[HN Gopher] How to Do Great Work
___________________________________________________________________
How to Do Great Work
Author : razin
Score : 533 points
Date : 2023-07-01 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| He mentions that for certain projects you'll need to be good at
| managing others, or you shouldn't attempt them at all.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| 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.
| galacticaactual wrote:
| Frankly not sure what you want. You want money but also want to
| keep things open source and free. I think you need to take a
| hard look at your wants and how they map to the real world.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I just want enough to be able to work on it as a full time
| thing.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Maybe hasbro wants to hire you?
| tough wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| isc_lover wrote:
| Good effort, but ISC is still better. Sorry not sorry.
| j2bax wrote:
| Is there a problem if you don't use the trademarked name
| Scrabble or any of their art? It's my understanding that you
| can't protect a game mechanic. Is that inaccurate?
| lairv wrote:
| You seem passionate about it, so you should definitely keep
| going
|
| > Hasbro is litigious
|
| > I'm not going to charge without getting sue
|
| I don't think this is a thing ? There's this website which is a
| web Catan game ( https://colonist.io/ ) which is at least as
| niche as Scrabble, and they seem to be doing well
| ftxbro wrote:
| I remember looking this up before, and game rule sets are not
| protected in USA. You can't make some game rules and say that
| other people can't make that game. The things that are
| protected are the things that go along with the game, like if
| you use any trademark name in the game or if you use any
| protected media like if it's a card game then you can't use the
| same card art. My understanding is that you can make a game
| with the same rules as scrabble and not call it scrabble or use
| their art and you are allowed to do it.
|
| Edit: this is getting upvoted so maybe at this point I should
| say I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice lol
| jacobolus wrote:
| In theory. In practice, depends what judge you pull, and
| you'd better have deep pockets for legal fights.
|
| My friends made a Tetris-like game (under a different name,
| with unrelated art, just broadly similar rules) and were sued
| out of existence by The Tetris Company. Even though they were
| legally in the clear according to theoretical analysis, the
| judge took a brief look and decided "this seems like it
| should be a violation" and summarily decided in the Tetris
| Company's favor, without even engaging with any of the issues
| involved. Their pro-bono lawyers decided they didn't have the
| resources to mount an appeal, so that was the end of that.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| fourth type is when someone else does the great work and you
| get the credit
| n6242 wrote:
| Fifth type is when do something crappy but then someone
| else looks at it and for whatever reason they think it's
| great.
| notpachet wrote:
| The older I get, the bigger I think category 5 actually
| is.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| I work in the aerospace industry and know several current
| and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of them would
| agree with your assessment that Musk has done no
| meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer
| incapable of valuable work.
|
| I don't disagree with your read on his lack of maturity,
| or that he takes credit for work he hasn't done, or that
| his fans believe he is singularly responsible for the
| accomplishments of his teams. However, it's odd that Musk
| is so obsessively hated. I believe his passionate
| detractors are under a similar polarizing spell as his
| passionate fans, only in the opposite direction of "hero
| worship".
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "I work in the aerospace industry and know several
| current and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of
| them would agree with your assessment that Musk has done
| no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer
| incapable of valuable work."
|
| Could you expand that more? Like what meaningful work did
| your acquaintances say Musk did for SpaceX and what
| valuable engineering work did they think he was capable
| of doing?
|
| Maybe Musk socially engineered a kind of nerd
| reputational ant mill
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill where everyone who
| works in the aerospace industry knows several current and
| former senior engineers at SpaceX, none of whom agree
| with the assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work
| for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable
| work.
|
| I know he had pocket emeralds when he was a teenager and
| he bought twitter and made a lot of stupid tweets, but
| those things don't take much time, maybe in his other
| time he did amazing things.
| hgomersall wrote:
| To flip that on its head, most people who do great work
| do it explicitly for someone else. Or put another way:
| you can build equity for yourself, or you can build
| equity for someone else.
| ftxbro wrote:
| sometimes that depends on circumstance how easy or hard
| that decision is, for example if you got pocket emeralds
| as allowance from your parents when you were a teenager
| it might be easier to have means and agency to build
| equity for yourself, whereas if you were literally a
| medieval serf born into a fief then it might be harder to
| make this decision to build equity for yourself maybe you
| will have to revolt
| ftxbro wrote:
| I think some of the fan phenomenon is just how much money
| he has, although of course that's not the only thing.
| Like if he plans to spend all his money over the next
| decade (probably he doesn't) and he doesn't make any more
| money or interest, then if you can get one single second
| of his financial attention, then that is worth like a
| thousand dollars, so of course anyone like that will be
| swarmed by so many people.
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't think you have to be better than your peers to do great
| work, unless they're direct competitors. You could be working
| on something they're not, approaching it in a way that they
| haven't, making a creative expression of something particular
| to your own nature and experiences.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Surely there's another type where your work is _good_ but not,
| in isolation, truly extraordinary, but either by chance or by
| understanding the problem space is applied in a place that has
| a massive impact.
| raminf wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyAghands wrote:
| Kind of strange I'm getting a certificate error for this site...
| wondering if its just me. Strange.
| nathias wrote:
| a great work has many conditions, and takes a lifetime dedication
| from early on
| RadixDLT wrote:
| 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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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.
| carlossouza wrote:
| Although I enjoy reading his essays, yes, they tend to be
| longer than usual.
|
| I wonder whether he uses an editor to provide constructive
| feedback before publishing it or just writes and clicks
| "publish."
|
| Interestingly, I found that point missing: people who do great
| work usually have editors/mentors/advisors to help them along
| the way.
| andromaton wrote:
| Scroll to the bottom. He always credits multiple people. I
| assume all of them read his drafts.
| smokel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I find that quote rather condescending. It's also an excuse
| in disguise.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| "You are special (if you made it so far)" part is a cheap
| manipulation imo.
| DaveSchmindel wrote:
| [flagged]
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| 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.
| vsareto wrote:
| It's hard to not be lazy in today's corporate environments.
| You simply don't get much for putting in the extra effort.
|
| Hard work needs incentives. Companies want you to light that
| fire yourself so they don't have to pay extra. It's why I'm
| not curious about anything work-related (plus it's hard to be
| interested in CRUD apps after a decade). Even if I was, I'd
| give the benefits to myself and not my company.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Do you have examples of 200+ page API documentation that
| doesn't have any errors or broken examples?
|
| Sounds like the law of small errors to me:
|
| https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_4_00.html
| imran-iq wrote:
| Django docs come to mind
| GavinMcG wrote:
| By the way, and only because your comment suggests you care
| about detail and will find this valuable: it's "pored over"
| unless there was a liquid you were dumping on them.
| echelon wrote:
| > pored over
|
| Let's change this. That's disgusting. Literally.
| projektfu wrote:
| It's lousy documentation but it makes great coffee.
| [deleted]
| worldta8 wrote:
| From Zero to Millions: How Our Business Plan Transformed a
| Startup into a Mega Success Story -
| https://www.schoolterritory.com/2023/06/how-to-write-winning...
| norir wrote:
| One might be forgiven for wondering if PG gets paid by the word.
| shri_krishna wrote:
| 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
| andreasmueller wrote:
| 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).
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > 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.
| stephendause wrote:
| I certainly don't think you have to, and I don't think that's
| what Graham is saying, either. For those who are ambitious/do
| seek "greatness" in some form, though, I think this is a good
| article.
| helicalmix wrote:
| There's literally a note that says the text assumes you're very
| ambitious. If you have no desire to work towards some
| definition of "greatness", I assume that you're not ambitious,
| and the text doesn't apply to you.
|
| Which is ok! You don't need to be ambitious, but it also means
| you shouldn't take this essay so personally.
| padolsey wrote:
| Ambition is a pretty ambiguous term for what I think--here--
| means "A strong yearning for a type of success characterised
| by western capitalist-individualistic schema of wealth and
| status." Cool if you want that I guess. But it's narrow af.
| scaramanga wrote:
| If you work hard, in the fields, every day, perhaps one day
| you, too, could be a successful pharaoh like me. Said the
| great wise pharaoh.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| This is a oddly very narrow view of ambition.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Genuinely not sure what you mean -- it seems like the
| standard definition of ambition.
|
| How would you define it?
| vsareto wrote:
| Ambition has a large dynamic range. Shooting for
| greatness is closer to the extremes.
| hcks wrote:
| "Ambition is wanting to live any life you want" is not a
| very useful concept
| esafak wrote:
| It literally means a strong desire to do or achieve
| something.
| chii wrote:
| > Why would I spend my free time working toward "greatness"
|
| you don't have to. But then don't wonder why you never achieve
| greatness. Of course, life isn't about greatness.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Is Franz Kafka best remembered for how good he was at his day
| job?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And he died at 40 and this was his personal life:
|
| > Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was
| "tortured" by sexual desire ... his life was full of
| "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear
| of "sexual failure".[64] Kafka visited brothels for most of
| his adult life[65][66][67] and was interested in
| pornography.[63] In addition, he had close relationships
| with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912,
| Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in
| Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company. A week
| after the meeting at Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:
| emodendroket wrote:
| OK... neither here nor there for my point that nobody
| remembers him as a clerk.
| wsc981 wrote:
| If you can be a great parent, you've already achieved
| greatness from my point of view. And perhaps easier to
| achieve.
| amoshebb wrote:
| > The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
|
| No reason why. PG isn't writing to you. If you've got hobbies
| that make you happy, relationships you love, and runs that keep
| you healthy, I'm sure PG would tell you not to change anything.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I think the idea here would be to manage your manager so you
| can tie what work interests you into your job whenever
| possible, implied by this section:
|
| "Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.
| If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be
| on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project,
| but you'll be driving your part of it."
|
| as for time with family and friends, I'd say you can't have it
| all. It's a personal decision on whether you want to achieve
| "greatness" and what you are willing to sacrifice for it
| scaramanga wrote:
| Develop a habit of having a lot of dollars. Don't let life be
| something you do without at least a billion of them.
|
| You're totally welcome for the sage advice. Have a nice day.
|
| haha.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I enjoy working on my side projects more so than other hobbies,
| I have fun with them, it's not "work" in the sense as I think
| you mean. I'm not working towards "greatness" as much as I have
| ideas for projects that I think should exist and then want to
| bring them into existence.
|
| I truly and deeply find my chosen projects interesting and
| stimulating in a way other things aren't.
|
| I don't view work as a bad thing, with the caveat that it has
| to be productive and interesting work that goes towards
| something I think is impactful where the definition of
| impactful is personal.
|
| I'm not saying your way is incorrect or bad or anything, just
| providing the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time
| working and how I feel about it.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Sometimes that side work prepares you for a day job that's more
| enjoyable and/or pays better.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| I've never been happier not trying to be "great" and being
| "content"
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I found it much better to work "overtime" at my day job to
| learn new to me technologies and do POCs if the company is
| not using the technology or to volunteer for assignments
| based on something I don't know well and put in extra time to
| meet the deadline.
|
| One reason is that I can seek feedback from coworkers and
| polish the POC. I also can take advantage of infrastructure
| that may be cost prohibitive to test something at scale based
| on real world usage.
|
| The other reason is that for my next job, it's much more
| impressive to say I spearheaded work for a company than a
| hobbyist side project.
|
| Yes I know one advantage of your own side project is that you
| can show your code. But most of the time the hiring manager
| isn't going to take time to look at your work anyway.
|
| I have personally been fortunate enough to have unfettered
| Admin access to an AWS account on someone else's dime between
| two jobs for the past five years where I could experiment and
| learn on the job.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| What's your complaint? That this article is not targeted at
| you? The article is titled "how to do great work". If you
| aren't interested in doing great work then you are not the
| target audience.
| skribanto wrote:
| Does HN really think this? 99% of people will have neutral to
| negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem. None of us
| are the target audience is this article
| brigadier132 wrote:
| The words you wrote make sense but are filled with so many
| assumptions and beliefs that I actually don't understand
| what you are trying to say.
|
| For example
|
| > 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the
| world 10 yrs post mortem
|
| What does it even mean to have a negative impact on the
| "world"? Do you mean a negative impact on humanity? Also,
| where does the 99% number come from.
|
| > None of us are the target audience is this article
|
| Do you think humanity would be worse off with more people
| working hard to create and discover things to improve their
| own lives and the lives of others?
|
| Anyway, your comment is filled with cliche cynicism.
| Cynicism is a cheap way to appear smart. I think people
| learned it from TV when they watched tv shows like House or
| Sherlock.
| mmargerum wrote:
| If your personal projects are "work" then yes do not bother.
| These are my creative outlet and where I get to enjoy coding
| again. My day job is massive .net/angular/sql projects that are
| just meh.
| luqtas wrote:
| 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
| lewisjoe wrote:
| "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.
| badpun wrote:
| 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]
| kubb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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.
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| 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?
| rmorey wrote:
| [flagged]
| moffkalast wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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: "Decat sa 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 wrote:
| Who is Claude?
| la_fayette wrote:
| I read the text of PG and now found this summary, which fully
| sums it up. Thank you.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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 :-)
| fnord77 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| CartyBoston wrote:
| It would be nice to see Paul write more about the
| privileges he has enjoyed.
| [deleted]
| amts wrote:
| Yep, get yourself a bs job first while implicitly getting
| yourself stroke, cancer and diabetes from it to pay for
| utilities and a few gallons of water per month and only then do
| great work.
| [deleted]
| guptarohit wrote:
| 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 | sed -e
| '/<script/,/<\/script>/d' -e 's/<[^>]*>//g; s/\ \;/ /g;
| s/\&\;/\&/g; s/\<\;/</g; s/\>\;/>/g' | say --progress -o
| greatwork
|
| please note, this is tested on macOS only.
| dhdaadhd wrote:
| If you're looking for something that scales this feature, you
| might love Matter (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 wrote:
| thanks for sharing, Matter looks promising I'll give it a
| try.
| wackget wrote:
| It's 2023. Why do many websites featured here _still_ not use
| HTTPS?
| slig wrote:
| It's not _even_ tableless.
| ghqst wrote:
| see http://n-gate.com/software/
| nullandvoid wrote:
| 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.
| mgamache wrote:
| Sure, but there's a wider context of encrypting all internet
| traffic to provide less context for the stuff that _is_
| sensitive.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| I suppose someone could mitm impersonating pg? Seems like a
| low risk though.
| nyc_pizzadev wrote:
| What about an inbetween actor changing the content? Or
| someone just hijacking the website?
| [deleted]
| ava2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| vonnik wrote:
| 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
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| 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: "Decat sa 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".
| zamfi wrote:
| I'm not sure we got the same thing from this essay.
|
| Picking problems is one of the first things mentioned in this
| essay, and neither soccer-playing nor strawberry-picking seem
| like fields where there are lots of questions folks haven't
| answered yet. (This is not to say that there aren't interesting
| questions in agriculture or sports in general!)
|
| Picking a field that's zero-sum, where there are already 100
| workaholic geniuses pursuing the only possible positive
| outcomes (eg, champions league forward) seems like maybe not
| the right way to go, and the essay is pretty explicit about
| this.
| Blahah wrote:
| Honestly I didn't think it was well put at all. A vast number
| of words for very little content, and what content can be
| distilled is useful to approximately nobody. I've never known a
| person who needed this advice.
|
| If you're exceptional in some niche you don't need the advice
| (if it can be called that). If you aren't, you can be your best
| and thrive if you are motivated, in which case this is
| similarly unhelpful. In the final case, if you aren't
| intrinsically motivated to do 'great work' then you won't.
| jsunderland323 wrote:
| I think part of the point of it is to assure people working
| on niche problems that embody some of the qualities of what
| pg is describing as great work. It's easy to look at the
| shiny zeitgeist and feel a lot of self doubt if you're off
| working on something few outside the niche seem to
| understand. I'm not sure if this an advice piece as much as
| an encouragement piece to those readers going through those
| trenches.
| [deleted]
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'm not really sure that their statement is temporal or
| regional. With failure in general comes lessons that can be
| applied to other situations, regardless of anything else.
| moneywoes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| How does this work in the world of business where 99% fail
|
| Should I not even try?
| badpun wrote:
| Example - try to launch a startup as a technical founder. If
| it fails, you can still get a coding job and do ok.
|
| Example of what not to do - try becoming a pro poker player.
| If you fail, you have no marketable skills to fall back on.
| chksum wrote:
| Many professional poker players transition into quant based
| roles. They're great at assessing risk and objective
| decision making.
| [deleted]
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| My cousin tried to become a twitch streamer. He is an
| incredible gamer and did some competitive gaming in shooter
| tournaments back in the day. He's also very funny and
| charismatic.
|
| He became interested in hacking minecraft pushed some of the
| boundaries of what you could do in the modding/hacking scene.
|
| Despite his efforts, things never really took off and ended up
| heading off to college like the rest of us.
| sctb wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Prizes and rewards are never guaranteed. The only way to be
| sure you aren't wasting your time is to spend it on something
| gratifying--in the context of this essay this might be the
| "excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of
| great work." You don't need a fallback if your approach isn't
| outcome oriented.
| kepano wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| dkqmduems wrote:
| There's another word for this...play?
| xyzelement wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ideation and customer discovery? Market research?
| tough wrote:
| 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
| cushychicken wrote:
| 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.
| skmurphy wrote:
| 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.
| zengid wrote:
| Hofstadter's Law:
|
| _It always takes longer than you think, even if you take into
| account Hofstadter's Law._
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| Similar but more confidence.
|
| And ignoring all self doubt and imposter feelings has made my
| career way less stressful.
| moneywoes wrote:
| > the right people to leverage that context and experience on
| meaningful applications
|
| Whss as t does this entail, business context?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| aman_jha wrote:
| An essay worth waiting months to read
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The fact that this is so much longer than previous ones makes me
| wonder if LLMs were involved.
| urs wrote:
| 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), 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)).
| interroboink wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Right now, the audio tech/software niche is abuzz with ideas
| and attempts related to using transformer technology within
| the field. Music generation, new synthesis techniques,
| generative DSP and more.
|
| According to the field, viewed from some altitude, these the
| "important (to the world)" things.
|
| But for myself, with 25+ years in the field, I couldn't give
| a rat's arse about any of it. Absolutely not "important (to
| me)".
|
| Am I ambitious (still) ? I think so. But I'm also picky about
| where I'm willing to put my energy.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Curious, do you just think the industry is over hyped
| zug_zug wrote:
| 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]
| mistermann wrote:
| Watch out for this during your analysis:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
| ianbutler wrote:
| > 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.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure you see what I'm
| saying.
|
| If you want to maximize your chances of being a great writer,
| obviously write. But if you want to maximize your chances of
| being great period, then you need to decide if writing the
| next great american novel is the course you want to work
| toward. IMO you are an order of magnitude more likely to
| become famous/great from youtube than from writing, even if
| your best skill is novel-writing.
|
| Sure there are people who persevered at writing at made it
| work, but also probably more people persevered and wasted
| their lives on writing than most other pursuits.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| Traditionally, footnotes are straightforward explanations of
| terms or passages. Tech writers, in their grandiosity, have
| perverted them to contain randomass tangents that no one really
| cares about.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Whereas legal opinions use them either as a citation dump
| (known as "collecting cases"), as a place to bracket issues
| that are not being decided, or as a place to put a
| substantive response to a separate opinion in the case (if
| you're an appellate court).
| mamediz wrote:
| I like footnotes, or in this case maybe we should call
| "endnotes". David Foster Wallace was known to use them a lot,
| sometimes he would put footnotes in footnotes.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Good old postmodernist literature. So meta.
| leoc wrote:
| Footnotes are _mainly_ straightforward-enough glosses and
| references, but there have always been digressions (and quite
| often sniping) in there too. The C19 has some real specimens.
| interroboink wrote:
| > annoyingly breezy certainty.
|
| I may have to steal that phrase (:
| kens wrote:
| > [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.
|
| I think what's going on here is the theory that the purpose of
| religion is to create a trusted in-group separated from the
| out-group, with rules that make it difficult to casually join.
| [1] If you start from that premise, PG's footnote makes sense.
| But this ignores the fact that the largest religions really
| want as many members as possible and would be delighted if
| everyone followed their principles.
|
| [1] See for instance:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/24/there-are-rules-here/
| dmvdoug wrote:
| This is actually helpful. So, he's saying, religions _really_
| exist for this social function of group formation /identity.
| Thus, we know that the principles they proclaim, which tend
| to be universal claims of truth, are wrong, since if those
| principles were true, they would defeat the real purpose of
| religion. Therefore, one good way to find ideas to explore is
| to question the principles or bracket them and see what you
| can do without them.
|
| That does make what he's saying there cohere better. Of
| course, what he's saying turns entirely on the ambiguity he's
| playing on (which I suspected): religion in the sense of
| concrete historical/social human practices and religion in
| the sense of identifying strongly with and thus not
| questioning your principles. Never a good idea to hang your
| hat on the coatrack of suggestive language games. Or, you
| know, outrageous bullshit.
|
| I almost think it makes it worse, finding a coherent meaning
| ---which is so silly.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I used to interpret PG's self-assured tone as wisdom. Over the
| years though, I've come to realize what it actually is: hubris.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Not to get too memey but: why not both?
| rblion wrote:
| 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.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| PSA: This is much longer than pg's other essays. There are
| multiline gaps between sections that can seem like the end.
| culopatin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Go for it!
| zevv wrote:
| 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.
| keithalewis wrote:
| 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.
| Graffur wrote:
| [flagged]
| smokel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| ajkjk wrote:
| Anecdotally: I think of myself as one of those people who is by
| nature driven to do great work. Tbd if it happens. But in my
| life I see most other people as having written off almost
| everything I find interesting, all the places where it seems
| like there is great work to be done if one digs hard enough.
|
| It seems obvious that someone like me, who believes this and is
| looking and working everywhere, will be the type of person who
| does the great work, rather than someone who thinks that, ah
| well, it's probably an accident that others found things and
| they didn't. Because, seriously.. The gaps are everywhere! in
| everything! Some of us can scarcely go a day without having an
| idea that seems to have huge potential and it's a question of
| deciding what to focus on and how far to go. The problem is
| never thinking of something that could be great work to do...
| it's picking which one.
|
| So basically, strong disagree, it's no accident at all.
|
| That said the main reason everyone is writing off all the
| potential is, yes, lack of ambition, lack of curiosity, lack of
| perseverance, etc. Can those habits be unlearned? Dunno.
| Probably. I think most people are 'followers' at heart, and to
| imagine doing something truly novel is to imagine, ultimately,
| not trying to do what they're told, not trying to be safe. And
| the thought gives them intense anxiety so they explain a
| hundred reasons why they're right, why nothing can be done.
| Well, from my perspective that's just a matter of perspective.
| badpun wrote:
| As usual, Ancient Greeks had it figured out already.
| Aristoteles wrote: "make war to have pace. Do business to
| enjoy leisure". That's the natural proclivity of 99% human
| beings. The other 1%, for whatever internal reason, does work
| for work's sake, and is often pushing civilization forward.
| smokel wrote:
| Perhaps I have worded my argument somewhat too poetically.
| You say that you are driven to do great work _by nature_.
| That is what I would call "by accident", as you had very
| little say in that nature.
|
| Pushing the argument a bit further: When you are so lucky to
| have what it takes to do great things, would you be able to
| _not_ do great things?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >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
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > to some degree, but it's not like you can luck your way
| into writing an app by slapping the keyboard
|
| I wish some of the people I've worked with knew this
| scaramanga wrote:
| 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.
| htss2013 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Everyone likes movies, but that doesn't mean they want to
| discuss cinematography all night.
| htss2013 wrote:
| That's a difference in kind, not degree. People find watching
| movies interesting, not making them. They're two completely
| different experiences.
| rosecross wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| slothtrop wrote:
| This is contrived. You can do a good job bagging groceries, but
| no society will ever elevate that to "greatness". Colloquially
| it's either in reference to mastery, or prolific/high-impact
| work as society is concerned.
| tinktank wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm constantly amazed at the clever, resourceful
| folks beavering away on things that don't have a lot of
| visibility.
| peteradio wrote:
| Seems well aligned with the dictionary definition of great. If
| you are maintaining the status quo that is pretty much by
| definition not great.
| badpun wrote:
| great: immense; notable; momentous; exalted; grand
|
| If you can dig ditches faster than anyone else, then you're a
| great ditch digger, and you're doing great work. Similarly,
| if you're a surgeon who saves much more lives than the
| average, you're doing great work. Etc.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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).
| masto wrote:
| 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.
| dzogchen wrote:
| It is a very narcisistic perspective. Which makes sense if you
| consider the author.
| andai wrote:
| 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...
|
| Although rogue bees (as a small portion of the population) are
| actually essential to a hive's survival.
| neon_electro wrote:
| Could it be possible that there is also overlap between
| groups A and B, and the interdependence is what fuels
| societal progress more than "it's all group B"?
| hooverd wrote:
| A tortured analogy could be line cooks and dishwashers, the
| line cooks made all the tasty food, but the kitchen would
| crash and burn without the dishwashers and busboys and prep
| cooks.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| mattlondon wrote:
| TL;Dr - be rich enough that you don't need to do Real Work and
| can focus on your personal passion projects.
| astee wrote:
| 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.
| ignoramous wrote:
| https mirror: https://archive.is/4ZlRl
| thisismyswamp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| moneywoes wrote:
| Where do you go for specific advice, upwork?
| iamwil wrote:
| 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
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| mmargerum wrote:
| Why doesn't paul take some of that cash horde and put it into the
| LISP community? Maybe he does?
| emmender wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Guess you didn't read to the end
| emmender wrote:
| 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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Can we get Paul an SSL cert?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| How did it hold you back that it was plain http?
| oldstrangers wrote:
| That's irrelevant obviously but Chrome pushing a bunch of
| 'not secure' warnings at me isn't ideal.
| [deleted]
| gozzoo wrote:
| Am I the only one who is noticing that pg's posts are getting
| longer lately?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > 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.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| Yes! I've found this approach very useful with my own projects.
| I might not be out here inventing C++ or Linux, but it's
| actually not too hard to find projects where you can apply well
| known computing techniques or technologies to a new domain to
| do something truly new.
|
| I think this is really motivational because doing something new
| and showing the world is really fun!
| bigdict wrote:
| > I might not be out here inventing C++
|
| thank you!
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| creer wrote:
| Re. "this is the best time to be a polymath". I was noticing
| something like that. For a while it became impossible to know
| or do "science" ("philosophy", was it?) as a whole. Too
| broad, too deep. That was not the end of the polymath but it
| was the end of truly broad expertise in one individual. Then
| the net in general made so much info available painlessly.
| (Much faster to dig deep on a narrow issue and switch issues
| - than say, even with a large academic library.) So that now,
| it's still not possible to master the forefront of tech or
| science on a very broad front, but it is possible to dig deep
| as needed to address this or that problem in the pursuit of
| what is now just about always a multidisciplinary project.
|
| With the very present danger that many feel that a couple
| youtube videos is as deep as they ever need to go.
|
| Being able to gauge how deep and broad you have to go for
| each difficulty you encounter has become an important skill.
| But polymath seems very possible.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this
| _while they 're discussing a specific object level problem_
| and see how that goes.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I don't really follow. You've quoted a few statements and
| I also don't know what you mean by a specific object
| level problem.
|
| Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's
| endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding
| what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too
| hungry.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| 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
| Biologist123 wrote:
| I don't know man, farming in most of the world is a totally
| risky activity.
| tuukkah wrote:
| You might say the climate crisis has made it interesting.
| ycomb-acct wrote:
| [flagged]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Just a self-delusion due to lack of research. It's all
| due to technology advances, all of it. Against increasing
| drought and heat.
|
| Sure corn grows in more places now. Because they warmed
| up - a concern of its own. They'll not stop warming up.
| Witness https://globalnews.ca/news/9761043/dry-spring-
| southern-alber...
| ycomb-acct wrote:
| [flagged]
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| Some categories are explored or unexplored because either they
| didn't have a compelling, defining entrant like smart watches
| or they're Chindogu like flying cars and VR.
|
| Build something that's currently painful you know there's a
| definite need for and people would gladly pay money for.
| Solving a burning pain is far more compelling than
| incrementally better with the gotcha of introducing the risk of
| change.
|
| The biggest mistake people make is not letting things soak in a
| lean, passive income marketable way. They'll build something,
| shake the trees for customers for a little while, and then turn
| it off 3 months later when they're not instant internet
| billionaires. Not working would be 15 years later <$10k/year
| net profit. Let it simmer with as little engineering investment
| as possible. Never waste time on churn for churn's sake, or
| effort that doesn't add end-user UX value.
| igormartynov wrote:
| 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.
| vervas wrote:
| https://youtu.be/HL1UzIK-flA
| snihalani wrote:
| can I sell pg a https cert plz
| travisgriggs wrote:
| 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 :/
| js2 wrote:
| Some of my greatest joys are cooking a meal and doing the lawn.
| They are so much different than writing software. There's a
| start, an end, and a clear set of steps in between where you
| can easily see your progress. When you're done, you can step
| back and admire your work, and show it to others.
|
| Do you ever refactor your LEGO builds into new builds? Do you
| prefer kits or building something of your own design from
| generic sets?
| jahewson wrote:
| I like to start with a deck of my LEGO design for the pre-
| seed round.
| borski wrote:
| Nah. I literally have a LEGO brick tattoo. Never let that die.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| [dead]
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| > 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
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