Hey, Reader

​How to Do Great Work is, perhaps, Paul Graham’s best-known essay. It’s also very long. Now, I trust you can read it. I encourage you to read it. It’s worth your time. But in the event you don’t, I’ve curated some of my favorite paragraphs from the essay so that you can capture the gist of his argument without having to read it all.

Below are various sections of the essay under headings that describe the main idea contained in each quote.

There are two things I’m assuming here.

First, I’m assuming that what you read will make you curious enough to go read more.

Second, I’m assuming that this won’t be the only time you read these quotes or the essay. This essay is the kind of piece that you should read a couple of times a year and the density of thought means that you’ll get more value out of it each time you read. Rumor has it he spent 6 months writing and editing this one piece.

As you’ll see in the opening paragraphs he assumes that his reader is naturally ambitious. Someone who doesn’t see themselves that way will likely not make much sense of the essay or perhaps will be offended by the notions. That’s ok. So I’ll offer you the same warning. If you don’t see yourself as very ambitious, that’s ok, but don’t feel like you have to read this one. Next week will be much more practical and applicable to all kinds of personalities.

Alright, enough from me. Here are some of my favorite quotes from Paul Graham’s, How to Do Great Work.

ON DECIDING WHAT TO WORK ON

“The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.”

“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. You’ll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that’s fine. It’s good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.”

“Develop a habit of working on your own projects. 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.”

PURSUING THE FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE

“Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. 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.”

“The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.”

“If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears, embrace it.”

FINDING GREAT WORK BY FOLLOWING YOUR INTERESTS

“When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they’re like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.”

“Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness.”

THE FOUR STEPS OF FINDING GREAT WORK

“Four steps [to find your great work]: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.”

WHY PLANNING IS OVERRATED WHEN DOING GREAT WORK

“But while you need boldness, you don’t usually need much planning. In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can’t discover natural selection that way.

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it.”

THE POWER OF COMPOUNDING

“Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key: consistency. People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing….The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn’t; it’s still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can’t grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.”

DON’T JUST BE GOOD, BE THE BEST

“Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don’t know what you’re aiming for. And that is what you’re aiming for, because if you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good… One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than your contemporaries’, but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.”

STYLE

“Don’t try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won’t be able to help doing it in a distinctive way.”

BUILDING MOMENTUM

“How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

It’s particularly useful to make successive versions when you’re making something for people — to get an initial version in front of them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.

Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn’t, this will at least get you started.”

THE ADVANTAGES OF YOUTH AND EXPERIENCE (AKA BEING OLD)

“Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old. The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they have.”

“One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you

don’t have to worry about. The young know all the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.”

“But what you don’t know is only half the problem with inexperience. The other half is what you do know that ain’t so. You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you’ve acquired and false things you’ve been taught — and you won’t be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do.”

GREAT WORK WITH GREAT TEAMS

“Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can’t be done alone, and even if you’re working on one that can be, it’s good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off. Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.

Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It’s better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. In fact it’s not merely better, but necessary, judging from history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one’s colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.

How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my experience, when you do, you know. Which means if you’re unsure, you probably don’t.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF CURIOSITY

“If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on “curiosity.”

That doesn’t translate directly to advice. It’s not enough just to be curious, and you can’t command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you.

Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.”

WHY MORE PEOPLE DON’T DO GREAT WORK

“Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you’d fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that’s what’s going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question.

So I’m going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that. I wouldn’t have done it to a general audience. But we already know you’re interested.

Don’t worry about being presumptuous. You don’t have to tell anyone. And if it’s too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have worse problems than that. In fact you’ll be lucky if it’s the worst problem you have.

Yes, you’ll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to work hard. And if you’re working on something you find very interesting, which you necessarily will if you’re on the right path, the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your peers’.

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?”

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That's it for today! I hope this inspired you.
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If you're in a season of life where you need the voice of a coach I'd love to see how I might be able to help.

Keep the faith,

Craig