How to Do Great Work (opens in new tab)

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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), and mentioned it on Twitter (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)).

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.

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.

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

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.

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".

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.

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'.

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".

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.

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?

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.

> 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 :/

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.

- 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 | 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.

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.

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?

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

> 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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

I wish Paul Graham would stop pushing that silly outdated concept of "natural aptitude".

> 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

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?

If you have time, I recommend you reading the whole essay.

* Footnotes would ideally have backlinks, for those who read them all at once.

* "ballon bursting"

https://youtu.be/S8jWFcDGz4Y

"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. "

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.

(It would be interesting to know, without reading every comment, what questions people have about it.)

Great article

Is there some intent in not using headings?

~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.

~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.

Twenty words: Strive for great work by choosing an exciting field, exploring its frontiers, noticing gaps, and boldly exploring promising ideas.

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.

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 :-)

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.

My question is: why?