoulder watching my thinking and watching my work process over years. In fact this article is “great work” because actually distilling the essence of, and describing, great work would have been incredibly hard. The article describes the process it must have taken to write the article. Kinda recursive.
  • mkoubaa 3y ago
    I feel the same way, and I think it's really nice read for someone who's a decade or so into their career and has been head down chasing their interests im obscurity. The privelege of doing that is its own reward but it's easy to see why this approach leads to great outcomes. P.S.Why do you feel the need to say you're not a fanboy? Are you assuming that a positive statement about his work implies that you are and that you afraid of that impression ?
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  This is a good article, but I don't think it acknowledges the challenges and dangers that come with working in disruptive technology fields. There are certain fields where great work is welcomed by all, and although their may be a competition between interested parties over who gets to control (i.e. profit from) the fruits of your work, nobody is interested in actively suppressing technological progress in that field. For example, nobody I know of wants to suppress the development of faster computer chips - although the US government doesn't want China to have access to the latest ASML process technology. There are many fields where this is not true - e.g. neither Apple nor Microsoft were thrilled about the development of the open-source Linux operating system for decades. Similarly, renewable energy technology funding has been actively suppressed at the federal funding level in the USA by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel sector since the 1970s, as even a cursory examination of DOE budgets will reveal. Decentralized robust energy grids not under the control of large investor conglomerates are another touchy subject. Nevertheless, it's possible to do great work in these fields but only if you understand the forces arrayed against you in great detail. In some cases, making progress might require fairly radical solutions. For renewable energy development, moving to a country whose economy is not based on fossil fuel exports and which already is interested in replacing fossil fuel imports with renewables might be the optimal solution, particularly if the kind of work you have in mind requires expensive technological support. Otherwise, you'll have to accept shoestring budgets and active opposition to your work. There are a rather large number of fields where these issues arise. Academic institutions have largely been corporatized in the USA, and one side-effect is the gutting of environmental contaminant research programs that measured things like heavy metals, organochlorine contaminants, etc. in water, plants and soil. Similarly, research progams that focused on the potential uses of out-of-patent medicinal compounds were eliminated because the private pharmaceutical partners of universities were only interested in new patentable compounds. Of course, there are fields where you'll get lots of support - development of military drone technology, say. This kind of situation isn't a new phenomena. Historically, technological stagnation is associated with the rise of autocratic monopoly power in all civilizations. The printing press was a threat to the established order in medieval Europe, the electric lightbulb was a threat to the kerosene lamp and oil business (note it took FDR's New Deal to electrify Rural America), and so on. Therefore, if you plan on doing great work in a disruptive technology field, don't be surprised when you run into headwinds of various sorts. Such forces can often be overcome (Linux eventually succeeded on a large scale), but pretending they don't exist is the worst mistake you can make. Understanding those opposing forces in detail is going to be a necessary first step.
• andreasmueller 3y ago
  This blog post is GREAT and INSPIRING!! Thank you so much! --- What came in mind is: To attentively make use of the concepts of static and dynamic quality (introduced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals).
• _c3ag 3y ago
  Paul the creator of Ycombinator? hmm… depends what you consider great. last time i checked companies you helped, one of them was Rappi. they came to Brazil and basically destroyed the bicycle courier scene with anti-competitive practices on other companies just because they were rolling on money. after them, it is pretty rare to see someone working with deliveries and bicycles… and they are more silent and ecological than any motor-cycle or car. and actually smart considering the amount of damage noise and pollution from motor does. anyway, considering something great is a sensible topic. specially if you taking the amount of money made as a important factor. maybe that is why the world is full of people digging CEOs status on top of zombie-like consumers that can not think for themselves
• dmvdoug 3y ago
  As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type. > [18] The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken. Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else. First, anything can be either literally or metaphorically described as a religion, so that makes this an empty principle, since it either covers nothing or everything or both. (“Cheesecake is my religion.” Etc.) Second, the footnote is literally impenetrable to me. Honestly. I can discern no coherent meaning. That everyone could adopt a principle or belief does not mean it must be false just because everyone uniformly and indistinguishably believes it and therefore nobody disbelieves it. Whether people can be distinguished from one another with respect to some belief (say, that in base 10 arithmetic that 1+1=2) has nothing to do with the truth vel non of that belief. And honestly, I am genuinely struggling to fathom a mind that could not only believe that statement but believe it so deeply that they breezily announce it as obviously true. So it’s funny that this is the next paragraph: > What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? The only, and I mean, literally only, interpretation that I can come up with is that PG is using “religion” and “religious” in enough different ways that when he mixes them, as it seems to do here, he doesn’t notice. Or he means them ONLY in the sense of “too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think.” But I have a very strong suspicion that he is definitely not using them only in that way.
  • hospitalJail 3y ago
    >But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest When you are famous, people give you the benefit of the doubt. When you are small fries, you are blogspam.
    • dmvdoug 3y ago
      It’s more a tone issue. He’s a skilled enough writer to come across as sincere and well-meaning. Whether he is or not I have no clue, I don’t know the man.
• scaramanga 3y ago
  Fascinated as I might be to read an approximately 11 trillion word article which says "if you want to be great then work on things you are passionate about stay fresh and curious" I have to first stop and wonder if this is advice that I've already seen being given in embroideries, on countless coffee mugs, or along the side of a ballpoint pen.
  • jamiek88 3y ago
    Yeah cynically this is jezebel for our demographic. Live,laugh love. It’s wine o’clock. Do great work.
• grumpy_coder 3y ago
  You really shouldn't write a long post on doing great work without mentioning teamwork. He seems to say great work is done in the garage or garden shed, which has been false for centuries at this point.
  • rosecross 3y ago
    He mentions that for certain projects you’ll need to be good at managing others, or you shouldn’t attempt them at all.
  • brailsafe 3y ago
    Unless you live in any of the houses right outside the Apple campus. The single most shocking thing to me when I visited for the first time was that the entire area including right outside the visitor center is still dominated by these upsetting 60s bungalows. Ironically up in Redmond they're putting them to shame in terms of development.
  • mkoubaa 3y ago
    Teamwork was mentioned in the post
  • Zetice 3y ago
    I think your comment is an underappreciated one. The article, to me, seems exceedingly preferential to the "tortured/overworked genius" method of innovation, and by now I'm personally tired of seeing that trope fall on its face. The best... anything gets built by many people. Of course it takes a VC to try and tell us about the "exceptional" people at the top who make it all possible, but the number of times PG points out how instrumental Jessica was to the early days of YC disproves the very trope he's trying to puff up here.
  • aputsiak 3y ago
    My thoughts as well. He himself went ALL the way through the educational system broadly and were into arts and so on, so did his friend and collaborator Morris. Granted, PG has seen tech talent and success unfold on a scale that few will experience, which gives him a unique perspective. I'm still left wondering what role he attributes having close friends like he did, peers, mentors, community and collaboration...
• raminf 3y ago
  I agree with almost everything said here, especially the value of curiosity and experimentation. A few thoughts: - Every project is at its most exciting right in the beginning when it's new, and toward the end where the end is in sight. The trick is staying engaged and interested in the long, flat middle where progress comes in small dribs and there are frequent setbacks. - Another point I wish the essay made is that many projects reach a point at which it is best to reveal it to others. That is one of the most scary parts, of exposing oneself to criticism and doubt. It's what petrifies so many people from even starting. But if you embrace it not as the end, but as part of the process and a natural part of the evolution of the idea, it can itself be turned into a motivator. It's your first milestone. You WANT to get to that point, as a checkpoint. Seek out the feedback, adjust, and press on. - In fact, more should be said about the emotional part of doing projects. The love (or lust), the fear, the frustration, the doubt, and yes, the joy. All those human emotions are part of doing any work. We can run away from it and try to avoid it, or realize it comes with the territory. - Another thing that comes with experience and age is knowing what to say NO to, and avoid getting pulled away into the tributaries. It's easy to get distracted by side quests and to engage in bike-shedding. In fact, sometimes it's necessary for one's mental health. But it is best to keep an eye on the main goal that got us excited about the idea in the first place. Knowing when the break is over and it is time to get back to main path is a trick that seems to only come with age. - Lastly, there is great value in brevity (this is not a critique of PG's excellent essay :-) Imagine meeting a friend and they ask what you are working on. You tell them a long, complicated story, and their eyes glaze over. Next person, you learn to shorten it. Same result. You iterate. Soon, you've boiled it down to a short sentence you can rattle off without thinking. That's the nugget of the idea. The through-line. It's the blurb on the back of the book, the opening line of the website, and the executive summary of the grant application or pitch deck. At some point, all works need to be explained to someone else, before they become Great Works.
• norir 3y ago
  One might be forgiven for wondering if PG gets paid by the word.
• mercurialsolo 3y ago
  I have always wondered is greatness is something we see in retrospect and in the middle of all the work - do we really see it as great. What keeps us ticking to do the work? The passion, the finish line, the eye on the goal, the fleeting moment of accomplishment? And do you really see work as a product of your life's output. Or the way you live your life as one dedicated to the work. Are your relationships, your friendships, your contribution to your immediate environment around you motivators?
• nazgulnarsil 3y ago
  One thing mostly not addressed is just how hard it can be to receive social opprobrium for pushing against things that are obviously broken but act as important foundation for current social reality. Even small amounts of contrarianism can get surprising amounts of not just overt push back, but social undermining over seemingly trivial things. This creates a different kind of blindness to 'What you Can't Say' and 'Schlep Blindness' but rather a filtering of most smart contrarians into fields where lots of smart people bicker over table scraps of prestige and the few interesting problems that are legible and funded to work on. Work on seemingly low status problems and you won't have to waste your time competing.
• culopatin 3y ago
  Ive been conflicted for 12 years now on what field to pursue. I’m between mechanical engineering because of my interest in materials and aerodynamics (I’d love to do research in this field), and software engineering (I don’t know what I’d do research in, but I like the idea of making tools people use). I work in IT/light software dev, and I think I’m inclined towards software because that’s where I’ve been building my expertise in, but I’m always thinking of mechanics in my head. This post made me think that maybe what I should truly follow is mechanics.
  • oldelpaso66 3y ago
    Go for it!
  • zevv 3y ago
    No need to choose, you can have both - there is this very nice place where software meets hardware; call it embedded, call it robotics, call it industrial automation; this is the place where software actually gets to interface to physics: read sensors, drive solenoids and motors, make things move and act and do things in the real world. I got into this business 25 years ago and never left. Still loving every single day.
    • 2snakes 3y ago
      information, communication and fabrication (see the huge influx of fab labs)
  • mkoubaa 3y ago
    Similar background. I write software for mechanical engineers and enjoy it very much
    • culopatin 3y ago
      Can I pick your brain a bit? What is your involvement in the mechanical side and how did you get in it?
      • 3y ago
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• igormartynov 3y ago
  Two words: Ambitious Curiosity Twenty words: Strive for great work by choosing an exciting field, exploring its frontiers, noticing gaps, and boldly exploring promising ideas.
• Octokiddie 3y ago
  > What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. This is a great article, but there are many, many people for whom this advice is going to lead nowhere or worse. They have often been to fancy universities and have often earned fancy degrees. But what they don't realize is that they've also been trained to respond to the praise of authority figures. The article touches on this point later, but emphasizes a different outcome. If there's one thing that authority figures absolutely hate is a project that makes you excessively curious. I'll speculate that those most affected by this perverse reward system will deny its influence over them most strongly. They won't realize that their motivation for projects stems from the enthusiasm that authority figure show or withhold. They will therefore conclude that the warning above does not apply to them. And they will have a very hard time. I saw this first-hand in graduate school. At least half the students had never learned to disregard the level of the greybeard's enthusiasm when choosing projects. Unsurprisingly, they also did not understood the process of formulating a project idea. This was the half that had, by far, the hardest time. At the slightest hint of graybeard apathy for a project idea, they were onto something else.
  • chinchilla2020 3y ago
    At the end of the day, your curiosity and talent is used to make money for someone. Fetishizing work productivity and ability ignores the fact that most company owners are managerial types that will harness your output for monetary value. You could easily end up wasting your life by becoming some niche field leader in the systems you work on, but never enjoying the rewards of your talent. Hackernews in particular likes the idea of a life spent entirely behind a laptop, but there is a larger world out there, and the winners are enjoying it while we chase little lifehacks to eke out 20 extra minutes of productivity in a 10 hour day. I'm as guilty of this productivity fetishization as anyone here, but am just reaching a point in life where I'm starting to notice the walls of the maze.
    • irksomehails 3y ago
      Thanks for putting this out in words. It really hits the nail on how I've been feeling lately.
• MichaelRo 3y ago
  Well put. But what the article (and others like it) lacks is the fallback, the plan B, the exception handling, what to do if things don't work out as planned. There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and eventually you end up competing with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser. It's a dog eat dog world, winners take all and there's no reward for the effort. If you don't win the big prize, you've wasted your life for nothing. So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99 guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries. Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".
  • ren_engineer 3y ago
    in tech at least even if you fail, you are developing valuable skills that can be used elsewhere. Plenty of failed startup founders end up at other places in engineering or management roles not creating a billion dollar startup isn't a failure, tons of people in the tech industry retire as multimillionaires essentially working a 9-5. A lot of people on HN seem to think if you don't make the Forbes list you are a failure
    • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > in tech at least even if you fail, you are developing valuable skills that can be used elsewhere. Rather: Currently in tech in the USA ...
      • sentientslug 3y ago
• mattlondon 3y ago
  TL;Dr - be rich enough that you don't need to do Real Work and can focus on your personal passion projects.
• thisismyswamp 3y ago
  The thing I try to keep in mind most when dealing with these kinds of blog posts is that something that must be helpful to a majority of its audience will inevitably lose a lot of the value it can provide to each individual.
  • chubot 3y ago
    It is a bit weirdly generalized I kept trying to read between the lines for the domain PG is known for and writes most frequently about — startups But a lot of the writing seems to apply to achievements in math, science, art, and literature I think the latter four domains have a lot more in common with each other than they have in common with startups And PG seems to write and claim expertise largely in startups, although certainly he has experience in many areas and is well read So it would be nice to address that, otherwise it does seem less useful I’d agree the first part of the essay generalizes, but have my doubts about many points deeper in the essay
    • chubot 3y ago
      Just to elaborate on what bugged me about this essay -- probably the most important part for many domains is a single sentence, the last one in this paragraph: Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but some projects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of those is not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you'll have to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude and interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management as a second language, or avoid such projects "You must force yourself to learn management" is not very useful It's basically like saying "go run a marathon in a world record time" --- And I'd say that's the KEY difference between companies and math/art/literature The former are necessarily collaborative -- YC even says that PREFER co-founders; they reject solo founders Whereas math/art/literature has more of a solo feel, and so does this essay, despite the fact that PG is accomplished more in the collaborative domains Science these days is probably more like a company, more collaborative. A hundred years ago it was probably closer to math So I would have preferred to read about one kind of endeavor or the other; as is, it's something of a mish-mash that's not too actionable It's more of a "cheering section" for people working mostly alone, not really practical advice --- That said, I do appreciate his turns of phrase (going diagonally across the tracks), and the metaphor of reaching the edge of knowledge, it fractally expanding, etc. (It's probably more that I've already gotten these ideas from his previous essays, which are mostly great)
• svilen_dobrev 3y ago
  > Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. somehow, i have almost always made software as for my self if i were the user. And out of 35+ years and 20?30?50?70? projects, only 5 times this aligned. While in most ~~failed cases it was that i wanted much more sophisticated stuff than the eventual audience (if any). Or i was not connected to right audience. All the same. so.. YMMV ------ another one... > It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions. reminds me of something i told once to my mentees: "searching answers.. does not make life interesting. Search for questions... then you beCOME interesting. And inconvenient. To the asnwer-producers (whole industries and institutions are only doing this). which.. is already interesting :) ...Most People are either Answers - and boring ones - or not even Answers, only lay faceless. banal. incredibly predictable and.. like a transparent bag, you see through but can get through.. search for People-that-are-Questions. search. " have fun
• bryanmgreen 3y ago
  I think it's important to note there are two types of "great work" 1) Where you have work expertise that is objectively higher than your peers or in the top percentile of your industry due to natural skills or experience or both. 2) Where you have do not have top-percentile expertise, but are hitting the limits of your capabilities. Maxing out your performance is the only way to know your limits and get better. Sometimes you just can't improve, but if you're doing your best, that's great work too. I have my own business and while I think there are people out there who could do it better, everyday I'm putting in my best and learning a lot. What more could I realistically ask for?
  • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    The third type is where you just got lucky. For example a one hit wonder musician or writer. Your baseline abilities aren’t that good but you hit the high side of variance.
    • ftxbro 3y ago
      fourth type is when someone else does the great work and you get the credit
      • anonyme-honteux 3y ago
        That's so true, why bother doing great work, which is a lot of work, when you can get the credit of many people doing it? That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means something awesome about you personally. You need to be the one who always announce the news on Twitter, you don't even have to lie, your strongest fan will assume you did all the work. Like they believe he is the founder of Tesla. Like they believe he is the real life Tony Stark. Like they believe that he, not the actual rocket scientists working at Tesla, design all those rockets. Like they believe that he invented the hyperloop when he renamed the vactrain concept from hundred years ago and then couldn't build it because it's bullshit. Like they believe he will save humanity by helping us anytime soon to escape Earth that people like him are destroying. I don't really care about Elon Musk. The guy is a mix between a Tech Robber Baron and an emotionally immature 14 years old who has read too much science fiction. And remember more the fiction than the science. OTOH his fan club is a fascinating experiment on how a cult of personality develops in public and in real time.
• johnnyAghands 3y ago
  Kind of strange I'm getting a certificate error for this site... wondering if its just me. Strange.
• shri_krishna 3y ago
  Not related to the post. I am genuinely curious. Does PG make his own titles? And why is it a gif instead of a regular text? I know the site has remained stuck in the 90s kind of web design and I quite like it. However, I fail to understand why the title has to be a gif instead of text. Is it autogenerating it in the backend or did someone actually write it out in some graphical software, exported the title to a gif and then hardcoded it into the HTML? So many questions LMFAO
  • tim333 3y ago
    It's auto generated using ImageMagick. A lot of that is because he wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb in 1995 when things were done like that and then used the same tech for his personal site.
    • shri_krishna 3y ago
      Thanks for this gem! > A lot of that is because he wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb in 1995 when things were done like that and then used the same tech for his personal site Makes sense considering the first version of CSS did not roll out up until 1996 at the very least.
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  The fact that this is so much longer than previous ones makes me wonder if LLMs were involved.
• gozzoo 3y ago
  Am I the only one who is noticing that pg's posts are getting longer lately?
• nathias 3y ago
  a great work has many conditions, and takes a lifetime dedication from early on
• guptarohit 3y ago
  This is one of the great writeup! In case you want to listen it instead of reading it like me, you can do so by following command, it creates a audio file (named greatwork) which you can play: wget -qO- http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html | sed -e '/<script/,/<\/script>/d' -e 's/<[^>]*>//g; s/\&nbsp\;/ /g; s/\&amp\;/\&/g; s/\&lt\;/</g; s/\&gt\;/>/g' | say --progress -o greatwork please note, this is tested on macOS only.
  • dhdaadhd 3y ago
    If you’re looking for something that scales this feature, you might love Matter (https://hq.getmatter.com/ https://hq.getmatter.com/). It has instant article text-to-speech via a simple chrome extension & a web + iOS app - along with %-read tracking, ability to start playing audio from any word, etc. (Not affiliated, just a happy user.)
    • guptarohit 3y ago
      thanks for sharing, Matter looks promising I'll give it a try.
• vervas 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/HL1UzIK-flA https://youtu.be/HL1UzIK-flA
• htss2013 3y ago
  "What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for." I'm trying to make sense of this question. Usually people think about boredom as a matter of kind, not degree. X subject is either boring or not to most people, to any degree, small or large. Conceiving of boredom as a matter of degree is counter intuitive. Is this meant to be an insightful nuanced point or am I just high?
  • rosecross 3y ago
    Everyone likes movies, but that doesn’t mean they want to discuss cinematography all night.
    • htss2013 3y ago
      That's a difference in kind, not degree. People find watching movies interesting, not making them. They're two completely different experiences.
      • rosecross 3y ago
        Interests don’t stay in boxes. They grow tentacles that reach up and down the chain of production. They bump up against adjacent fields and they make the whole world look a little different. A single curiosity will evolve and change form over time. The beginning of it might not be boring to others, but if you take it far enough the end probably will be.
  • maxibenner 3y ago
    I'd imagine that a lot of people who are interested in taking photographs might zone out once I start talking about content-based interpretation and the renewal of artistic language.
  • stanleydrew 3y ago
    Thinking about boredom as a "matter of kind" is just a special case of "matter of degree." The degree is just zero or not zero. There are lots of subjects that I have a cursory interest in, but then I'm done exploring once I've read the Wikipedia page.
• emmender 3y ago
  As Mark Twain said: "I wrote a long essay because I didn't want to put the effort writing a shorter one" - applies to this piece.
  • rosecross 3y ago
    Guess you didn’t read to the end
    • emmender 3y ago
      No, I did not. The question is ill-posed imo. I would invert the question and ask: "How not to suck at your work" as that would lead to similar conclusions, and is more actionable. This essay has too many weasel sentences like: "Boldly chase outlier ideas," "Husband your morale" "Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. " "Curiosity is the best guide." This is woolly-feel-good writing that chatgpt and folks like steve pinker, deepak chopra etc specialize in, ie: a bag-of-words about fuzzy feel-good ideas we all want to hear.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • sanderjd 3y ago
        The essay is about something different than "how not to suck at your work".
  • _x5ft 3y ago
    Many of us feel this way about his essays. He bloviates often as if on a pedestal without realizing how transparently arrogant he sounds. Many of his ideas inherently contradict his other ideas, or are simply vague and shallow. But he’s rich, so of course he must be an astute philosopher.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • 3y ago
• cdelsolar 3y ago
  My problem is that I’ve already chosen what to work on long ago - Scrabble. I’ve built a popular (within the community) study tool, I’ve also been working on an open source AI that I believe is finally better than the state of the art one - I’m going to set up a match between them sometime soon (but need a bot interface, etc). This is without ML, too, which I fully intend to explore soon. And finally I’ve been working on a modern lichess-like app (woogles.io) for it, with tournaments, puzzles, etc that recently hosted its 3 millionth game, with a small team of contributors. It will likely be the test bed for the AI matches. And if that isn’t enough, I’ve attempted to achieve mastery at the game, being rated as high as 7th nationally in the last few years. Although I think I’d be better if I didn’t spend so much time building stuff for everyone to play with. The problem is there’s no money in it. Hasbro is litigious, all of this stuff is open source because I find it curious and deeply interesting, and as a sort of misguided attempt to try to democratize access to it. I’m not going to charge without getting sued, and even if one of the companies like Scopely wanted to hire me, I’m only interested in keeping this open source and free. So I’m not really sure what to do.
  • paulcole 3y ago
    I was rated around 1600 about 15 years ago and just discovered Woogles through Mack Meller’s Mack vs. Machine series on YouTube. I definitely won’t study again, but for a quick game against a bot it’s quite fun!
  • tough 3y ago
    Just keep doing whatever you want and maybe this work will be the springboard to a new discovery where copyright isn't limiting. I say following your passion can never go wrong, (well ,sometimes, heh)
    • detourdog 3y ago
      No doubt I have followed this advice to a Tee (given to me at weighing graduate school or a commercial world) 32 years later I have whittled the perputal timeline from 2-5 years to 6 weeks. Some days I even think I’m doing it.
  • 3y ago
• ava2 3y ago
  [flagged]
• astee 3y ago
  Prioritize output early. You can't do great without slogging through mediocre. Don't be afraid to suck. Don't stop at the first failure. And don't worry about originality. Creativity comes from doing. Experience begets ideas.
• einpoklum 3y ago
  > Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. So, either be someone who's privileged, or very lucky, or - first get rid of the wage-labor-based economy, and probably Capitalism altogether, then get started :-)
• iamwil 3y ago
  PG tends to revisit the same topics from different angles in multiple essays as he's figuring something out. You can hear resonances of this essay in a previous essay he had a long time ago about cultivating taste for makers. http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
  • mikewarot 3y ago
    Ansel Adams tended to visit the same sites and take slightly different photographs over time, refining his vision of a place. I think it's a modality of most work, refinement and improvement over time as new perspectives are incorporated.
    • mkoubaa 3y ago
      I revisit my favorite recipes and while each experiment isn't always better over a long enough time span they do seem to taste better
• worldta8 3y ago
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• rblion 3y ago
  Design checks all the boxes for me. I am naturally gifted in this field, deeply interested in how everything works, how I can increase quality of life for all beings. > There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. We are going to meet one day PG and I will thank you for encouraging me since I was 17. I am 33 now and determined as ever.
• RadixDLT 3y ago
  Unlocking your full potential comes down to one thing: passion. Find what lights a fire within you and let it fuel your journey towards doing great work.
• neilv 3y ago
  > Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. Is there some intent in not using headings?
• keithalewis 3y ago
  It's funny what people tell you if you just listen. Scrabble and Great Work. Tiddly Winks probably won't lead to great work either.
• 11thEarlOfMar 3y ago
  "Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that." Is there value in differentiating Luck from Chance? Perhaps Luck only pertains to attributes of you and your life you cannot change. Such as your DNA and your life before you can leave home. Chance can apply to the life path you determine for yourself. Perhaps, unknown to you, doing great work depends on a Chance encounter with a potential mentor in the field you are pursuing. You can increase your Chance of meeting that mentor by living in an area that has a high concentration of people in your field of interest. That Chance encounter is still a matter of Luck, but requires 'less' Luck than if you lived on a different continent.
• jakeduth 3y ago
  I clicked on this without seeing that it's on paulgraham.com, yet still picked up it was his writing within a minute of reading. His writing is distinct even for someone who hasn't read much of it. My question is: why?
  • a_bonobo 3y ago
    It's a unique mix of true earnestness, over-generalisation, very short sentences of roughly similar length, some insights, and a preachy tone. and a 90s website design :)
• artisanspam 3y ago
  As I've gotten older, I believe more and more that having a desire for great work has more negatives than it does positives. This post really demonstrates why I believe this – mainly because PG doesn't touch at all on why someone would want to do great work while romanticizing how great it is to have that desire. I don't think the question that ambitious people should be asking themselves is "what is work that I can do that will be great?" but something more akin to "what is work that I will find fulfilling?" Why do you want your work to be great? Do you think that the work being perceived as "great" is fulfilling in and of itself? What are you trying to prove through this work, and whom are you trying to prove it to? These are important questions to ask yourself because, otherwise, you're going to end up getting burnt out and wondering what all of your effort was really for. A personal anecdote: when I was younger, I wanted to be great at piano. I played it since I was very young and I spent many hours playing it through my teens. I competed against others at music festivals with moderate success, and I wanted to continue doing great work with it. But this environment put me in a terrible headspace. I would frequently have angry outbursts when I made minor mistakes while practicing. If not anger, I'd chastise myself to the point of crying (I firmly believe this is what gave me low self-esteem through my college years). When someone would tell me to take a break given my emotional state, I'd firmly say no and go back to practicing because... why would I stop? The best piano players practice for hours a day non-stop. I'd spent so many hours practicing and I was actually pretty good. I wouldn't be able to do great work if I were to take a break. It made me a competitive asshole, a sore loser, and a depressed individual. Ambition is still an admirable trait to have because, among other things, it demonstrates that you have curiosity and a love for life. But point I'm trying to make is that being ambitious for great work simply because you want to do great work is not a healthy way to do your work. You need to have a deeper reason for why you've chosen the work that you do, and you shouldn't fall for the romanticism that these sorts of essays put forth. The work that you do will be great work if you have a reason for doing it other than "I want to do something great."
  • hopa 3y ago
    Completely agreed. Media excessively romanticizes compulsive workers.
• spoonfeeder006 3y ago
  > When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out. That just gave me an idea for a phone app: Something that helps teenagers explore their interests and aptitudes (but not skills of course) Thoughts?
  • IAmGraydon 3y ago
    I like the idea, but it’s quite broad. It’s essentially what school is supposed to do.
    • spoonfeeder006 3y ago
      Yeah true. I don't know the scene in the schools but I have read a lot about how math education is pretty dismal, at least in the USA, depending on the teacher Maybe theres a way for an app to help someone who does have a math aptitude to realize that they do and that math is fun and not a bunch of rote memorization of formulas And repeat for like.... a bunch of other types of thought But you're right, it is pretty broad, so maybe best to start with a specific field There are apps like Brilliant that focus on math, so maybe that fills that niche, or maybe theres something that else could be added to it in terms of helping someone explore the raw thought processes involved
      • IAmGraydon 3y ago
        Maybe you could devise a test that, when completed, can detect where their natural strengths lie. I imagine such a test would be somewhat lengthy. That could easily be turned into an app and marketed.
  • klabb3 3y ago
    I had a thought a while back about how education systems are somewhat bad proxies for the type of work you want to do. There are many factors aside from just pure method that determine good fit, such as degrees of freedom, number of collaborators, market saturation and maturity, and feedback cycle lengths, etc. These vary greatly in “real life” but are almost always restricted in education systems. For instance, simple things like “there is a right answer to this question”, “you can finish this task in less than a week” and of course “an older more experienced person will judge your work” are true in school but vary greatly in the wild. I’ve found that people’s true passion axes mostly aren’t aligned with specific sub-fields (like say theoretical astrophysics, improv jazz saxophone), but tend to orient themselves towards higher level features. As someone who used to think that narrow specialization is paramount, this realization is incredibly liberating (also kinda missing from PGs post – I think he’s missing or glossing over an important aspect here).
• tppiotrowski 3y ago
  > What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. > The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. There's a contradiction here. If you work on something that bores other people (small niches) it will not satisfy the desire to do something impressive. For example: I want to tell my in-laws I work at Google, but I really want to create maps that simulate sunlight and shadow
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• BigElephant 3y ago
  Why is his site not in https??
  • the_common_man 3y ago
    Only the truly ambitious people will click through and read it. It acts as a filter.
    • BigElephant 3y ago
      I hope that is sarcasm
• pcurve 3y ago
  I liked these two snippets at the end. "Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. " "Do you want to do great work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. "
• neilv 3y ago
  > There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray. Money is an insurmountable objective barrier for most people, and seems it's just slipped into the middle of a list of things that are more likely overcome by merely strengthening one's character. So this sounds like wealthy person saying "don't concern yourself with money; just follow your heart".
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    No, he addresses that. Get a day job. Then do your project on nights and weekends, or else manage your manager into making it part of your job.
    • edandersen 3y ago
      The problem with moonlighting a meaningful side project is that any marketing you do will alert HR to the fact you are moonlighting (HR in large corps pay to have employees' social media scanned). In most cases you'll either be told to stop or in the worst case your employer will claim they own it.
      • tlb 3y ago
        This isn't the norm in Silicon Valley. Most companies will agree to exceptions to their Assignment of Inventions agreement if you ask, as long as it's not directly competitive.
        • pfannkuchen 3y ago
          If you work for a large company anything you do in software is directly competitive.
      • nip 3y ago
        PG did not use the term moonlighting for the fact that you don’t have to. That is unless you agreed to a contract that forbids from holding multiple jobs. 40h/week paying the bills leaves plenty of free time to do something on the side when you don’t have kids / a family to take care of
• thimkerbell 3y ago
  What question do you have about this essay? (It would be interesting to know, without reading every comment, what questions people have about it.)
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    Question: how could comments on the essay be structured, so as to give them maximum value for readers?
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    The essay doesn't mention LLMs. Does their rapid progress change the advice at all?
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    Empirically, does bicycling work for coming up with ideas too? (as walking and running do)
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    What are the characteristics of an institution whose people do great work? Would it be fair to compare Bell Labs to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study?
  • thimkerbell 3y ago
    How would you go about designing a high school or undergraduate course in coming up with the questions, ideally including doing work that raises them? What&where are some courses that do this?
• deleted 3y ago
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• thimkerbell 3y ago
  What typos or formatting issues did you notice, that should maybe be fixed? * Footnotes would ideally have backlinks, for those who read them all at once. * "ballon bursting"
• rr808 3y ago
  Does anyone have a TLDR of this? My attention span isn't what it used to be.
• codazoda 3y ago
  I like the article and I believe much of it, but I’ve been chasing personal passions for more than 25 years and I haven’t had a side project I’d call successful, at least not in a financial sense. So, there’s something else to that part. I suspect it’s at least a bit of luck. I continue to try to find a function that will work for me.
• lanstin 3y ago
  One wonders if he imagines writing and selling Viaweb during the dot com time was greatness comparable to discovering new physics.
• uptownfunk 3y ago
  Anytime PG published an article I want to go “sshhhh why are you telling them that you’re giving away all my hard earned secrets!” Great article
• kurosawa 3y ago
  This felt somehow complementary to Dr Seuss’ “Oh the places you’ll go”, specifically, part two and/or a commentary on part one. Thanks for this.
• hahnchen 3y ago
  Why is this post so long?
• JohnCurran 3y ago
  I respect Paul and everything that he writes, even if I don’t agree with it. It takes some serious stones to publish your thoughts on the internet - whether people agree or not. In any case. This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a corporate profit they will never see. I’m not interested in eliminating the ceiling - I want to raise the floor. Having a “side hustle” shouldn’t be a requirement to get by. I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. They’re not like us. That’s OK. There’s a lot of room between millions and billions
  • kirso 3y ago
    I think this essay applies not only on business but also your craft. If you like painting, work on your craft, not for the sake of betterment but for the sake of joy and appreciation for your craft. If its weightlifting work on it for the sake of yourself. IMO this applies to everything you do.
  • matwood 3y ago
    > I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies. As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then figure out a passion.
    • shurane 3y ago
      > And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies. Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit. Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc. Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.
• black_13 3y ago
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• nadam 3y ago
  As I got older I have a very different take on pg's essays than when I was younger. When I was younger these essays motivated me, as I felt that these essays are written for me. PG seemingly addresses many of his essays to 'very ambitious', 'extremely smart', 'independent thinking' people, and writes about topics to achieve extreme success. When I was younger I believed I am such a person. Now I know that I am smarter than average, has a little bit more ambition than average, but I am probably not THAT special. And it is OK. I can be, and am relatively successful. Without pg's grandious motivational writings. Nowadays I am not motivated by pg's essays as I am much much more conscious about myself and my motivations. When reading his essays I am much more interested in the rhetoric he uses to convince young people. I became an outsider, a third-party observer when it comes to his essays. One interesting thing I noticed at the start of the essay is that he starts with a descriptive tone: at the first sentence he does not assume that I, as a reader want to do 'great work'. "to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field." But then suddenly he writes this: "The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious." Now suddenly he makes the reader of the essay and the one he gives advice to equivalent. Ok, my personal opinion on pg's advice: For fairly ambitious people, who has some life experience these essays are fairly trivial. Absolutely not actionable. Most of us will not do 'great work'. Most of his readers will do 'good enough' work, even slightly above-average work. My advice would be that do what fulfills you. Don't aim for great work, aim for good work. If you are lucky your work can even become great. But you can still be happy if it is just good. Also don't sacrifice yourself too much chasing overly ambitious ideas while you are poor. Try to find joy in work that brings you closer to financial independence with much greater chance than pg's romanticized 'great work'.
  • the_common_man 3y ago
    What's the difference between great work and good work? It seems you are trying very hard to be a contrarian ( Which funnily is a trait of older age )
    • nadam 3y ago
      The difference is that great work is achieved by 1 in one million people. Good work can be achieved by one in 1000 people, or one in 100 depending on your definition. You can adjust your definition of good work to your circumstances. The difference is that even if you are much smarter than average you have miniscule chance to achieve the kind of great work pg tells you about. You can have a high chance to achieve good work, if your definition of good work is realistic. Yeah, I have some contrarian tendencies, always had, but I am not contrarian in every topic and hopefully not contrarian just for the sake of it.
• sagarpatil 3y ago
  Some of you might not have time to read 10,000+ words. I’ve tried my best to summarise the essay here: https://twitter.com/sagarpatil/status/1675438574140006401?s=46&t=mxdCIA2Nb6gnD7ZG81u9xQ https://twitter.com/sagarpatil/status/1675438574140006401?s=... If you have time, I recommend you reading the whole essay.
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• sagarpatil 3y ago
  Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on the assumption that everyone does. —- This poses a significant problem, and I’m still seeking solutions. As a child, I was fascinated by computer games and decided to become a computer engineer. However, I later discovered that I was not particularly skilled in math and programming. Despite the struggle, I managed to complete my degree. I had a genuine knack for history and geography and genuinely enjoyed them. However, I wasn’t sure if there were any viable career paths based on my interests, so I didn’t pursue them.
• javajosh 3y ago
  There's so little great work done that the path is bound to be idiosyncratic. I suspect that a lot of a great work sneaks up on people. Sort of like great love. It's that jolt of inspiration where you see something new. Like really new. If you're lucky, the vision is very very clear. If you're unlucky, you might have to spend an enormous amount of time clarifying it such that it can be communicated to others. This implies there's a lot of great work that dies along with the person who did it. I find that very easy to believe.
• andzuck 3y ago
  Is pg factoring uncertainty and unpredictability into this argument on per-project procrastination? He brought in the idea of natural selection earlier in the essay, yet may be ignoring that the best project to work on may not be known a priori. “One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does.”
• krosaen 3y ago
  For every person doing great work of the sort he describes - original and impactful - there often needs to be several talented people helping to execute towards the newly discovered goal. He hints at this when he mentions the need to manage on certain types of projects. So what of all those talented craftsmen helping get the idea done? Working a job, hard enough to squeeze away time towards significant side projects (if one still desires to maintain good health and relations with family)? Are they suckers? Should they phone it in at work to leave time for their side hustle? What if trying hard at their main job is more impactful? This is the paradox of startup advice. It’s good advice for those aiming to do original work. But it turns its nose up at the kind of work that is a vital ingredient towards achieving great things. And I think Cal Newports advice is more practical in this sense - cultivating craft and autonomy within any role can be equally satisfying and is way more practical for a lot of people. That said, I still really like PG’s advice for how to think about being original, and I suppose I shouldn’t expect someone trying to convince more people to become founders to be completely even handed about assessing or recommending other kinds of meaningful impactful work.
• redheadmad 3y ago
  I think, while you are not in top10%, you shoud copy best practices. Or even untill top3%. And when you get there - then you shoud think about own system.
• simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  This is possibly the best essay that Paul ever wrote. I've read it through the end, and the final part is so personal and so valuable that I don't want to anticipate anything, if you haven't read it already.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all. It’s interesting that he hardly ever mentions making money as a principal motivator. There’s a big insistence that the desire to make money drives quality (because competition). In my experience, it’s the opposite. Money is made at the expense of quality. It’s certainly possible to “bikeshed” on Quality, but I enjoy doing Quality work, even though it sometimes draws scorn.
  • dchftcs 3y ago
    Depends on what quality you optimize for. The quality of the execution, the quality of cost controls, etc. If you mean the quality of each unit of the product, then yes, you're largely right. You just need enough quality to let people buy from you, and any corner you can cut without losing sales is profit. However, often a startup needs to push the quality bar at first to be competitive with large existing incumbents in a market segment.
• leksak 3y ago
  Perhaps too unrelated but it is amusing to me that this isn't served over HTTPS and I wanted to share that remark as it got caught in my HTTPS everywhere extension
• mempko 3y ago
  My problem with Paul Graham's work is he keeps pushing on nature over nurture. Most work can actually be learned and you don't need a "natural aptitude" for it. This is especially true of knowledge work like programming, but also true of things like 'musical' or 'acting' or anything else. Most things can be learned. I wish Paul Graham would stop pushing that silly outdated concept of "natural aptitude".
  • sheepybloke 3y ago
    IMO this comment goes too far in the other direction. There is a lot of "natural aptitude" in what we can learn, and more specifically, what we can learn to do well. I can theoretically learn ballet, but I have no "natural aptitude" and so I will never be even OK at it. Similarly, my wife could try to learn programming, but her brain isn't able to make sense of how programming works. The big thing is that just because you don't have "natural aptitude" for something doesn't make you a worse human. It just means your strengths are elsewhere.
    • mempko 3y ago
      Have you tried ballet? Has your wife tried programming? Seems this is all just speculation if I were a betting man. This mindset you have is called a fixed mindset. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-mindset https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-min... I could teach anyone programming including your wife. The mechanics of it are easy. The hard part is building things that matter.
• nategreb 3y ago
  This essay was about 39 pages ~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.
• nategreb 3y ago
  This essay is about 39 pages ~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.
• T3RMINATED 3y ago
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