[HN Gopher] How to Do Great Work
___________________________________________________________________
How to Do Great Work
Author : razin
Score : 909 points
Date : 2023-07-01 14:41 UTC (1 days 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.
| Zetice wrote:
| I think your comment is an underappreciated one.
|
| The article, to me, seems exceedingly preferential to the
| "tortured/overworked genius" method of innovation, and by now
| I'm personally tired of seeing that trope fall on its face.
|
| The best... anything gets built by many people. Of course it
| takes a VC to try and tell us about the "exceptional" people at
| the top who make it all possible, but the number of times PG
| points out how instrumental Jessica was to the early days of YC
| disproves the very trope he's trying to puff up here.
| aputsiak wrote:
| My thoughts as well. He himself went ALL the way through the
| educational system broadly and were into arts and so on, so did
| his friend and collaborator Morris. Granted, PG has seen tech
| talent and success unfold on a scale that few will experience,
| which gives him a unique perspective. I'm still left wondering
| what role he attributes having close friends like he did,
| peers, mentors, community and collaboration...
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Teamwork was mentioned in the post
| 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.
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| 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.
| magpi3 wrote:
| You could perhaps pivot someday into your own original IP (i.e.
| create a word/letter based game that doesn't infringe a
| corporations IP).
| 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?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Have you got a Patreon?
| v64 wrote:
| @cdelsolar, definitely consider Patreon. I mentioned in
| this comment [1] recently about how so many coders are
| doing exactly what you wanna be doing, working on awesome
| projects full time, funded by people who want to see you
| succeed and to get the opportunity to get a behind the
| scenes glimpse of how you work, get updates about new
| things you're working on before anyone else, and getting
| access to beta testing and new features first.
|
| I've worked with Scrabble players in the past on a
| personal project [2] and can say this is absolutely the
| kind of thing they'd go for. I had never heard of
| woogles.io either and will be passing the link on to them
| as well.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=36525089
|
| [2] https://github.com/v64/fiend
| cdelsolar wrote:
| We have a Patreon for Woogles, we make on the order of
| $100 a month from it. Mostly to keep our servers running
| along with other random donations. Not sure if we need to
| do more "fundraising".
| v64 wrote:
| That's legit and a sign that you're on the right track. I
| was an early user of lichess when it was getting started
| and they were always a better experience than either
| chess.com or internet chess club, it was just a matter of
| convincing the best players to play there. Hope things
| grow and I'll do my best to convince my friends who play
| to give the site a shot :)
| 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.
| phforms wrote:
| I don't think that great work and financial success are
| necessarily related; in fact, in many historical cases they
| were not. For me personally, I always have special and long-
| term projects on the side (that may or may not lead to "great
| work"), while doing more boring work in my bread-and-butter
| job. I guess I need some sort of independence from financial or
| social pressure when I want to do what I am passionate about,
| even if it means that I am not able to go "all in". Otherwise
| it would only stress me out and in the worst case, I would lose
| interest or drift away from my original intentions to satisfy a
| customer or whoever might give me money.
|
| So many very valuable or important things are just not
| profitable, but that doesn't mean they should not be pursued.
| jebarker wrote:
| > I don't think that great work and financial success are
| necessarily related
|
| This is an important thing to know. An even broader point is
| that no matter what you do you can't control how the world
| will receive your work. You may do work that's considered
| great long after you're dead. You may do work that is
| tragically overlooked because something bigger happens to be
| going on right now.
|
| That's why I think the advice to follow your interests is
| solid. At least that way you'll guarantee doing something
| interesting even if you can't guarantee doing something
| great.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I think they're related, but it doesn't go both ways. Self-
| made financial success almost always takes great work,
| although great work does not necessarily lead to financial
| success even when the work is clearly great.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I can think of many examples of mediocre work resulting in
| self made financial success.
| jebarker wrote:
| Maybe we disagree on what constitutes self-made financial
| success, but it seems to me that most wealthy people have
| not done great work at all. It's entirely possible, and
| fairly common, to become financially independent by
| grinding away at mediocrity or even actively being shitty.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Oh no, I agree with you there. Most wealthy people are
| not self-made, which supports your point. Maybe that's
| where the sleight of hand occurs -- many if not all
| wealthy people will pass it off as being self-made, when
| only a small fraction of those instances are the case.
| But I do think you will see hard work playing a large
| role in that fraction of cases.
| sanderjd wrote:
| No, I really think you're mistaking this. Some of the
| easiest ways to become wealthy - or let's say
| "financially independent", because it's a more clear-cut
| term - are doing useful and well-compensated work, that
| is definitely not "great work" in the essay's sense.
| Think dentists and most doctors and lawyers, and also
| lots of different kinds of "businesspeople", including
| software engineers at big successful companies. Think
| about the people you see on a private golf course that
| they have a house next to; those people are all wealthy,
| some of them inherited it, sure, but many of them just
| plugged away at lucrative jobs and saved and invested
| well. That's not what the essay is talking about. It is a
| much easier way to achieve financial success than
| attempting to do "great work" in the essay's sense.
|
| Personally I have had a tendency to waffle back and forth
| between the ambition to "great work" and the ambition
| (and at times, necessity) to do _lucrative_ work. And for
| me, thus far, the two things have been almost entirely
| negatively correlated; I have given up the lucrative path
| to seek something I hope will be "great", or given up
| the "great work" path to seek something I know will be
| lucrative.
|
| To bring this back into the lens of the article, I do
| think that for people who are not already financially
| independent, this can / should / is just one more
| constraint in the search through this space of "what
| should I work on". Some "great work" is lucrative while a
| lot is not. Financially independent people have the
| privilege to choose freely among the two kinds, while the
| rest of us have to focus on the lucrative kind to at
| least some degree.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| If anything, I view that as a slight deficiency and bias
| of the essay's sense. Here's how I'd phrase it based on
| what's worked for me, which is "Learn to fall in love
| with expensive, poorly-solved problems." Not all
| expensive poorly-solved problems are poorly-solved, but
| for the ones that are, focusing your curiosity on them --
| why they are expensive, why they are poorly-solved, what
| state of the art looks like, how it could be improved --
| that is a surefire way, in my view, towards doing great
| work.
|
| Now, that may not be considered great work by the essay.
| But I might read the essay with my assumption around its
| editorialization -- which is that it's to some degree an
| attempt to describe "here's what I'd like to invest in."
| I'll bet you today (and especially in the future) that if
| I tested the author's revealed preference about investing
| in "my" thesis of great work, while our stated
| preferences might differ, our revealed preferences would
| align.
|
| Caveat that this is this is all conjecture given that
| I've never directly interacted with YC's investment
| thesis.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah we're sort of just debating the implied definition
| of something left purposefully vague, but I don't read
| this particular essay as an investment thesis thing at
| all. His motivating examples are pretty much all
| musicians and theoreticians there's no investing in those
| things. To some extent those examples are metaphorical of
| course, and I'm certain he is thinking of at least some
| entrepreneurs as having done "great work". But I still
| take the essay more at face value that it isn't primarily
| focused on the kind of wildly lucrative "great work" that
| makes a good investment.
| isc_lover wrote:
| Good effort, but ISC is still better. Sorry not sorry.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Nice trolling :) ISC still saves all passwords in plain text
| (!), they're unchangeable, and probably running a very
| ancient and vulnerable version of Java. Apparently someone on
| the FB group claimed their password which they only use for
| that site was found in a data breach.
|
| Oh yeah and you can change your tiles at will and draw
| RETINAS 7 times in a row if you want :)
| 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?
| paulcole wrote:
| I was rated around 1600 about 15 years ago and just discovered
| Woogles through Mack Meller's Mack vs. Machine series on
| YouTube. I definitely won't study again, but for a quick game
| against a bot it's quite fun!
| 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
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Are you obsessed with scrabble... or could that obsession be
| broadened to "word games" including wordle, crosswords, other
| word games (boggle?). Maybe time to make your own original
| game? That may get you further away from hasbro.
| simonh wrote:
| In the old days we used to call those hobbies.
| 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.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| An interesting discussion from 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19533219
|
| _Tetris Holdings, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc._ held that
| the tetrominoes are "expression; they are not part of the
| ideas, rules, or functions of the game," which certainly
| seems open to dispute, but I could just as easily imagine
| the same standard being applied to letter tiles with a
| score value in the corner.
|
| So yeah, unless you have a few spare million to get this
| precedent overturned, it's probably not worth it.
| [deleted]
| Aeolun wrote:
| Wait what? That's not expression. Without the blocks
| being the shapes they are there wouldn't be a (viable)
| game, so it's clearly part of the rules.
|
| Whether the blocks look like jelly or concrete is
| expression. Or even the exact graphics they use in
| Tetris.
|
| But the fact there's blocks in preconfigured shapes (and
| what those shapes are) is game rules. There's only so
| many ways you can stick four blocks together...
| jacobolus wrote:
| Yeah, the judge's gut-feel decision that using
| tetrominoes is not part of the functional rules of the
| game seemed absurd to me. But hey, when you are the judge
| you can more or less decide however you want, and the
| only one who can say otherwise is the next appellate
| court.
|
| Disclaimer: I made the "art" for Xio's game (i.e. I
| picked the colors and drew all the tiles and menu buttons
| etc. on my laptop in photoshop) as a favor to my friends,
| so am not an unbiased reporter. As a reward I got to sit
| through a long deposition. :-)
| ralphc wrote:
| Sounds like words with friends.
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I feel the same way, and I think it's really nice read for
| someone who's a decade or so into their career and has been
| head down chasing their interests im obscurity. The privelege
| of doing that is its own reward but it's easy to see why this
| approach leads to great outcomes.
|
| P.S.Why do you feel the need to say you're not a fanboy? Are
| you assuming that a positive statement about his work implies
| that you are and that you afraid of that impression ?
| photochemsyn 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.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| I'm talking about the fan perception of Musk.
|
| For example Jordan Peterson went on stage to say
| somethink (not exact quote) like: "Elon Musk wow. He
| wanted to built an electric car which is basically
| impossible and yet he went on, nobody thought he would be
| possible and he went on to fouund Tesla and now it
| works".
|
| In real life though the first electric car was invented
| in 1881, because electricity and fossil fuels have always
| been the two obvious sources of energy for making a car.
|
| Elon Musk wasn't the founder of Tesla, he bought it. He
| played a role sure. But obviously, painfully so, he
| didn't do the Tesla engineering alone. Tesla in fact pays
| shitloads of engineers to do the engineering. And Tesla
| is just one company making electric cars. Elon Musk
| brought the hype, the money, sometimes the right
| decisions, sometimes the wrong decisions, sometimes the
| toxic workplace. And he got lots of money from big
| government.
|
| And sociology taught us you don't have to be rich when
| you start your career. But that it sure helps a lot when
| you have no shortage of money, good education, you are a
| dude, your mother tongue is english, you know the right
| people, you are an illegal alien but that's okay because
| you come from a white supremacist country, and you happen
| to be here during the california gold rush, I mean the
| silicon valley in the 90s.
|
| When you check all those boxes, you are much more likely
| to become a "self made man"
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| I'm not talking about Musk, it may be hard to believe,
| but I genuinely don't care about him. He is the current
| guy with too much money, fame and ego.
|
| I'm talking about his fans and their perceptions of Musk.
| They hear "he is the real life Tony Stark" and they think
| "WOW" instead of Tony Stark is a character of fiction
| that can't possibly exist in reality".
|
| Absurdity is fascinating to me.
| 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.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| It's not obvious that this must happen actually. Bernard
| Arnault is as rich and sometimes richer than Elon Musk.
| But there is no big Bernard Arnault cult in France. He is
| recognized as a very efficient business shark but not
| worshipped. It's all about cultural relationship to
| money, and France and the US have a quite different
| relationship to money, although they have in common that
| it's a werid relationship to money.
| 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.
| lanstin wrote:
| One wonders if he imagines writing and selling Viaweb during the
| dot com time was greatness comparable to discovering new physics.
| artisanspam wrote:
| As I've gotten older, I believe more and more that having a
| desire for great work has more negatives than it does positives.
| This post really demonstrates why I believe this - mainly because
| PG doesn't touch at all on _why_ someone would want to do great
| work while romanticizing how great it is to have that desire.
|
| I don't think the question that ambitious people should be asking
| themselves is "what is work that I can do that will be great?"
| but something more akin to "what is work that I will find
| fulfilling?" _Why_ do you want your work to be great? Do you
| think that the work being perceived as "great" is fulfilling in
| and of itself? What are you trying to prove through this work,
| and whom are you trying to prove it to? These are important
| questions to ask yourself because, otherwise, you're going to end
| up getting burnt out and wondering what all of your effort was
| really for.
|
| A personal anecdote: when I was younger, I wanted to be great at
| piano. I played it since I was very young and I spent many hours
| playing it through my teens. I competed against others at music
| festivals with moderate success, and I wanted to continue doing
| great work with it. But this environment put me in a terrible
| headspace. I would frequently have angry outbursts when I made
| minor mistakes while practicing. If not anger, I'd chastise
| myself to the point of crying (I firmly believe this is what gave
| me low self-esteem through my college years). When someone would
| tell me to take a break given my emotional state, I'd firmly say
| no and go back to practicing because... why would I stop? The
| best piano players practice for hours a day non-stop. I'd spent
| so many hours practicing and I was actually pretty good. I
| wouldn't be able to do great work if I were to take a break.
|
| It made me a competitive asshole, a sore loser, and a depressed
| individual.
|
| Ambition is still an admirable trait to have because, among other
| things, it demonstrates that you have curiosity and a love for
| life. But point I'm trying to make is that being ambitious for
| great work simply because you want to do great work is not a
| healthy way to do your work. You need to have a deeper reason for
| why you've chosen the work that you do, and you shouldn't fall
| for the romanticism that these sorts of essays put forth.
|
| The work that you do will be great work if you have a reason for
| doing it other than "I want to do something great."
| rikroots wrote:
| > The work that you do will be great work if you have a reason
| for doing it other than "I want to do something great."
|
| I've always had an issue with the word "great". Who defines
| greatness? How will I know that I've achieved greatness in
| whatever work I'm doing at any particular time.
|
| For work, I know when my work is great because co-workers and
| managers praise it: "nice fix", "some really good insights
| here", etc.
|
| Beyond work - there's a whole bunch of egos and social politics
| that get tangled into the whole "what is great" thing:
|
| - "Great poem"? Depends entirely on who is on the competition
| judging panel or what mood the magazine editor is in when they
| read your submission.
|
| - "Great novel"? You've got to get it published first before
| the reviewers can cast their judgments, and to get it published
| you need to convince people that this is a great novel for the
| specific reason that it will make them some money when they
| publish it.
|
| - "Great JS library"? People need to know it exists - and then
| how do you measure its greatness? In my view great DevEx and
| minimal issues raised in GitHub are just as important (if not
| more important) than the elegance and speed of the code itself.
|
| Nowadays I judge the greatness of my varied passion projects by
| how well they please me. I am a harsh judge of myself: the days
| when I manage to draft a poem that leaves me stunned with
| wonder when I review it a few weeks later (for all poems should
| be left to ferment for a few weeks before review) is how I
| measure greatness. It's a rare occurence, but wondrous when it
| happens!
| nullcipher wrote:
| > For work, I know when my work is great because co-workers
| and managers praise it: "nice fix", "some really good
| insights here", etc.
|
| They only said nice and good though not great. I would say if
| your CEO came down and said that's awesome, then it's great
| work. (for you)
|
| As for me, I don't think too much about word semantics. No
| advice can be given or taken if you take each word apart. We
| will just keep arguing about details and miss the point.
| lying4fun wrote:
| It depends how much you value/respect your co-workers. In a
| high level team "good insight" can mean "great work". I am
| not saying you disagree with this, but you may have made
| assumptions about the parent's team and his relation to it.
| Conversely, a "great work" from a CEO can mean nothing to a
| person
| civilized wrote:
| I wonder if you might have found it more fulfilling if you had
| received some psychological help with all the harshness on
| yourself.
| cmdli wrote:
| As somebody who has struggled with similar issues, oftentimes
| the psychological help you need is to de-emphasize the
| ambition and success. You have to act against the expectation
| and dreams of greatness, and instead focus on your present
| state and appreciating that. It's not impossible to do great
| work and be happy, but it's very easy to let your dreams
| consume you.
| mindwok wrote:
| I have also followed a similar trajectory to you. My early 20's
| I wanted to do something 'great'. But my ambition was what Paul
| identified in this post as the type that precedes experience.
| As a result, I became restless, agitated if I thought I wasn't
| pursuing the right things, competitive.
|
| That is slowly disappearing from me, for the better. Now I just
| try to focus on doing things as well as I can. I don't worry
| about what to do, because really that will flow from your
| intuition. Just do what you want to do. Maybe it'll be great,
| maybe not, but you can't force greatness.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If great people didn't exist we are all doomed
| xapata wrote:
| Not all people who do great work are great people. In fact, I
| suspect a negative correlation.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| For a current example, see Elon Musk. Even here on a
| relatively level-headed hacking forum, any discussion of
| Musk will turn into poo-flinging between fanboys that
| worship him and haters who deny that success of his
| companies has anything to do with him.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Great person does not imply good person. My comment was
| about great people
| andzuck wrote:
| Thanks for zooming out and sharing these questions that
| challenge pg's assumption from the beginning. I felt caught in
| the essay's ethos and throngs the moment I started reading.
| This helps me pause
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree, and I think this conflict is actually visible within
| the essay. One particular parenthetical jumped out at me:
|
| > So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of
| the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on
| the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)
|
| PG never explains why love is an exception. Perhaps he thought
| it was obvious. I disagree.
|
| I agree that familial love is important to _the overall human
| experience_. But this isn 't an essay on how to live a
| fulfilling life, it's an essay on "how to do great work," for a
| so-called "very ambitious" person who wants to achieve "great
| work" at any cost. In this context, familial love is no less of
| a distraction than anything else. History is littered with
| eccentric artists who prioritized their work above any human
| interaction, and achieved fame for it.
|
| So why does PG say not to avoid love? I believe it's because
| deep down, he realizes that "great work" _isn 't_ the most
| important thing in life--but he isn't quite aware enough to
| acknowledge it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I don't think this essay ever actually made the value
| judgment that doing "great work" is "the most important thing
| in life" or even a good thing in life. Did I miss that part?
| I read it as, "for better or worse, some people are driven to
| do great work, here are some techniques to accomplish that".
| I think it's true, right?, that such people do exist, whether
| that is good or bad for them.
|
| I suppose I know enough of his history to know that he
| _would_ make that value judgment, but I read this particular
| essay as being fairly agnostic about it, leaving it up to the
| reader.
| koopuluri wrote:
| I agree. To your point, I feel the most useful questions we
| ought to ask are the ones that push us to understand our
| deepest selves: the desires, insecurities, fears that dictate
| why we do what we do.
|
| Without that deeper understanding, we're more easily trapped
| into following someone else's / the collective culture's
| programming of our minds - which likely doesn't prioritize our
| own individual well-being.
|
| And ofc this is a lifelong journey. I can't imagine waking up
| anytime soon thinking I understand what happens in the deepest
| recesses of my mind, but without having a reasonable sense of
| the deeper motivations, it's easy to read this essay by PG and
| feel a craving to "do great work" without understanding why or
| the impact this craving can have on your wellbeing.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree with you about whether this is the best
| path to a good life.
|
| But I also don't think the essay actually does romanticize
| "great work". I read it as, "if you are the kind of person who
| naturally has this kind of ambition, this essay will speak to
| you, and if you aren't that kind of person, it won't". That is,
| I think it's necessary for you to be that kind of person, in
| order to read the essay as a romanticism. And clearly you have
| that in you, as your anecdote about piano demonstrates. And
| even though you have concluded that this is not a good facet of
| your personality, it's hard to truly shake it.
|
| Personally, this plight really speaks to me (and I'm sorry if
| I'm just projecting that onto you...). When I really think
| about it, the happiest most chill times in my life and career
| are when I've just been plugging away doing useful and well-
| compensated work, but definitely not "great work" in the
| essay's sense. I have told myself many times to just do that
| and do fun and enriching things with my friends and family and
| be content with that. But it never fails, I always get the nag
| eventually, to be more ambitious, to try to do work that is
| more impactful, more "great". So this essay spoke to me,
| because of that trait I seem to have, even if I'm totally
| unconvinced that it is the best path to a good life.
|
| And I don't think this is universal. I think nearly everyone I
| know would instead read this essay as "that sounds exhausting
| and terrible" and, as the essay alludes to at the end, would
| not make it very deep into it.
|
| But yeah, striving to do the kind of "great work" that this
| essay is talking about is certainly not what I want for my
| children... The best outcome is succeeding after a huge life-
| impacting amount of work, and the more likely outcome is
| constant nagging doubt without any pot of gold at the end.
| movedx wrote:
| I've been studying a lot of Buddhism as of late. One thing it
| has taught me in the Middle Way. In short, it means do nothing
| in excess, which includes doing nothing at all.
|
| This balanced view leads to me to believe you, Paul, and
| "hustle culture" that's all over YouTube are both right and
| wrong. I've come to live by a simple system...
|
| Try to do fulfilling work that's meaningful to future
| generations, whilst also putting back into society as much
| positive value as you can versus what you consume.
|
| So far, this has led me to the model of, "Learn a skill, give a
| skill". The term "give" can be exchanged for "sell" depending
| on the receiver. This has led me to learn complex skills and
| problem solving (consuming from society), and then giving back
| in the form of books, videos, mentoring, and more (putting
| back) so that others can learn from my experience.
|
| At the end of the day though, who really knows? :-)
| namaria wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment and that of grandparent. But I
| take issue with the notion of fulfillment. I think we ought
| to strive to do things that drain us. You can't fulfill
| yourself continuously. You can't learn if your head is full.
| We have this 'my heart if full' turn of phrase that makes the
| next sentence confusing, but you can't love if your heart is
| full (of things you hold on to).
|
| Same thing with trying to leave a legacy, or trying to make
| an impact. If you decide some thing or another is a goal,
| with the best altruistic reasoning, you're still first
| choosing something to hold on to, and then putting effort
| into attaching more and more to that.
|
| We need to perform life because we are living beings. We go
| through the acts of nourishment and socialization because we
| are at that stage, being people on Earth. But seeking any
| personally chosen result or goal is self delusion. Letting go
| of what I think is the right thing, and pouring myself into
| my life, as I interact with others and gain opportunities to
| listen to them, work alongside them, decide together what to
| do and do it. I am alive because the universe pours into me.
| I need to pour forth. That's how things flow through their
| natural progression.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| You speak mostly of not getting attached. Which is mostly a
| method not to build negative karma in Buddhism and build
| positive karma. But positive karma is not a goal in itself in
| Buddhism, realization is.
|
| The Madhyamaka way, translated to the great middle way,
| mostly refers to combining freedom & meaning from emptiness.
| Meaning things are neither real, nor or they an illusion.
| Therefore the middle.
|
| This is because understanding emptiness often leads to
| nihilism: "nothing really matters". The opposite seeing
| things as real, instead of acknowledging everything is
| changing, often leads to suffering: if laptop breaks,
| relationships end etc. Both are true and both are false.
|
| The goal of madhymaka is to explain middle way between those
| and also practical how that leads to freedom, joy and meaning
| in every moment of life.
|
| In the end the goal of Buddhism is not to change outer
| conditions but to get to a state were hapiness is experienced
| regardless of outer experiences.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Reading this, I had an epiphany just now.
|
| What you've shared is essentially Dharma. Or giving back from
| a sense of duty, or as a matter of principle.
|
| Interestingly, Karma preaches: if you give to those in need,
| you will receive in return when you're in need.
|
| Although the motivations are different in both teachings
| (Buddhism vs. Hinduism, with carrot vs. stick if you will),
| they have the same effect - to reach an equilibrium in
| society.
|
| Edited: For clarity
| yoble wrote:
| I see this simple version of Karma talked about quite often
| in the general public and it's pretty far from my
| understanding of Karma in Buddhism.
|
| Karma is a consequence of Dependent Origination - basically
| that things arise dependent on other things, and there is
| nothing that's outside of the law of cause and effet (hence
| no eternal, unchanging, eternally happy Self, which is the
| type of Self, or soul/atta(pali)/atman(sanskrit) the Buddha
| was talking about).
|
| Karma means your intentional thoughts and actions all have
| consequences.
|
| If you give to those in need, that ripples through the
| world and yeah, you're more likely to get good things
| because you're building a good life. There's no need for a
| "cosmic justice" that will weigh what you did and give you
| the exact same amount when you're in a similar situation.
| You have more probability of receiving help (cause you've
| got friends now), but you might still be unlucky and don't
| receive any help.
|
| That's on the material level but it goes further than that
| - by acting and thinking wholesomely, less based on your
| own craving and delusion, you're cultivating a mind that's
| less likely to act based on craving and delusion. It's
| simple cause and effect again, and it depends much less on
| external conditions since it's internal.
|
| (Now the word Karma is used differently in different
| tradition, so the general idea of "cosmic retribution"
| might be what it refers too in some of those. When I
| understood more this version of Karma it made a whole lot
| more sense, so I'm sharing that here.)
|
| I found this article by Culadasa really enlightening on the
| topic: https://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/20130322--
| what-the-b...
| movedx wrote:
| That's right. For me, it's essentially living a Bodhisattva
| life.
| hopa wrote:
| Completely agreed. Media excessively romanticizes compulsive
| workers.
| movedx wrote:
| Not to mention to the 5am hustle. Only people who get up at
| 5am and smash out their book for the first three hours of the
| day, before starting work, are winners... /s
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is lonely doing hard work without some attaboys. Being some
| famous techie that people refer to you in droves by only your
| first name, or publishing a highly referenced paper, or exiting
| a startup with millions are great attaboys. But you sort of
| need to risk working hard and getting no cash and no attaboys.
| I think passion (that dirty word!) is needed to drive you to do
| the moonshot thing.
|
| I often think we are a bee colony. We need lots of people
| trying ambitious stuff but few will get that attaboy kick. We
| need failures (otherwise everyone is not ambitious enough).
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think "passion" just isn't the best word for it. I much
| prefer (and relate to) the use of "curiosity" instead in this
| essay.
| nathias wrote:
| a great work has many conditions, and takes a lifetime dedication
| from early on
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Anytime PG published an article I want to go "sshhhh why are you
| telling them that you're giving away all my hard earned secrets!"
|
| Great article
| pcurve wrote:
| I liked these two snippets at the end.
|
| "Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds
| them back is a combination of modesty and fear. "
|
| "Do you want to do great work, or not? Now you have to decide
| consciously. "
| 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.
| kurosawa wrote:
| This felt somehow complementary to Dr Seuss' "Oh the places
| you'll go", specifically, part two and/or a commentary on part
| one. Thanks for this.
| 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]
| the_common_man wrote:
| Next you will say books are out of style
| jb1991 wrote:
| How so?
|
| There is a difference between long-form writing and long-
| winded writing.
| 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
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/class-based-
| views/...
|
| > from article.view
|
| Broken example due to typo.
|
| I'm being facetious but it's actually easy to find them
| because their are typo PRs open in their GitHub.
|
| Hopefully demonstrates the point though: the law holds.
| 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]
| goodbyesf wrote:
| [flagged]
| 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...
| javajosh wrote:
| There's so little great work done that the path is bound to be
| idiosyncratic. I suspect that a lot of a great work sneaks up on
| people. Sort of like great love. It's that jolt of inspiration
| where you see something new. Like really new. If you're lucky,
| the vision is very very clear. If you're unlucky, you might have
| to spend an enormous amount of time clarifying it such that it
| can be communicated to others. This implies there's a lot of
| great work that dies along with the person who did it. I find
| that very easy to believe.
| 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).
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What question do you have about this essay?
|
| (It would be interesting to know, without reading every comment,
| what questions people have about it.)
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Question: how could comments on the essay be structured, so as
| to give them maximum value for readers?
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Empirically, does bicycling work for coming up with ideas too?
| (as walking and running do)
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What are the characteristics of an institution whose people do
| great work? Would it be fair to compare Bell Labs to
| Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study?
| thimkerbell wrote:
| How would you go about designing a high school or undergraduate
| course in coming up with the questions, ideally including doing
| work that raises them? What&where are some courses that do
| this?
| thimkerbell wrote:
| The essay doesn't mention LLMs. Does their rapid progress
| change the advice at all?
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Isn't that the point though? Do you think on his death
| bed when he looked back at his relatively short life he
| took solace in the fact that years in the future some
| random people admired his "greatness" even though his
| personal life was a mess?
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't pretend to have any idea of his interior life but
| I do think that if he invested his time in being great at
| his job rather than a passion project with no real
| practical purpose he would be forgotten. I like being a
| dad but I don't think everyone has to do that or aspire
| to it.
| 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.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| So lewisjoe, maybe one way to address this problem would be a
| fellowship that came with an extra stipend that would keep your
| family afloat? How much extra would that have to be, in India
| for a year, or would the required amount be far too variable to
| estimate?
|
| (Also, the essay did indicate that if you're taking care of
| someone then his standard advice needs adjustment.)
| 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.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| Somewhat related, Kevin Gross and Carl T Bergstrom just put up
| this preprint on risk aversion in science:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13816
|
| > incentives to motivate effort clash with incentives to
| motivate risk-taking, because a failed project may be evidence
| of a risky undertaking but could also be the result of simple
| sloth. As a result, the incentives needed to encourage effort
| actively discourage risk-taking. Scientists respond by working
| on safe projects that generate evidence of effort but that
| don't move science forward as rapidly as riskier projects
| would.
| 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.
| irksomehails wrote:
| Thanks for putting this out in words. It really hits the nail
| on how I've been feeling lately.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I
| could._
|
| Is there some intent in not using headings?
| andzuck wrote:
| Is pg factoring uncertainty and unpredictability into this
| argument on per-project procrastination? He brought in the idea
| of natural selection earlier in the essay, yet may be ignoring
| that the best project to work on may not be known a priori.
|
| "One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that
| it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting
| around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something
| else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms
| that per-day procrastination does."
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If 1000 people read this and only 100 of them meet your
| criteria, and it's good advice, than he would have helped 100
| people.
|
| I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here
| [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.
| jlokier wrote:
| Some telecoms carriers inject their own Javascript into every
| HTTP page.
|
| I've seen some of that break my pages for some users. It went
| unnoticed for months until someone complained that "my"
| Javascript was badly written and breaking something. After a
| difficult round of conversations where each of us assumed the
| other was seeing the same page contents, we compared source
| and found the culprit was injected by the carrier.
|
| So we changed to HTTPS to fix that problem.
| 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]
| BigElephant wrote:
| Why is his site not in https??
| the_common_man wrote:
| Only the truly ambitious people will click through and read it.
| It acts as a filter.
| BigElephant wrote:
| I hope that is sarcasm
| [deleted]
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Some of you might not have time to read 10,000+ words. I've tried
| my best to summarise the essay here:
| https://twitter.com/sagarpatil/status/1675438574140006401?s=...
|
| If you have time, I recommend you reading the whole essay.
| 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
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Summary?
| 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".
| yarekt wrote:
| It was mentioned, the striving for the best bit, but may have
| been me reading in between the lines.
|
| The little bits in the article really resonate with me, in
| particular what I spot in my field (software dev / distributed
| systems) is that at high level there looks like many great
| solutions exist, but when you look deeper in you see that many
| of them are inelegant, and only reason they weren't done better
| was because no one actually spent time on that particular
| minute thing. it likely got implemented as part of a bigger
| patch and still deemed "good enough".
|
| I theorise that many fields are similar if you look deep enough
| 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.
| harishneit wrote:
| [dead]
| 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.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > How does this work in the world of business where 99% fail
|
| I used to know this grumpy old guy who had a simple
| explanation for that statistic:
|
| It doesn't mean that, if you start a business, you have a 99%
| chance of failure. It means that, out of everyone who starts
| a business, 99% of founders are guaranteed to fail, and 1% of
| founders are guaranteed to succeed.
|
| The trick, I think, is to become the kind of person who can
| succeed at starting a business -- and _then_ start a
| business.
| [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.
| kirso wrote:
| Exactly, I'd reckon you have a better position to do great
| work when you are older, given you know yourself better and
| what makes you tick.
|
| This is IMO impossible without experimentation and doing
| stupid stuff during the 20s.
|
| I just turned 35 and only starting out on the best work of my
| life in the shape of offering something of value except for
| just my time at work prior.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| have you got any kids? I'm 30 and one of my biggest worries
| is that starting a family will mean I will never get the
| time to do great things. I also got a fair share of skills
| under my belt and a lot of motivation. My relationship
| always ends to taking time away from my projects however
| and that's only going to get worse once there's a kid 5
| years down the road.
|
| Then again Bach had a lot of kids, and look at the body of
| his work.
| rr808 wrote:
| Sounds about the right time for you to have babies and ruin all
| that readiness for great work.
| cushychicken wrote:
| If anything, my kid being born helped _increase_ my output.
|
| Limited time makes it a lot easier to decide what to focus
| on.
| rr808 wrote:
| Limited time? Congrats, Lol with a full time job I didn't
| have time to do anything.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| My experience having a child is that it made me more
| ambitious, not less. And not for the child's sake,
| necessarily
| 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.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What typos or formatting issues did you notice, that should maybe
| be fixed?
|
| * Footnotes would ideally have backlinks, for those who read them
| all at once.
|
| * "ballon bursting"
| neilv wrote:
| > _There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you
| 're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness,
| fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent
| frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting,
| you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're
| not astray._
|
| Money is an insurmountable objective barrier for most people, and
| seems it's just slipped into the middle of a list of things that
| are more likely overcome by merely strengthening one's character.
|
| So this sounds like wealthy person saying "don't concern yourself
| with money; just follow your heart".
| thimkerbell wrote:
| No, he addresses that. Get a day job. Then do your project on
| nights and weekends, or else manage your manager into making it
| part of your job.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This is terrible advice imo. It entirely hinges on being able
| to work ridiculous hours, which most people just can't do
| either due to burnout, family, or both.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| No family or other responsibilities. Also say goodbye to your
| health. Not widely applicable advice.
| edandersen wrote:
| The problem with moonlighting a meaningful side project is
| that any marketing you do will alert HR to the fact you are
| moonlighting (HR in large corps pay to have employees' social
| media scanned).
|
| In most cases you'll either be told to stop or in the worst
| case your employer will claim they own it.
| nip wrote:
| PG did not use the term moonlighting for the fact that you
| don't have to.
|
| That is unless you agreed to a contract that forbids from
| holding multiple jobs.
|
| 40h/week paying the bills leaves plenty of free time to do
| something on the side when you don't have kids / a family
| to take care of
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > 40h/week paying the bills leaves plenty of free time to
| do something on the side when you don't have kids / a
| family to take care of
|
| Show of hands: How many others feel this way?
|
| Personally, I can barely muster the energy to do much
| hacking after a normal job. The only way I've found to do
| work I've been known for is by blowing off my other
| responsibilities (sometimes to the annoyance of various
| people).
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| I have also become known for what I do, in the last
| minutes of odd hours, to the neglect of my
| responsabilities. While I do "make time", and could
| probably do so more effectively[1], I certainly do not
| have "plenty" after 40 hours.
|
| 1: One needs downtime, and can't expect perfect
| utilization even after planning for rest.
| flashgordon wrote:
| So sounds like you are one of the lucky folks who is
| excited and really enjoying their day job that you dont
| need a challenge after work. I once heard that those who
| are very stimulated at work actually spend a lot of
| energy and need cool down "after work". I (like many I
| know) can't wait to get home after a soul crushing day
| (at a pretty well paying job) to work on exciting things!
| Depends on factors that energize and motivate you I
| guess!
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Or, you know, some people don't want to continue doing
| the same thing all day. For whatever reason.
| havelhovel wrote:
| There are also people who hate their day job, and after
| dealing with food, chores, and physical fitness, just
| want to spend their last waking hour or two relaxing
| before starting over.
| tlb wrote:
| This isn't the norm in Silicon Valley. Most companies will
| agree to exceptions to their Assignment of Inventions
| agreement if you ask, as long as it's not directly
| competitive.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| If you work for a large company anything you do in
| software is directly competitive.
| the6thwonder wrote:
| [flagged]
| kirso wrote:
| I understand the concern, but frankly don't think this is
| the case.
|
| Nobody really cares about you in the org and in the world
| in general.
|
| There is a legal implication on side projects on everyone's
| contract -> so the solution here is to just have an
| alternative profile on social media...
|
| Oh and don't add HR people on your linkedin.
| keyle wrote:
| Program what makes you happy, everyone else is already
| programming the rest.
| rr808 wrote:
| Does anyone have a TLDR of this? My attention span isn't what it
| used to be.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not the industry, but the rush-to-"AI" is certainly over-
| hyped and displays a very shallow understanding of the
| role of art of any form for most human beings.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The older I get the more I think this is fine, and more
| or less the way of the world.
|
| Let the young ones expend their energy and drive trying
| to do all kinds of weird, pointless and occassionally
| very useful shit while we keep the world running.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| >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.
|
| In my 37 years of experience: people do want to be where the
| action is, but many people who are the main examples of
| 'being at the action' already were at a location where the
| action happened to end up. I.e., people working for a long
| time on an 'obscure' problem interesting to them suddenly see
| that 'obscure' problem become important and fall into success
| (think of all the CS people working on DL/ANNs in the 90s. I
| don't think Yann LeCunn was a known name in the 90s).
|
| The tragedy is that it's very hard to predict where the
| action will be. Literature is full of people who lucked into
| that position, and obviously ignores the millions who were
| where the action never ended up.
|
| With some experience you can shift your focus to where you
| think the action will be: it's probably best not to run after
| the money, but walk towards it.
| 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?
| hahnchen wrote:
| Why is this post so long?
| 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!
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Similar background. I write software for mechanical engineers
| and enjoy it very much
| 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.
| 2snakes wrote:
| information, communication and fabrication (see the huge
| influx of fab labs)
| 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.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| People with high-paying careers rarely choose to radically
| reduce their work hours after achieving financial security.
| I don't think the idea of doing great work often enters the
| equation.
| badpun wrote:
| > People with high-paying careers rarely choose to
| radically reduce their work hours after achieving
| financial security.
|
| Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually expect
| them to fully retire in their fourties or fifties, once
| they no longer need more money.
| 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.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah cynically this is jezebel for our demographic.
|
| Live,laugh love. It's wine o'clock. Do great work.
| 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.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of
| figuring out what to work on.
|
| When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your
| own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest
| will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid
| down on the assumption that everyone does. --- This poses a
| significant problem, and I'm still seeking solutions.
|
| As a child, I was fascinated by computer games and decided to
| become a computer engineer.
|
| However, I later discovered that I was not particularly skilled
| in math and programming. Despite the struggle, I managed to
| complete my degree.
|
| I had a genuine knack for history and geography and genuinely
| enjoyed them. However, I wasn't sure if there were any viable
| career paths based on my interests, so I didn't pursue them.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| > When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what
| different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up
| doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they
| want to do at 14, most have to figure it out.
|
| That just gave me an idea for a phone app: Something that helps
| teenagers explore their interests and aptitudes (but not skills
| of course)
|
| Thoughts?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I like the idea, but it's quite broad. It's essentially what
| school is supposed to do.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| Yeah true. I don't know the scene in the schools but I have
| read a lot about how math education is pretty dismal, at
| least in the USA, depending on the teacher
|
| Maybe theres a way for an app to help someone who does have a
| math aptitude to realize that they do and that math is fun
| and not a bunch of rote memorization of formulas
|
| And repeat for like.... a bunch of other types of thought
|
| But you're right, it is pretty broad, so maybe best to start
| with a specific field
|
| There are apps like Brilliant that focus on math, so maybe
| that fills that niche, or maybe theres something that else
| could be added to it in terms of helping someone explore the
| raw thought processes involved
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Maybe you could devise a test that, when completed, can
| detect where their natural strengths lie. I imagine such a
| test would be somewhat lengthy. That could easily be turned
| into an app and marketed.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I had a thought a while back about how education systems are
| somewhat bad proxies for the type of work you want to do. There
| are many factors aside from just pure method that determine
| good fit, such as degrees of freedom, number of collaborators,
| market saturation and maturity, and feedback cycle lengths,
| etc.
|
| These vary greatly in "real life" but are almost always
| restricted in education systems. For instance, simple things
| like "there is a right answer to this question", "you can
| finish this task in less than a week" and of course "an older
| more experienced person will judge your work" are true in
| school but vary greatly in the wild.
|
| I've found that people's true passion axes mostly aren't
| aligned with specific sub-fields (like say theoretical
| astrophysics, improv jazz saxophone), but tend to orient
| themselves towards higher level features. As someone who used
| to think that narrow specialization is paramount, this
| realization is incredibly liberating (also kinda missing from
| PGs post - I think he's missing or glossing over an important
| aspect here).
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| > education systems are somewhat bad proxies for the type of
| work you want to do
|
| Is that because that doing the actual relevant work is the
| way to find out? If so, maybe making the app more like a game
| where it tries to simulate things like that
|
| > higher level features
|
| Yeah, thats kind of along the lines I was thinking. Not
| specific roles but types of thought process, and now that you
| mention it, types of impact
|
| The whole idea is about uncovering what unique gems a
| teenager (or adult even) has, rather conforming them to a
| predetermined framework
| 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]
| goodbyesf 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".
|
| The guy invests money in and profits from other people doing
| "great work". So it shouldn't be too shocking his primary focus
| is on the commercial or the innovative.
| JohnCurran wrote:
| I respect Paul and everything that he writes, even if I don't
| agree with it. It takes some serious stones to publish your
| thoughts on the internet - whether people agree or not.
|
| In any case. This seems like a continuation of the never ending
| quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a
| corporate profit they will never see.
|
| I'm not interested in eliminating the ceiling - I want to raise
| the floor. Having a "side hustle" shouldn't be a requirement to
| get by.
|
| I am frustrated that the USA's money advice largely comes from
| billionaires. They're not like us. That's OK. There's a lot of
| room between millions and billions
| matwood wrote:
| > I am frustrated that the USA's money advice largely comes
| from billionaires.
|
| One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is
| it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And,
| those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to
| staff their companies.
|
| As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure
| out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then
| figure out a passion.
| JohnCurran wrote:
| > Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security
| and once there, then figure out a passion
|
| This is good advice and I agree with it. I just wish it
| wasn't the advice we had to give
| jebarker wrote:
| Do you say that because you think the work required to
| achieve economic security is too much? I ask because it's
| hard to imagine an alternative that would enable more
| people to follow their passions without securing the
| essentials first.
| red_admiral wrote:
| There's a saying from Eastern Europe: first learn a trade,
| then follow your dreams. If the dreams don't work out, you'll
| still be able to earn a living.
| badpun wrote:
| Andrzej Sapkowski (polish fantasy author, of "The Witcher"
| fame), when asked about his advice for young people who
| want to be professional writers like him said: "get into an
| honest and, if at all possible, profitable profession".
| We're not dreamers here in EE like people in US, we're not
| reach enough to afford it :)
| samuellevy wrote:
| There's an interview with Bo Burnham where he puts it
| clearly...
|
| > Don't listen to people who just got very lucky. Taylor
| Swift telling you to "follow your dreams" is like a lottery
| winner saying "liquidise your assets, buy Powerball tickets.
| It works!"
|
| And that's the thing. Skill and talent are important, but
| there's a certain amount of success that's only achievable
| through luck, or through starting from _so far ahead_ that
| it's just genuinely out of reach for us mere mortals.
|
| Is the experience of those people irrelevant? No, but it's
| also not actually applicable to most other people.
| biztos wrote:
| Surely there's some luck involved, but wouldn't the Taylor
| Swift analogy be more like "develop a product that
| leverages your talents and is likely to have mass appeal,
| work your ass off perfecting your ability to deliver that
| product, take the extreme negative externalities of success
| in your business without complaining, and once you get
| traction double down on the working your ass off part?" Oh
| and also "have sufficient business acumen to stare down
| Apple and win?"
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I have noticed a divergence between product quality and
| incentive. The more distant the incentives are the less product
| quality matters. I have observed this at every place of
| employment, personal project, and entertainment software I have
| ever touched. It comes down to this:
|
| 1) What is the purpose of the product/platform/work? Typically
| when speaking of software generally there is only one correct
| answer: automation. If the stakeholder cannot answer this
| question in 2 words or less nothing else matters, because this
| the foundation from everything else derives.
|
| 2) How does the stakeholder define product quality? Do they
| measure any of that? If there are not written goals AND
| measures its probably all bullshit.
|
| 3) How directly are incentives tied to the defined product
| quality goals? If I have to count the hops using two hands
| there are no product quality goals.
|
| 4) What is the target audience of the product quality goals? In
| theory the primary audience should that which is the primary
| driver of revenue, but in reality it is typically that which is
| of greatest comfort to people analyzing requirements. This is
| where things get toxic. This is what makes me want to abandon
| software as a profession.
|
| 5) Incentives are not necessarily compensation.
|
| With this list in mind the typical goal of a corporate software
| developer is to complete some tasks, get paid, and retain
| employment. Product quality is completely irrelevant up to and
| including some tolerance for terminal failure.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > including some tolerance for terminal failure.
|
| On the other hand, you cannot survive as a corporate software
| dev without this ability because 80% of the failure will be
| completely unrelated to anything you do.
|
| I keep thinking about these two massive projects we were
| working on with literally 50 people only to find out after
| completion that nobody had asked the client if they actually
| wanted anything like it. All that work down the drain...
| Lk7Of3vfJS2n wrote:
| > This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for
| people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a
| corporate profit they will never see.
|
| Reading the essay I didn't see a reference to "the betterment
| of a corporate profit". Doing good work doesn't mean starting a
| startup, if this is what you meant.
| 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.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| "Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore
| that."
|
| Is there value in differentiating Luck from Chance? Perhaps Luck
| only pertains to attributes of you and your life you cannot
| change. Such as your DNA and your life before you can leave home.
|
| Chance can apply to the life path you determine for yourself.
| Perhaps, unknown to you, doing great work depends on a Chance
| encounter with a potential mentor in the field you are pursuing.
| You can increase your Chance of meeting that mentor by living in
| an area that has a high concentration of people in your field of
| interest. That Chance encounter is still a matter of Luck, but
| requires 'less' Luck than if you lived on a different continent.
| 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?
| [deleted]
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I revisit my favorite recipes and while each experiment isn't
| always better over a long enough time span they do seem to
| taste better
| nadam wrote:
| As I got older I have a very different take on pg's essays than
| when I was younger. When I was younger these essays motivated me,
| as I felt that these essays are written for me. PG seemingly
| addresses many of his essays to 'very ambitious', 'extremely
| smart', 'independent thinking' people, and writes about topics to
| achieve extreme success. When I was younger I believed I am such
| a person. Now I know that I am smarter than average, has a little
| bit more ambition than average, but I am probably not THAT
| special. And it is OK. I can be, and am relatively successful.
| Without pg's grandious motivational writings.
|
| Nowadays I am not motivated by pg's essays as I am much much more
| conscious about myself and my motivations. When reading his
| essays I am much more interested in the rhetoric he uses to
| convince young people. I became an outsider, a third-party
| observer when it comes to his essays.
|
| One interesting thing I noticed at the start of the essay is that
| he starts with a descriptive tone: at the first sentence he does
| not assume that I, as a reader want to do 'great work'. "to
| create a guide that could be used by someone working in any
| field." But then suddenly he writes this: "The following recipe
| assumes you're very ambitious." Now suddenly he makes the reader
| of the essay and the one he gives advice to equivalent.
|
| Ok, my personal opinion on pg's advice: For fairly ambitious
| people, who has some life experience these essays are fairly
| trivial. Absolutely not actionable. Most of us will not do 'great
| work'. Most of his readers will do 'good enough' work, even
| slightly above-average work. My advice would be that do what
| fulfills you. Don't aim for great work, aim for good work. If you
| are lucky your work can even become great. But you can still be
| happy if it is just good. Also don't sacrifice yourself too much
| chasing overly ambitious ideas while you are poor. Try to find
| joy in work that brings you closer to financial independence with
| much greater chance than pg's romanticized 'great work'.
| the_common_man wrote:
| What's the difference between great work and good work? It
| seems you are trying very hard to be a contrarian ( Which
| funnily is a trait of older age )
| nadam wrote:
| The difference is that great work is achieved by 1 in one
| million people. Good work can be achieved by one in 1000
| people, or one in 100 depending on your definition. You can
| adjust your definition of good work to your circumstances.
| The difference is that even if you are much smarter than
| average you have miniscule chance to achieve the kind of
| great work pg tells you about. You can have a high chance to
| achieve good work, if your definition of good work is
| realistic.
|
| Yeah, I have some contrarian tendencies, always had, but I am
| not contrarian in every topic and hopefully not contrarian
| just for the sake of it.
| inimino wrote:
| Your definition of good work is so above and beyond that
| well under one percent can approach the rarified air of
| your high standards? I don't believe you.
| nadam wrote:
| The main problem is that pg does not even try to define
| what level of success he speaks about. I think he should
| be more clear and honest about it: Is it the one in a
| million great work he writes about, or is it the one in
| 100? These are entirely different stories. Anyway I am
| afraid he writes about the one in a million kind. And my
| point is that don't try to optimize for that kind of
| success, it is better to adjust your approach to your
| circumstances to have a greater chance of success.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Yeah. His comment is very hard to parse for insight.
|
| One thing that happens the more experienced you get is that
| more and more of your work seems "not complex"/"too trivial".
| But then you realize how many people struggle at those
| trivial things in similar position and realize it's a trait:
| - implement simple solutions that provide value. - empower
| others to understand and use your solutions and implement
| their own. - tackle on more issues that provide the most
| value (and not necessarily the most complex). - repeat and
| expand. Do more with less. Make it less or a battle. - help
| and foster collaboration of heterogeneous actors. -
| proactively fix projects before they go the wrong way. - etc
|
| It's not about being particular smart or better but finding
| methodologies that work and being very conscious and
| intentional about your work.
| mmargerum wrote:
| Why doesn't paul take some of that cash horde and put it into the
| LISP community? Maybe he does?
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| krosaen wrote:
| For every person doing great work of the sort he describes -
| original and impactful - there often needs to be several talented
| people helping to execute towards the newly discovered goal. He
| hints at this when he mentions the need to manage on certain
| types of projects. So what of all those talented craftsmen
| helping get the idea done? Working a job, hard enough to squeeze
| away time towards significant side projects (if one still desires
| to maintain good health and relations with family)? Are they
| suckers? Should they phone it in at work to leave time for their
| side hustle? What if trying hard at their main job is more
| impactful? This is the paradox of startup advice. It's good
| advice for those aiming to do original work. But it turns its
| nose up at the kind of work that is a vital ingredient towards
| achieving great things. And I think Cal Newports advice is more
| practical in this sense - cultivating craft and autonomy within
| any role can be equally satisfying and is way more practical for
| a lot of people.
|
| That said, I still really like PG's advice for how to think about
| being original, and I suppose I shouldn't expect someone trying
| to convince more people to become founders to be completely even
| handed about assessing or recommending other kinds of meaningful
| impactful work.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| The comment above was fair criticism. This one is needlessly
| mean. Pay attention to the community guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jb1991 wrote:
| Thank you for your note, and for all you do to help
| moderate HN. Moderators like you help keep the site honest.
|
| I have reviewed the link you provided. I agree with the
| guidelines noted therein. I asked some of my peers to give
| an objective read of my comment and they found it an
| accurate reflection of how they too responded to the posted
| essay. I cannot identify anything about it that was
| contrary to what is observed by many members of this
| community.
|
| I do apologize to you though if you read it differently.
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm not a moderator, just a fellow user.
| [deleted]
| jakeduth wrote:
| I clicked on this without seeing that it's on paulgraham.com, yet
| still picked up it was his writing within a minute of reading.
| His writing is distinct even for someone who hasn't read much of
| it.
|
| My question is: why?
| a_bonobo wrote:
| It's a unique mix of true earnestness, over-generalisation,
| very short sentences of roughly similar length, some insights,
| and a preachy tone. and a 90s website design :)
| 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?
| redheadmad wrote:
| I think, while you are not in top10%, you shoud copy best
| practices. Or even untill top3%. And when you get there - then
| you shoud think about own system.
| 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!
| the_common_man wrote:
| World already has one C++ too many . Thanks op
| 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.
| codazoda wrote:
| I like the article and I believe much of it, but I've been
| chasing personal passions for more than 25 years and I haven't
| had a side project I'd call successful, at least not in a
| financial sense. So, there's something else to that part. I
| suspect it's at least a bit of luck. I continue to try to find a
| function that will work for me.
| 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.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| > What are you excessively curious about -- curious to a degree
| that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking
| for.
|
| > The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the
| desire to do something impressive.
|
| There's a contradiction here. If you work on something that bores
| other people (small niches) it will not satisfy the desire to do
| something impressive.
|
| For example: I want to tell my in-laws I work at Google, but I
| really want to create maps that simulate sunlight and shadow
| 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.
| 2snakes wrote:
| new legos are the devil because all the creative thinking is
| done behind a desk at lego. (not my thought, just repeating)
| 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-02 23:02 UTC)