paul graham essay work

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

Nov 10, 2023

Notes from "How To Do Great Work" - Essay by Paul Graham

These are some direct key snippets from Paul Graham's essay, "How To Do Great Work." I'd highly recommend his full version here .

Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.

Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find.

Four steps: 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.

Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could.

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.

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.

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.

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. A field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.

If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience.

This should follow from the excitingness rule. 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. And once you go down that route, you're lost.

It's ok to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example. Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it be?"

This is one case where the young have an advantage. They're more optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.

Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.

Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after all.

Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you.

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.

Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.

You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.

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.

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.

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.

One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight positive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.

There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical and pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage to be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a fool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. The Old Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like a fool. But that's advice for seeming smart. If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.

You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some effort; when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert to what I have now?

I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but there are definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. For example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult.

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.

Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before?

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.

Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction? It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard.

The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. From the point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.

Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.

An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.

One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.

You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other direction: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.

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? What becomes possible if you discard it?

Unfashionable problems are undervalued.

One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't. Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.

Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And there's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted.

But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these? By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way, and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on "important" problems.

You do need to work on important problems, but almost everyone is too conservative about what counts as one. And if there's an important but overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it's probably already on your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.

Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game.

Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.

This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either.

Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new idea is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled about something. Which means that originality consists partly of puzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.

Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones.

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.

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.

Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value. If you're not failing occasionally, you're probably being too conservative.

Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked. And there's probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard.

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. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.

That "slightly" is an important qualification. Spend time lavishly when you're young, but don't simply waste it. There's a big difference between doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doing something you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet, and possibly a better one than you think.

When you're learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they probably represent an undiscovered idea.

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.

Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools. We're so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to school as identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts of strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.

Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school they tell you what the problems are, and they're almost always soluble using no more than you've been taught so far. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're soluble at all.

But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You can't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.

Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.

In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing.

If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it's usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence.

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.

Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism.

Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.

One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always involves some backtracking.

An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar, your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big. The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.

Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking.

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter.

It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise.

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

Notice how often that word has come up. 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."

The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?

Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying.

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?

Ways of Thinking

#168 Essay Breakdown: “How To Do Great Work” by Paul Graham

Paul Graham's essay on "How To Do Great Work" begins with the following words:

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

How To Do Great Work explores curiosity, the source of originality, the relationship between breaking rules and new ideas, and how being naive is a form of independent mindedness. As well as why being self-indulgent helps you find overlooked problems, why big ideas are more often questions than answers, and why the best questions grow while you work to answer them.

A few fascinating bits of background on the essay:

In all, it took nearly 7 months to write. ( Source )
It sprung out of a single paragraph in another essay he was writing. It seemed such an important topic that he cut it out and made it into its own essay. ( Source )
Reflecting on this last point Paul shared: "It's strange to think that such a huge essay could grow out of one paragraph in another essay. But this has happened before. Beyond Smart began that way too. There's nothing like writing essays to give you ideas for essays." ( Source )

It's the best meditation on the conditions and precursors from which Great Work arise. It feels a lot like the modern equivalent to Richard Hamming's talk at Bellcore in 1986 titled You and Your Research .

Listen & Watch: Listen now on Apple , Spotify , or Google . Watch on YouTube . Or find a link to your favorite player on Pod.link .

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The Big Ideas

While nothing beats reading the essay in its entirety, here's an attempt to sum up some of the big ideas:

To do great work, you first have to choose something you a deep interest in and a natural aptitude for — ideally something that offers enough scope to achieve greatness.
Embrace experimentation and always spent some portion of your time on your own projects.
Reach the front of knowledge in your field and notice the gaps in that knowledge. Explore them.
Find value in the cumulative impact of work — be long-term, compounding oriented. Remember that consistency of effort matters more than intensity of effort in the end.
Cultivate taste in your field and strive to be the best.
Be intellectually honest with yourself, admit your mistakes, and stay informal in your approach.
Avoid affectation, cynicism, pessimism, and the need to seem a certain way.
Utilize the advantages of youth (energy, time, optimism, freedom) and the advantage of age (knowledge, efficiency, money, power) at the right time.
Inexperience can be a superpower because it allows you to see things objectively and question established ideas — often because you're entirely unaware of them.
Let your curiosity guide your work. Curiosity is always a precursor to doing great work.
Be prolific and try many things. Just remember to always start small.
People tend to be overly conservative in choosing problems to solve — seek unfashionable and overlooked problems.
Overlooked ideas often hide in plain sight. Explore what's been dismissed, looked over, and left unexplored.
Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible.
Just try to do something amazing, and leave it to future generations to say if you succeeded.
A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things.
Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem.
Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.
If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from.
Don't try to be anything except the best.
It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're now in a position to do something about some of them.
"If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas." — Linus Pauling
One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than playing games where you don't.

The essay ends with a few reminders and a call to action:

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. The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying. 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?

How To Do Great Work (Full Essay) by Paul Graham

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."

The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

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.

In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1]

That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. 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.

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.

What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. 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.

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.

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.

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. [2]

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.

Four steps: 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.

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.

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.

Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose late based on very incomplete information. [4]

The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.

The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.

It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted that the system not only can't do much to help you figure out what to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager. They don't tell you, but I will: 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.

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.

Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.

One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.

But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in the course of working on one thing you discover another that's more exciting, don't be afraid to switch.

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.

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.

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.

Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't like that.

You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a technique to working, just as there is to sailing.

For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day.

Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.

It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don't worry about this; it's the nature of work, not a flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it.

It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's ok to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example. Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it be?"

This is one case where the young have an advantage. They're more optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.

Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. [8]

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. You're too busy to notice it.

The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older. [9]

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. 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.

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. 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.)

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. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true. [11]

Fortunately there's a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might seem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It's exciting, and also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it's easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.

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.

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. [12]

The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices.

The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?

Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality. Informality is much more important than its grammatically negative name implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It means focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't.

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd.

Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy.

Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes a conscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice. But I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool. [14]

Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.

Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.

Indeed, in some kinds of work it's good to strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'll understand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself about whether there's anything real there.

Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant" applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math.

Elegance can be a long-term bet, though. Laborious solutions will often have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot of effort and they're hard to understand, both of which impress people, at least temporarily.

Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.

When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.

(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case it's more like creating something. In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it.)

Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit will be.

Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas.

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended.

True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge.

In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity, and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name, because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possible to have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a great deal of what's often called "technical ability" — and yet not have much of this.

I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading. Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.

If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understand very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear.

Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. [17] Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.

Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force.

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect.

To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter.

Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world they brought with them. But they didn't at the time; it took the greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.

There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded.

The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started.

The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs. Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.

Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination. In popular culture they're opposed. But popular culture has a broken model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking are opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict.

One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.

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? What becomes possible if you discard it?

People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But even so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems are undervalued.

Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.

Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about. People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive. [19]

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.

The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict that. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.

It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.

Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything that's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun by trying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when you do look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like two puzzle pieces.

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.

Don't try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. There are names for doing this with the first version (taking too long to ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these are both merely instances of a more general principle.An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a toy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it has everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow. [22]

The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going to try x and see what happens." And it is more organized ; it just doesn't work as well.

Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something you have to do because you're working with inflexible media, or because you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. If you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to plan as much, and your designs can evolve instead.

Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's the young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear risk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most.

The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience, is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fit together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but occasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not to. [24]

So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they probably represent an undiscovered idea.

For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child, there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed.

The sooner you overcome this passivity, the better. If you're still in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. That may seem a stretch, but it's not merely some weird thought experiment. It's the truth, economically, and in the best case it's the truth intellectually as well. The best teachers don't want to be your bosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.

Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people.

And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of a feedback loop, and very few are.

People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothing inherently bad about that. There's no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor does copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.

There's a good way to copy and a bad way. If you're going to copy something, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still, unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributed phrase "Great artists steal." The really dangerous kind of copying, the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that's done without realizing it, because you're nothing more than a train running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination. [25]

In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you're first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two cases are more similar than they seem.

Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimes makes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things, even by their discoverers , because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.

There are definitely some dangers to copying, though. One is that you'll tend to copy old things — things that were in their day at the frontier of knowledge, but no longer are.

And when you do copy something, don't copy every feature of it. Some will make you ridiculous if you do. Don't copy the manner of an eminent 50 year old professor if you're 18, for example, or the idiom of a Renaissance poem hundreds of years later.

Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.

This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it.

One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors.

Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing.

If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies.

It may take some effort to find the people who are really good, though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places, particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyone is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.

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. But it may be possible to give a more concrete answer than that. Here's an attempt: sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can't. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep you on your toes in this sense, you're probably over the threshold.

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. [27]

Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism.

Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.

Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism, it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by some of the greatest minds in history.

Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you're stuck, just so you start to get something done.

Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.

"Never give up" is also not quite right. Obviously there are times when it's the right choice to eject. A more precise version would be: Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you need to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node.

It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.

To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable, but it's so liberating to escape it that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct. [28]

The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence.

Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.

The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder.

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

Notice how often that word has come up. 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.

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.

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

‍ [1] I don't think you could give a precise definition of what counts as great work. Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. But there's no threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree, and often hard to judge at the time anyway. So I'd rather people focused on developing their interests rather than worrying about whether they're important or not. Just try to do something amazing, and leave it to future generations to say if you succeeded.

[2] A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!

[3] That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited about something most authorities discount, but you can't give a more precise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're starting to drift into the territory of cranks.

[4] Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible future versions of you.There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have to rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be; different types of work have been collected together as much by accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.

[5] There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place.

[6] It can also be dangerous to make things for an audience you feel is less sophisticated than you, if that causes you to talk down to them. You can make a lot of money doing that, if you do it in a sufficiently cynical way, but it's not the route to great work. Not that anyone using this m.o. would care.

[7] This idea I learned from Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology , which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any field.

[8] Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.

[9] You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want, especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side. Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight to get time to do it.

[10] If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from.

[11] There may be some very unworldly people who do great work without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to cover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except the best.

[12] This gets more complicated in work like acting, where the goal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to be affected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoid unintentional affectation.

[13] It's safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionable if and only if they're also unfalsifiable. For example, it's safe to have the principle that everyone should be treated equally under the law, because a sentence with a "should" in it isn't really a statement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. And if there's no evidence that could disprove one of your principles, there can't be any facts you'd need to ignore in order to preserve it.

[14] Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty. Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.

[15] Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact moment you have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairly recently.

[16] Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.

[17] For example you might give the nth most important topic (m-1)/m^n of your attention, for some m > 1. You couldn't allocate your attention so precisely, of course, but this at least gives an idea of a reasonable distribution.

[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.

[19] It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're now in a position to do something about some of them.

[20] The connection between originality and uncertainty causes a strange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certain than the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper hand in disputes, even though they're generally stupider.The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

[21] Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas."

[22] Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking a statement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantial criticism can be made to stick.

[23] One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than playing games where you don't.

[24] Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anything publicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supports your earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieve eternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people, having previously published opinions has an effect similar to ideology, just in quantity 1.

[25] In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted his own version to show how much better he was.

[26] I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As of this writing, being in the same physical place has advantages that are hard to duplicate, but that could change.

[27] This is false when the work the other people have to do is very constrained, as with SETI@home or Bitcoin. It may be possible to expand the area in which it's false by defining similarly restricted protocols with more freedom of action in the nodes.

[28] Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably a good idea.

[29] It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, because that frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, and there is some historical evidence for it.

Originally published on Paul Graham's website .

Who is Paul Graham?

Most of you will recognize the name. Paul Graham is best known for Y Combinator , which has become the world's foremost startup accelerator whose alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, and DoorDash. In addition, Paul is widely known for his essays including timeless classics, which have become common vernacular, like Default Alive or Default Dead . In 2004, he published a collection of his early essays in a book called Hackers & Painters .

Daniel Scrivner (00:02.414) Paul Graham's essay on how to do great work begins with the following words. If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field, but I also was curious about the shape of the intersection, and one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape. It's not just a point labeled hard work. The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

As we're all both very ambitious and focused on doing great work, it felt appropriate to cover this essay as a sort of book in miniature. The essay itself comes in at a staggering 11,800 words or nearly 30 pages when printed. As such, I think it's appropriate to think of this as more of a monograph than an essay. How to do great work explores curiosity, the source of originality, the relationship between breaking rules and new ideas.

And how being naive is a form of independent mindedness, as well as why being self-indulgent helps you find overlook problems, why big ideas are more often questions than answers, and why the best questions grow while you work to answer them. A few fascinating bits of background on this essay. I did a bit of research because I was curious. In all, it took Paul Graham about seven months to write this. So just to, you know, he said somewhere between six and seven months. In the show notes, I'm going to link to all the sources in case you're curious.

This essay actually sprung out of a paragraph in another essay he was writing. It seemed such an important topic that he cut it out and made it its own separate essay. Reflecting on this last point, Paul shared, it's strange to think that such a huge essay could grow out of one paragraph in another essay, but this has happened before. Beyond Smart, which is one of Paul's other, you know, well-known essays, began that way too. There's nothing like writing essays to give you ideas for other essays. So why am I sharing this?

This post, you know, how to do great work has already been widely read by a lot of different people. Everyone has chimed in, including everyone from Toby Lutke at Shopify, two other founders saying that it's one of the best pieces of writing they've ever read about how to do great work. The reason I wanted to share this is, I mean, one, it's just staggering. Like this is packed with so many amazing, interesting ideas. And we'll get into the structure in a second. And I'll kind of talk about how I understand it and think about what we're covering and why it's important.

Daniel Scrivner (02:21.598) But the reason I wanted to share this is, you know, we all are very ambitious. We all care about doing great work. This essay is exactly written for us. And so it's something we should study. It's also the best meditation on the conditions and precursors for great work that I've ever read. So I'm going to link to a bunch of stuff in the show notes. I don't imagine this is going to be a short essay because there's so much to explore. And so I'll jump in to a little bit of the essay in just a second.

But if you're curious for my notes, for some of the experts in quotes, for a link to the essay, as well as other related essays like this to me actually feels a lot like a modern equivalent of Richard Hamming's talk that he gave at Bellcore in 1986 titled You and Your Research, You and Your Research, which is another phenomenal piece I'm sure I'll cover at some point in time. Anyways, if you're interested in seeing all of that, I highly encourage you to go find the show notes at outlieracademy.com slash great work.

And you can also, you know, link to the essay. If you haven't read it, you can find it in the show notes for this podcast just directly below. So with that, let's go ahead and jump in. And what I actually want to do is start with where Paul, how Paul ended the essay. So this is all, you know, once you make it 30 pages in, this is what this is what the kind of, you know, last few paragraphs are like at the end. And then we'll jump into the front and start going into the structure of this. 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 sort of 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 a set of people willing to want to is small. The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal mathematical sense. And they are ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition, you can't do anything about. So we can ignore that. And we can assume effort if you do in fact want to do great work, it's going to take effort.

So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It's just a question of finding it and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. You can only answer that by trying.

Daniel Scrivner (04:42.962) 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 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 it's fascinating here. You know, I'll jump into the essay in a second, but what's fascinating is, you know, as I was kind of preparing for this essay, trying to think about the structure,

It's actually remarkably simple. And I would say, you know, the essay starts out like the, you know, you don't have to be reading for long to get maybe the main jest of Paul's findings of what it takes to do great work. And it's really that he thinks there are four things. The first is that you have to decide what to work on. The second is that you need to learn enough about that so that you can get to the frontier of knowledge in that given field in that given area. The third is that you then, you know, you're on this frontier of knowledge.

You need to notice the gaps. You need to notice where things are missing. You need to notice where little bits of logic or little bits of how this might be done or be done in a better way are missing and can be added. And then the fourth is you need to explore the most promising gaps. And so I would say that's actually relatively simple. What's fascinating is that the bulk of the essay is actually about more of the how. And I kind of think of it as a bunch of tips for navigating and persisting through these seemingly four simple steps.

And it's everything from optimizing for interest in, you know, interestingness, to when ideas are simultaneously novel and obvious, they're usually good ones to why the best questions grow and answering to why everyone should take as much risk as you can afford. So I break all this down in the show notes. And I would say this is probably an episode where I would highly encourage everybody, because there's, you know, everyone should absolutely go and read the essay and that's linked there.

But even just trying to wrap your head around it, it takes quite a while because there's so much ground that Paul covers in the essay. And so, again, highly encourage everyone to go to outlieracademy.com slash great work in order to kind of see how I break this down and be able to see some quotes and excerpts, because I think it's really interesting. OK, so now with that, I'm going to go ahead and dive into the essay. OK, so we're going to start with basically these kind of four rules, these four primers, which I think is really interesting.

Daniel Scrivner (07:06.318) 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. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. When you're young, you don't know what you're good at and what different kinds of work look like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. The way to figure out what to work on is by working.

You'll probably guess wrong some of the time and that's fine. One of the things he talks about here that I really like is, and so, you know, just to reiterate, like what is Paul saying in those last few sentences? What he's saying is, you know, you just need to actually start. And I find this somewhat freeing because I think all of us have this natural, you know, we all desire to be, you know, to have like a perfect record where everything that we try out, we are able to be successful at. And I just love, you know, right at the beginning, it's like one, you just need to start.

And you're going to guess wrong some of the time and that's okay. And you know, I think this idea that if you're sufficiently ambitious, you're probably going to want to do more. You're going to have a higher bar for yourself. So that means you're probably going to choose, you know, make some wrong decisions more than people that have a lower bar, you know, lower ambitions. And that's okay. You know, and I think there's something wonderful freeing about that. Wonderfully freeing about that. He also has an idea in here that I really like of just that you want to 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'll probably be on a project of your own. Just like a really quick interlude on this, what I find is so fascinating, and the reason I would underscore that advice is, the most talented people I've ever worked with are voracious in their curiosity and their desire to do, and their desire to challenge themselves and try new things.

And you know, this idea of like having your own projects, I think is there's a couple layers to it. On the one hand, it's work on things that you yourself are excited about and give yourself permission to have these kind of side projects or main projects that you're doing. But I think, you know, the other pieces, like it's a core part, everyone needs to have be developing a curriculum for themselves all the time. That's what I'm doing with this podcast. This podcast super selfishly is me.

Daniel Scrivner (09:22.014) you know, so I'm working to make something incredible for everybody, you know, that is like me, that I think is sufficiently ambitious and interested and curious and wants to get better. But for me, it's a practice. This is a project for myself. So it's a forcing function for me to get really good at this and to get really good at understanding these ideas and articulating them. Okay, enough on that. So just one idea here is you want to develop your own, develop a habit of working on your own projects. What should your projects be?

Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious as you grow older and your taste in project evolves, exciting and important will converge. But you always want to preserve the excitingness. There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It'll not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, we'll show you what to work on. What are you excessively curious about? Curious to a degree that would bore most other people.

For me, it's investing. It's a lot of the business books that I cover. That's not an interest that a lot of people share with me, kind of broadly speaking. And so you and I are at a small circle there. You know, but I think that's a great bar. What are you curious and curious to a degree that would bore most other people? What is easy for you that when people see you do it, you know, it looks hard to them. That's what you're looking for. Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge.

Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance, it looks smooth. But once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. So this next piece here, again, you know, going back to kind of the initial framework that we started with here. First, you want to decide what to work on. And you're going to do that by following your curiosity, following what you're most interested in. And, you know, and then you're going to want to get, you know, just get to work.

Second, you're going to want to learn enough about it to get to the frontiers of knowledge. And third, it's about noticing gaps. You know, so the next step is to notice them. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. And there's you just an aside for a second. There's some phenomenal footnotes that Paul adds throughout the essay. Some of them are so good. They're interesting enough. I'm going to actually cover them at the end. And so anyways, we just went by one. I'll come back to it at the end.

Daniel Scrivner (11:34.986) Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. You know, one idea here in terms of how you notice the gaps is to boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them. In fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. I want to read that again, because I think there's a lot of wisdom in the sense.

If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. And what I love there is it's kind of like this, this idea or this analogy that you want to be so good. You know, if you're ever going to debate somebody, you want to be able to articulate their point of view so well that you can articulate it better than, than they would be able to themselves. That's how you actually understand the nuance of the subject. And that's how you actually have a, you know, a handle on the idea.

Well, here it feels very similar, you know, and this is a very hard criteria. It's a very high bar. But if you're excited about something that everyone else ignores, and you can say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as any. So again, these four steps, choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps and explore promising ones. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things. But the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence of mortality, which I thought was

That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever will. And you know, we're going to come back to this unsurprisingly one of the keys in this essay, this monograph that we're going to come back to at the end, it's actually echoed at the very end, is that all of this kind of, you know, like great work, if this was a system of planets, great work revolves around curiosity and it revolves around deep passion.

And you know what I love here is it's both the acknowledgement that actually that's something to be followed. You should listen to your intuition and you should listen to just like whatever is, whatever is easy for you. That's not easy for others. Whatever's fascinating for you. That's not typically fascinating for others. Follow those things because one they're energizing. You're going to work harder. You're going to be, you're going to dive deeper.

Daniel Scrivner (13:53.346) You're going to want to get better at it than other people is just unlocks. So many things, the three most powerful motives, it's going back to the text or curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge. And if you want to create something great, it's exactly what you need. You need these all three motives, curiosity, delight, and desire to create something great. And this, you know, one way I thought about this, I've heard this kind of phenomenal quote recently.

When I hear these powerful motives, but then also the desire to do something impressive, one way I've heard that stated recently, which I really like, is whenever you're looking at anybody, there's a fundamental difference between somebody whose aim is not to lose and someone whose aim is to win. From the outside looking in, they can actually look very similar. They can appear as someone who's working hard, someone who's earnest, but when you really get down to it and the drives and the motivations and the bar, they're very... different.

And so what I love about here again, you know, so you want to, you want to lean into these motives, curiosity, delight, but you especially want to lean into this desire to do something impressive and you want to look for points where they converge because that combination is the most powerful of them all. The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud, you'll notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside. And so now you know, we've this is, as I kind of alluded to,

What we've just covered is basically the bulk of the findings. Paul puts it at the very front of the essay. So again, you need to decide what to work on, learn enough about it to get to the frontier of knowledge. You need to notice the gaps in that knowledge. And then we're going to explore, you need to explore, sorry, some of the most promising gaps in that knowledge. The rest of the essay, and so this printed out, I'm on page three, and this is three of 30. So we're 10%, you know.

10% of it is effectively framing up it. The rest of it, I think, are best thought of as a bunch of tips for navigating and persisting through these four simple steps. And so what's fascinating here is it's really not much more complicated than that. But what I love about this essay and really where all of the meat is, is in the remaining 27 pages, where it really is, again, about just tips for making this transition. And what's fascinating structurally...

Daniel Scrivner (16:07.534) Again, I encourage you to read the essay, but it's actually structured as like there are large gaps between these various ideas. And so you one you can see that this is these are disparate thoughts that are that all cohere together into a narrative. But it's also these kind of many meditations on different ideas, which I really like. OK, let's talk a little bit about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. So, again, this is all about what to work on.

Which means that the four steps, sorry, the main reason it's hard is that you can't tell what kinds of work are like except by doing them, which means the four steps overlap. You have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it and how good you are at it. The nature of ambition exacerbates the problem. Ambition comes in two forms. I know this was so helpful. One that precedes interest on the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix. And the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.

And then he talks about, you know, in the educational systems in most countries, pretend that it's easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you know what it's really like. And as a result, an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage. Be better if they at least admitted it. If they admitted that the system not only can't do much to help you figure out what to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager.

Man, is that true? They don't tell you, but I will. When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. And then he talks a little bit about this, you know, this kind of concept of, of luck and really gets to the meat of the point, which is that you want to optimize for interestingness. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck. And the way to do that is to be curious, try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. 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 a high school math class. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show what they're like, but a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. Again, this is a great heuristic. So if we're biasing for interest in this, you want to make sure that the deeper you get into something, the more interested you get. And I think just to echo my sense,

Daniel Scrivner (18:26.738) In my life, the things that have sustained my interest now for a decade or decades have all been things that the deeper I got into them, the more I realized that there was so much more to learn. And it felt like an endless pursuit and endless game in many ways. But it's also something that I, you know, it's your, I think you get excited. It's as if you're progressing at a sport and you continually get more and more excited about your ability to get better and better and better and better. So I would say, you know,

Look for, be aware of that sense, really lean into it. If it doesn't, so if you're not getting more exciting, if you're not getting increasingly interested and energized, then it's probably not for you. If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you wanna read, build the tool you wanna use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience. This should follow from the excitingness rule.

Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mentioned 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. And once you go down that route, you're lost. And just really quickly, I know many people that listen are founders. I think every founder can will resonate with this concept, but there is absolutely like there is deep, profound wisdom in following your own curiosity and in making something that you yourself would love.

And if you can't do that, then you need to be, you need to have an extremely grounded sense of what you're making and who you're making it for. And so I think, you know, this idea of instead of making what they want, they try to make some imaginary more sophisticated audience wants. The reason that that's always a path, you know, you're lost and that's a path of failure is that it's never grounded. You know, typically it's like this amorphous entity.

And you haven't done enough to actually understand deeply what other people want. And so again, you know, if this was an order of hierarchy, it's like first create for yourself. If you can't create for yourself, try to find yourself in what you're creating, but make sure that you're grounding it in this real deep, profound sense of who actually wants this. It can't be this amorphous thing. There are lots of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on, pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, and other people's wishes, imminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against them all.

Daniel Scrivner (20:49.39) If you're interested, you're not a stray. And this, you know, there's a book that I read a while ago, I've read multiple times now that is, again, it's another set of ideas that rolls around in my head often, and it's by Steven Pressfield, and it's The War of Art. And he, in The War of Art, introduces this concept of resistance, meaning that his whole idea, and this is really deeply rooted in his own

his own work. He's been, Steven Pressfield has been prolific at writing a number of exceptional books, including, you know, so he started out more on the kind of fiction side, you know, writing more narrative and then he moved over to writing self-help and he's now kind of done not self-help, but I guess, you know, books about his craft. And so he talks about the act of creation. He has books on writing. He has books on, one of my favorites is I think it's put your ass where your heart wants to be, which is basically just if you really want to do something you need to put in the work.

But he anyways, in the war of art, he has this idea that has always resonated with me, because it shows up in my life and anyone else's life I've ever seen who wants to accomplish something big, which is that it will never it by nature will not be easy, and there will always be a force that it feels like is working against you. So again, if you're interested, you're not a stray, I think is a really good point there. And know and expect that there's going to be a lot of forces that try to lead you astray, and it's your job to stay focused and to stay to stay grounded.

Okay, moving on a little bit around following your interest. So what I love here was this idea that following your interest is not passive, it's actually active. And so it may sound like a 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. But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning. In most cases, the recipe for doing great work is simply to 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 pursue 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.

Daniel Scrivner (23:14.238) I call this approach staying upwind, staying upwind. Love that idea.

Um, one of the other, let's see here. Yeah. What are the other ideas here is, um, again, just how you actually go about persisting. So even when you found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. And again, this is like, there's so many tactical ideas in here, but we're about to get to some really good ones. There'll be times when some new ideas make you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work, but there will be plenty of times when things aren't like that.

You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a technique to working just as there is to sailing. And you know, the idea that, so this is all kind of a preamble, but what Paul's teeing up is basically this sense of like, you know, one of the core problems, whenever you're working on something difficult is actually working, you know, like getting started on it. And this can be getting started in a given day. You know, I encounter this, everybody encounters this. You have a list of things that you've, you know,

Clearly articulated this what I need to get done today. That does not mean that it's gonna be easy to necessarily jump in and actually start doing it. And Paul describes this as, you know, you need activation energy. It'll probably be harder to start working than to keep working. You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don't worry about this, it's the nature of work. It's not a flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going,

It's okay to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it. It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying, I'll just read over what I've got so far. Five minutes later, I found something that, uh, I found something that seems mistaken or incomplete and I'm off.

Daniel Scrivner (25:10.866) I use this trick all the time and it's actually, you know, I, I think of it as like, basically lowering the bar and creating a small, very easy hurdle to go over. And so, you know, some of the ways I apply the same technique is, um, if I'm having challenging, if I'm, if I, you know, I'm aspiring to, uh, read for 30 minutes, I often find it's much more mentally, it's easier for me to get started. It's easier for me to commit to it. It's easier for me to not come up with excuses if I just set a really low bar.

And so what I'll often do is very similar to this idea of just, I'll just read over what I've got so far, which is Paul's, you know, kind of mental trick. My trick is, well, I'll just open up and read for five minutes and I'll put a timer on for five minutes. And the number of times that I will actually only read for five minutes is probably about zero and I will end up reading for 20 or 30 minutes. But anyways, it's a helpful mental trick, helpful way. Again, if you want to accomplish ambitious things, you have to get to work. There's activation energy needed. It's easier to keep going once you've done it.

Don't be afraid of lowering the bar. Make it easy for yourself. Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's okay to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail. Lots of great work begins with someone saying, how hard could it be? But what's important is that you try to finish what you start. Even if it turns out to be more work than expected, finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects, a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. This is so true.

Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, or at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out to not have been a lie after all.

So Paul then introduces this idea. So we talked about activation energy, you know, so this idea that it takes it, it's a hurdle to get over. It's actually difficult for all of us to get started on something. But once we're started, it's relatively easy. So we talked about that. Now he's going to broaden that out and talk about procrastination and this concept that there's actually multiple different types of procrastination. There's per project procrastination, there's per day procrastination and why per project procrastination is so much worse.

Daniel Scrivner (27:11.338) Since there are two senses of starting work per day and per project, there are also two forms of procrastination. Per project, procrastination is far more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. 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.

Procrastination doesn't set off the alarm bells that per day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it. And I love this. This is such a like a simple actionable way. The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself, Am I working on what I most want to work on? You know, and I often, that's a perfectly wonderful way of you know, asking yourself that question. I think to make that a little bit more meta, maybe a little less prescriptive, I often think of it as like you want to force yourself to reflect.

One of the things that I've learned over time, is that reflection, you know, taking the time to reflect, which is really just saying, you know, like, maybe this bad analogy, but I'll go ahead and use it. You know, imagine we're all various different ships, it's like, most of the time, we're at the captain's wheel, and all we're focused on is what's exactly ahead of us and making sure that we're avoiding obstacles, making sure that we're headed in the right general direction. What we need to force ourselves to do more often is to actually take a bigger step back.

And I think of this as kind of, you know, what are you doing when you do that? Well, you're what you're trying to do is one go higher level. Ray Dalio has talked about this in principles. One of the concepts that he uses is that you want to kind of look down from above. And he talks about this in the concept of work and, you know, you're creating a system and you want to be able to look down on your machine. And he thinks of, you know, what is a machine? Machine could be a business machine, could be the way that you go about investing in some sort of system or process you put together.

But that what you ultimately need to be able to do is like kind of become objective and be able to look out, look down from above and really be able to see things clearly. That is what reflection is all about. You're trying to see reality. You're trying to force yourself to confront some things that you probably are pushing out of your mind. And you're trying to just make sure that you're on the right track. So again, Paul's, you know, kind of approach to this is, am I just stopping occasionally to ask yourself the question? Am I working on what I most want to work on?

Daniel Scrivner (29:36.758) This next piece I really like, you know, I think a lot of us can conflate time with cost. I know because it's just a very easy connection to make. Like the more time I spend on this, the more it's costing me. The more it's costing me an opportunity cost. You know, what I love about this is just this idea that like great work takes an unreasonable amount of time. It compounds, which requires consistency and just a sense like exponential growth always starts out flat.

And so the way Paul says this is great work usually entails spending what most what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost where it'll seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging. Again, this goes back to the idea you have to work on stuff that you're not is naturally energizing where you're naturally just very curious. You have to work on, you have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening. There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part.

But this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. That's the key, consistency. People who do great work don't get a lot done every day. They get something done rather than nothing done. And what I love about this is, just to connect this for a second, these two sentences are a little bit out of context, but just this idea of like, so great work happens by focusing consistently. Well, why is the consistent piece so important?

Well, it's because compounding, and this is something that I think is hard to internalize, but compounding at the end of the day, or like exponential growth, completely relies on consistency. If you think about something like Warren Buffett's track record, absolutely the core input to that track record is that he has been doing the same thing on the same tact with the same strategy for now nearly 60 years. Wicked consistency over a very long period of time.

And I would say, you know, just one of the things that we all don't want to acknowledge because it's not super sexy is that consistency is a superpower and discipline is a superpower. Um, and it's, you know, but it's difficult and that's okay. But, but if you want to, you know, if you want to do great work, the key is consistency. And so I just love the way he frames it up. You know, people who do great things, they may not get a lot done every day, but they get something done rather than nothing done.

Daniel Scrivner (31:58.798) And then talks a little bit about like, so consistency, we're doing that for an exponential growth. Well, exponential growth is a little bit different. 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. And you know, this is best, like if you're curious for a visual for this look up exponential growth, like just type into Google exponential growth chart.

But I would say you'll see a very different looking chart than a linear chart that goes up and to the right. And this is a concept. I just recorded a book summary for turning the flywheel. It's from Jim Collins. This concept shows up there as well, too. So again, I think just to reroute this, great work takes an unreasonable amount of time. It compounds, which requires consistency.

And exponential growth always feels flat at the beginning. So that's part of why you have to be able to be persistent and be really consistent. If people consciously realize they can invest in exponential growth, many more would do it. This next piece, I kind of think of like a hack. And this is like a short little three paragraph mini essay stuck in the middle of it. But part of this is like when you're doing something great, you also wanna bring your full self to that activity. What do I mean by that?

We all have times where we're obviously sitting down focused on a task. That could be when we're in the office for a given period of time. That could be when we're sitting down at a desk, just focused on one particular task. But I would say greatness, and I think that Paul clearly recognizes this and talks about it, it demands all of you. And you need to make this something that you're always thinking about, that's always on your mind. You're trying to use every ounce of time and energy and effort to be able to get really good at this.

And so just this idea that like work doesn't just happen when you're trying to work. It also happens when you're walking, taking a shower, going to bed, and that, you know, you can think of those times as like undirected thinking times. So you're thinking about something or you could be thinking about something. So why not use that and turn it into directed thinking? Work doesn't just happen when you're trying. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. But letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.

Daniel Scrivner (34:14.69) You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds that feeds it questions. Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. 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 a distraction instead.

And he says, exception, don't avoid love, which is probably good for us all to remember. He then goes on to talk about just that you want to cultivate your taste. And so, okay, we said, work doesn't just happen when you're trying to work. You want to take your undirected thinking time. You want to make that work. You also want to cultivate taste. 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. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the air is in one direction, where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. Or it could be because ambition...

To be the best is qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Again, I just talked about, or you know, is your aim to win or is your aim not to lose? Is your ambition to be the best? You know, and that's a very different thing from just the ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.

One way to aim high is to make something that people will care about in 100 years. And I think this is like a really useful principle of, okay, if we're trying to do great work, if we're trying to work on problems that are unbounded, that just have a scope that allows for greatness, then what's maybe a bar we can apply to that? What's one way to be able to gut check that? And I just love this idea because I think it strips whatever your particular goal is of all the bullshit and it focuses you on what's actually important is, you know, like focus ridiculously maniacally on just making something people will care about in a hundred years.

Daniel Scrivner (36:23.926) That is a very high bar. You know, that is a bar I think that will encourage you to think in a way that is much more durable and in a way that's much more true to who you are. And that's true to really trying to create something that's rooted outside of the noise of what's happening today and is rooted in stuff that's timeless. Just a phenomenal bar.

One of the things he talks about, we're going to talk about this next, is the desire to work in a distinctive style. And you can think about this as, okay, if we're all ambitious, we key in on people that are sources of inspiration for us. This could be people we want to be like. This could be people that we want to emulate. And I think what's wonderful here, and this comes up a little bit more, of just intellectual honesty and leaning into what's true for you and not trying to copycat or be something that you're not.

And I think of that this, you know, my kind of notes on the sidebar was being the best equals you're going to be, you know, you're going to have a distinctive way of working. And so if your goal is to have a distinctive way of working, don't pursue that, just pursue being the best. And if you pursue being the best, that's going to require you to be yourself. That's going to require you to, you know, just set an extraordinarily high bar. And that's going to automatically translate to a distinctive way of working. But it's going to be true to you. So it's not going to be from emulating other people.

Paul says this, Paul says it this way. 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. Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying. Trying to is affectation. Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive fake persona. And while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

And he kind of goes off on this, this idea of affectation, which actually had to look up, just understood a little bit better. Avoid affectation is a useful rule so far as it goes. But how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're earnest, you avoid not just affectation, but a whole set of similar vices. You know, just a profoundly simple thing. Just be earnest. Just literally try to be the best.

Daniel Scrivner (38:44.314) Set ambitious goals for yourself, like trying to make something that will be relevant, endurable, and useful 100 years from now as it is useful today. And if you do those things, and you approach them just from who you are, you know, then earnestness is exactly what you should do. The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact, it's a source of power to see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth.

You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. Another subtle component of earnestness is informality. Informality is much more important than its grammatical negative name implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It means focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't. What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good.

You know, another way of thinking about that's like you're focusing on the veneer. You know, my back, like my backgrounds in design, I've spent a lot of time helping companies, I, you know, achieve their goals of showing up in the world a given way. And, you know, I see a lot of corollaries between this. One of the, a typical conversation with the CEO. So I work with a lot of early stage companies. And every company that I work with has very high ambitions when it comes to their brand, their standards for design, how they want to show up in the world.

Everybody approaches that problem generally in the same way, which is that at first they want to start by copying other people. And I would say that's actually exactly what Paul saying here. You're trying to do affectation. You're trying to say, you know, we're a startup where if you know, say 10 person team with high ambitions, incredibly talented, you know, laser focused on a mission. But you know, what we really want to do is just borrow Apple's design aesthetic or pull from these five companies or these three companies or these two companies.

Well, you know, it's this is a very similar problem that you and I all have, which is we all have a desire to be seen a certain way in the world, or we all have a desire to show up in the world a given way. And what I think is just so useful about this advice, I mean, I've fallen into this trap before, and I think this is a phenomenal reminder, is that, like, you know, this is very hard for founders to be able to grasp, that like, what resonates in a brand is not that something is clean, is not that something looks like an Apple logo, what resonates in a brand is authenticity, in a sense that, you know, a sense of uniqueness.

Daniel Scrivner (41:07.33) I always, my, you know, the way I kind of describe and think about this today is whenever you're trying to create something, your goal should be to be singular. You want to be the only, you don't want to be one of many, you don't want to be similar, you don't want to be compared to, you want to be one of one. And anyways, and so it's a long way of saying, when I think of avoiding affectation, when I think of being intellectually honest, when I think of informality, you know, and just this idea of like your energy's going into the veneer, it's not going into the substance.

That's what I pull from this and I think it's really helpful. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work. They expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact, that's basically the definition of a nerd. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated sounding criticisms of them. The work to great, the route to great work is never easy. The Old Testament says it better to keep quiet lest you look like a fool.

But that's advice for seeming smart. If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas. Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes conscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice, but I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, we're cool.

So said another way, just strip it all down. You know, I show up authentically, do not try to be anything, just focus on making something great. And if you focus on making something great, and if you lean into your own intuition, and you lean into your own, you know, just the way the thing that you're going to naturally be able to create, it will be distinctive, and it will be distinctive for you, it'd be one of one and be singular and an all I absolutely have a very strong point of view.

That all great work and great work is a very different bar than good work. All great work is singular. And I, you know, anytime I ever feel like I'm struggling to create something, I always try to reroute myself and actually the goals to create something singular. And so what do I need to do at this moment in time to try to do that or push that forward one step more. One of the other things that I like here is just this idea that great work is consistent. And so Paul talks about this. Paul talks about this a little bit.

Daniel Scrivner (43:27.894) Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent. You may have to throw things away or redo them. You won't necessarily have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some effort. When there's something you need to redo, status quo, bias, and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat this ask, if I'd already made the change, would I wanna revert to what I have now?

You know, this idea you have to have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it or because it cost you a lot of effort. Indeed some kinds of work, in some kinds of work, it's good to strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated, you'll understand it better, and you won't be able to lie to yourself about whether there's anything real there. Mathematical elegance may sound like a metaphor drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term elegant applied to a proof.

But now I suspect it's conceptually prior, that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. You know, maybe another way of saying this is logical elegance. When we see things that cohere together, it's because there's a set of rules, a set of principles that is like the binding element of keeping everything one part. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.

When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural self. And then I just love this, you know, sort of simple idea at the end of the section. Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas.

Daniel Scrivner (45:24.418) So then we go on to this idea. Let's see here, so great work is consistent. Let's see, okay, just jump into this next section. True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge. I've never liked the term creative process. It seems misleading. Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind.

Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it. I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but there are definite ways to make the most of however much you have. For example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. And I love this. It's almost like

So what is Paul saying here? This is my interpretation, my notes in the margin, that the originality is a byproduct. It's not a sole aim. And I have found this to be true for many, many different things where what, you know, like the output that you're trying to get is actually a byproduct of doing something and it's not the sole aim. And if you try to treat it as a sole aim, you're going to fail. And so just this idea that if you want to be original.

You're trying, you're basically trying to solve, you're trying to understand something that's beyond your comprehension. And so you're stretching, you're pushing yourself. You're going to have to, you know, there's an aspect of creativity there. There's an aspect of problem solving there. There's an aspect of you're confronted with something that you're a little bit naive about. And, you know, we're going to talk about a little bit of these, some of these topics in a little bit more depth. But I find that very helpful. So again, you know, the fount of origin, the fount of originality is by trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult.

Originality is a byproduct. This is one of the other kind of ideas here. And I love this. Yeah, I love just the metaphor. It also helps. And so again, this is a tip for originality. It also helps to travel and topic space, you'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on. And partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. Don't divide your attention evenly between many different topics though or you'll spread yourself too thin.

Daniel Scrivner (47:43.942) You want to distribute it according to some sort of power law. Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality. It's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force. Read this again because I think it's phenomenal. Curiosity is itself a kind of

It's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. So curiosity will, will give you questions to ask. One of the big ideas in here we'll talk about in a little bit is, um, that to find, you know, to do great work, find a great problem in that what you're actually searching for is not a solution. It's not an answer. You're finding a great problem. Um, you know, I've had many, and I can include this in the show notes. Um, one of my, one of the favorite interviews that I've done in the last year was with the founder. Um, it was, it was, uh,

Adrian Allen of the company Forward, who kind of went on a rant when I was interviewing him in the best way possible about why he's so obsessed about being problem focused. And I went into depth, asked him a number of kind of, we went into quite a bit of depth about how this actually materializes what it looks like in the company. But this idea of actually, we're all taught to, we have a natural inclination to be solutions oriented.

And actually what we want at the end of the day to be problem oriented. Because problem, like basically problems, questions is where all the magic is. Okay, so curiosity is itself a kind of answers. Curiosity will give you great questions. And originality is really, you know, it's like originality is a component of a great answer. And so you need a great question first, that's the precursor. And if you're pursuing that question the right way, you know, if you're trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult, if you're being earnest.

If you're leaning into big problems, if you're being okay being naive, if you're showing up as yourself, you're going to get originality out the other side of that equation. I really like this test for, you know, how do you know when you've, how do you spot great ideas? Well, it's typically when they're both true and new. And true by itself is not enough and just that great work is both novel and original.

Daniel Scrivner (49:57.698) Having new ideas is a strange game because it occasionally consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before? When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one. And I always think of that like novels actually, you know, so what is novel? Unsurprising novels, a sense of newness, a sense of like, oh, wow, no one's done that before. That's an interesting tweak or twist on it. But what obvious means is that it's actually logical that once you once you

Once someone has proposed this idea to you, it actually snaps right into place and seems like, oh, of course. And so I just love this test. You're looking for ideas that seem simultaneously novel and obvious. We see the world through models that help us, that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover. They're easy to see after you do something hard.

One way to discover broken models, so again, this is like a source of original and interesting ideas here. One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't wanna see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model. It's what they think in. So they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect. To find new ideas, you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away.

That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations, not so much because he was looking for new ideas, as because he was stricter. The idea I wrote myself in The Margin is be stricter. Being stricter, seeing reality more clearly helps you see and discover new ideas and models.

And my interpretation here when I hear models is oftentimes in fields a huge unlock will be proposing a new way that something actually works, a new model of how some, you know, how an input and output happen, a new model of how, you know, cause and effect, a new model of how something works. You know, can you, I think maybe one of the easiest fields to see this in is physics, something like string theory. String theory is a, is a entirely new model by which we would see the world. And so the, you know, what I like here is like, you're both looking, you know, so how are we, are we going to try to do great work? We're going to try to one, be question obsessed.

Daniel Scrivner (52:19.746) We're going to try to be very earnest in the way that we work on them. You know, we're going to be okay breaking the rules. We're going to talk about that in a second. Just this need to break the rules and why that's a component of, yeah, we think of that as novelness and just really contributing a new note. To contribute a new note, you have to question things and take a different tact and that often requires violating narratives and commonly accepted rules. But just this other idea that you want to be stricter.

You also want to be very, you know, you want to look at the world rigorously. And I think of that as you want to look at the world as really as possible. You want to actually see what's happening as opposed to what sorts of easy, simple, nice, comfortable narratives are kind of sitting on top of it. The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. If you understand the degree of rule breaking required, because new ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world brought with them.

Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people. It has to be a narrative violation. Or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas can seem both, often ideas that seem bad or bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting. They're rich in implications. Whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.

Okay, so you're looking for narrative, violating ideas, but ideas that aren't bad ideas that actually you know, if you were to kind of carry forward and think about what this actually means if this were true, you start to get really excited and interested in implications instead of just like, oh, well, that's no, there's nothing there. There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules to enjoy breaking them and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent minded. The aggressively independent minded are the naughty ones.

Rules don't merely fail to stop them. Breaking rule gives them breaking rules gives them additional energy for this sort of person delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get started. The other way to break rules is to not care about them or perhaps not even know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make discoveries. Their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent mindedness. And so, you know, this is like, I think, pretty deep.

Daniel Scrivner (54:43.99) But just this idea that, you know, okay, so if you're trying to be original, if you're trying to do great work, you have to have originality. Well, what originality means is that you need to be independent mindedness. And just this concept that there's actually two types of that. You can be aggressively and actively independent minded, and that's probably bad. You know, you don't want to break the rules because you don't know they exist or you're trying to test something, you want to break the rules for the sake of breaking the rules.

And just this idea of, you know, I think of this as like a wonderfully elegant way of explaining why so many new discoveries, why so many new companies are created by people that are new to a field. Well, I think Paul says it here really well, which is the reason that they make these new discoveries is they have an ignorance of a given field's assumptions and that actually acts. And so what is that enabling? Like that, of course they have, you know, of course they have ignorance of assumptions and some common beliefs, but here's the key. It gives them temporary passive, you know, independent mindedness.

So it's helpful. It's helpful in helping them see independently because they're actually coming in not with none of the baggage, none of the frames, none of the rules that are typically being taught. I really like this. This is another thing that Paul, you know, kind of supposes, which is to find good ideas, you actually need to turn off your filters and that a lot of those filters, if you think about the way your mind works, we're always trying to make ourselves feel safe, make ourselves feel comfortable. We're always, you know, we're trying to live in this kind of vacuum and bubble to be super frank.

And so one of the ways of having original ideas is you need to turn some of that off. And I thought this was kind of a wonderful idea. And obviously the idea here is you want to turn off the filters, including some subconscious ones, so that you can get more new ideas. An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semi finals. You do see it subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it's too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial.

This suggests an exciting possibility. If you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas. One way to do that is to ask what would be, this is phenomenal, it's just phenomenal framing. One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. So simply by making it not about you, make it about the subjective, make believe other person, you know, and what should, what ideas should they go and explore? Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you. You won't be worried about fear of failure. You'll just be anchored on what is interesting.

Daniel Scrivner (57:09.134) What is something that is sufficiently interesting that it should be explored? And that's where you're anchoring, which I think is really helpful. You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other direction, by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.

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. 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? What becomes possible if you discard it?

Let's see here. Yeah, one of the other ideas here, which I love, is being problem oriented. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding what problems to solve. Super interesting insight. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems and solutions is that problems are bigger bets. I think this is a massive insight. A problem could occupy you for years while exploring a given solution might only take days. But even so, I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems are undervalued. I've often, you know, I think about this all the time. Of, you know, as a world.

And I think this actually goes back to this idea of avoiding affectation and being earnest. Again, what's the underlying principle there? Well, it's just this idea that we all have a base desire to be fashionable. We want to be seen in a given way. We want to be looked at positively. It's very difficult for us to kind of force ourselves out of that. And I actually think of it as one of the greatest accomplishments that all of us can unlock is this ability to live in discomfort.

Daniel Scrivner (59:16.834) This ability to live comfortably in fear of failure, this ability to just show up as yourself and not really care about it, because I think it's actually very difficult. And so, how does that translate here? Well, most people are gonna look at for kind of fashionable ideas. One way of saying this would be ideas that they're confident could be achieved in say, shorter timeframe.

Something that feels like the right problem to work on now, as opposed to a problem that I'm not even sure if I can crack it. And if I were, it's going to take me 10 years. You know, that is an unfashionable problem. And just this idea that, you know, you're if you're looking for value, part of that is you're looking for things that are undervalued and that unfashionable problems are undervalued. You know, I think this is articulated in another way. I often think of as just like unsexy problems. It's the same, you know, maybe similar, slightly different wording.

But you know, you want to find the unsexy problems that other people are avoiding, that other people aren't looking at because less you'll have less competition. Of course, that's what you want to do. Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential. You know, so if you're interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.

Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are occupied elsewhere. The existing work often has an old school solidity and there's a satisfying sense of economy and cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted. But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't seem to matter as much as it actually does.

How do you find these? By being self-indulgent, by letting your curiosity have its way in tuning out at least temporarily the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on quote unquote important problems. This is such a key insight and again goes why, you know, if we're trying to do great work, curiosity is at the center because curiosity is maybe another way of saying it's like, it's a very pure force. It is analytical. It is rigorous. It is energized it, um, you know, and uh, yeah.

Daniel Scrivner (01:01:23.722) And so you always want to be, you don't want to follow your curiosity and let that help you find problems. Because you know, you don't want to just don't look at other signals and don't look to other people. You do need to work on important problems, but almost everyone is too conservative about what counts as one. It's like a challenge for you and I, it is what you're working on too conservative. Are you focused on a solution as opposed to a question? And how could you raise the bar on your ambition?

And I think what I, you know, a big piece that I love about this essay is it is challenging. Like many of the ideas in many ideas in here are uncomfortable because if they're true and you believe in them, then you should be setting a higher bar for yourself. And I think this is a great way of saying that. So try asking yourself if you're going to take a break from quote unquote serious work to work on something just because it would be really interesting. What would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.

Daniel Scrivner (01:02:18.372) Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. So what might seem to be merely the initial step, deciding what to work on is in a sense the key to the whole game.

Few grasp this, and we're going to move on to a slightly different idea here. Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. This is one of my favorite parts of this essay. Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools, they tend to exist only briefly before being answered like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.

I love this idea. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By asking such questions, you are already in excitingly novel territory. By even asking such questions, you are already in excitingly novel territory. What I wrote about this again, just a really good question is a partial discovery and a great question transports you. It's like a little transportation device to new and novel territory.

Get really fucking good at asking questions and coming up with really good questions for yourself. Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before, even in your childhood, and couldn't stop thinking about. People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive. Keep your youthful questions alive.

Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new idea is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled about something, which means that originality consists partly of puzzlement, of confusion. You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them. It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. I love this, I put a note for myself, strive to be rich in unanswered questions.

Daniel Scrivner (01:04:27.914) And I feel like just on this for a second, absolutely one of the takeaways for me reading this is I want to spend more time cultivating great questions. I want to be more question obsessed in my own work and in my own pursuit. And I want to anchor more in exciting questions than in exciting answers or exciting solutions. Because I feel like that's just a massive insight. It's a very different way of seeing the world. 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 questions.

Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions. Again, just to make this connection, I said at the beginning, this essay came out of a paragraph, kind of an unremarkable paragraph from another essay. And so one way of kind of thinking about the genesis of this essay is that this came from a tiny nugget of an idea that was more a question of what does this mean and what would it look like if I dove into this in a big real way. You know, so this work came out of a question. Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

And then, you know, it has more ideas about what a great question looks like, which I love. The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and you try pulling on it and it just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be obviously big. So don't require a question to be obviously big before you try answering it. You can actually start with a really small question and it may be that just continuing to pull on that string you get to bigger and bigger and bigger questions. It's like a, you know, it's like a Russian doll of questions.

You can rarely predict that. It's hard enough even to notice a thread, let alone to predict how much will unravel if you pull on it. It's better to be promiscuously curious, to pull a little bit on a lot of threads and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments or side projects or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.

And again, you know, then leading off this idea, you know, one way of interpreting that. And so just this last, you know, my note for this last paragraph was just a note on questions. The best questions grow in answering them. I think that's such a profound, interesting insight. You know, the best questions you get more interested, you get more energized the further into them you get. And this other idea, you want to be promiscuously curious. You want to pull a little bit on a lot of threads. You want to start a lot of small things. Well, what's another way of saying that or looking at that? You want to being prolific is underrated.

Daniel Scrivner (01:06:49.154) The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering new things. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without having a lot of bad ones. Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything that's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun by just trying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when you do look at it. So err on the side of starting, which is easier when starting means starting small.

Those two ideas fit together like puzzle pieces. How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions, by iterating. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. And one way of thinking about this that I've often thought about is like, why is this true? Why do you wanna start small? And why do all great things that actually cohere? So all big things that actually are impactful and well done, why do they always start small?

Well, you know, I think another way of thinking about this, like you actually have to start, I think about this with teams actually when I'm building teams, like one just insight that I've had is to scale a team to scale a function. So I spend a lot of time in design to scale a design team. You need to have something there to start with. You need to have a core. You need to have, you know, like a seed that's actually gelling. You need to have a gravitational center. And I think the same thing is true when you think about, you know, so ideas that are going to grow and cohere together and be impactful.

I think part of the reason they start small and that you're working in successive iterative versions is you need to start with something of substance that's working. You need to admit one way of thinking about it. Paul earlier in the essay talked about unstable particles. You need your initial small idea needs to be a stable particle. It needs to be something that coheres, something that sparkles, something that you can scale. And then from there, what you're going to do is you're going to just think very iteratively.

And you know, one way I've often thought about that one question I actually ask myself is when working on ideas is just to kind of root myself in this idea that it's iterative and then that I should be less planned and I should be more rooted in just the next right move. One question that I'll ask myself is where should I put the next hour or dollar in a given project? And I feel like what's wonderful about that question is it keeps you rooted in the sense of it's iterative. I don't need to have, I don't need to be thinking necessarily 10 moves ahead.

Daniel Scrivner (01:09:13.378) If I just, you know, have something of quality that I'm working on. It can be very, very small. But if I'm working to grow bigger, I just need to make the next right move and the next right move. And I feel like that mode is uncomfortable, but that's also what gets us to compounding this idea of just being consistent, working, starting small, doing successive versions. It all coheres together. You start with something small and evolve it. And the final version is both clever 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. If you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to plan as much and your designs can evolve instead. You know, one way of thinking about that is like you're working on an idea or a project, you're working on it emergently. You're starting with something.

And this act of being iterative, I think honestly, what that allows is for something to emerge slowly over time. Like one of the other ideas that I have along these lines of allowing something to emerge is in creative process. You know, if we're working on, say, a new product design, one of the things that you want to do, like one of the big topic conversations I have with founders often is around how to set design teams up for success.

And a counterintuitive insight is that what a successful project, what a successful process looks like for a design team or a product team is that they allow themselves to surprise themselves to come up with surprising answers. And that may not sound very profound, but there's a bunch of precursors that are very obvious. If you want to be able to surprise yourself, one, you can't start with a crystal clear idea of what you want to be able to build. Sure, you absolutely want to start with some idea, you know, some like frame of reference or some sense sense of the ambition.

But what you actually want to do is more focus on questions and not answers. And you want to bake in enough time upfront to really be able to look at multiple different ideas and triangulate and to allow something to emerge. And so again, just this idea of like great work is often emergent. You want to get to something great and big and ambitious, it always starts small. And it's great to work iteratively. Great things are almost always made in successive versions.

Daniel Scrivner (01:11:35.07) Okay, now switching to this topic of risk, you know, just a very straightforward insight. You want to take as much risk as you can afford. Every project that fails can be valuable in the process of working on it. You'll have cross territory. Few others have seen and encountered questions. Few others have asked, and there's probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard. This, I mean, this is like just a profound, interesting insight.

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. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time.

The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it on slightly frivolous ways to learn about something you don't need to know about just out of curiosity or by trying to build something just because it would be cool or become freakishly good at something that slightly is an important qualification. Spend time lavishly when you're young, but don't waste it. There's a big difference between doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doing something you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet and possibly a better one than you think.

The most subtle advantage of youth or more precisely inexperience is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fit together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but occasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly and jabs you when you think about it. People are used to the idea having learned, people that are used to the idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not to. So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing.

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 the relative importance. So they worry equally about everything. When you should worry more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest. But what you don't know is only half the problem with an experience. The other half is what you know that ain't so. You arrive at adulthood with a head full of nonsense, bad habits you've acquired and false things you've been taught.

Daniel Scrivner (01:13:53.886) 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. For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child, there was an authority at the front of the class telling you what to do, telling you what you had to learn, and then measuring whether you did it. But neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning. They're just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed. The sooner you overcome the passivity, the better.

The best teachers don't wanna be bosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead using them as a source of advice rather than being pulled by them through the material. Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.

Daniel Scrivner (01:14:42.966) This I really like so we can talk a little bit about originality but also about good and bad ways to copy and I think there's actually some profound ideas in here. People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothing inherently bad about that. There's no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor does copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Love this next sentence. I'm gonna say it twice. Originality is the presence of new ideas not the absence of old ones. Originality is the presence of new ideas not the absence of old ones.

But there's a good way to copy in a bad way. If you're going to copy something, do it openly instead of furtively or worse still unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributed phrase, great artists steal. The really dangerous kind of copying, the kind that gives copying a bad name is the kind that's done without realizing it because you're nothing more than a train running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination.

In many fields, it's almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people's projects rarely arise in a vacuum. Once you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative, the latter doesn't structurally, the two cases are more similar than they seem. So again, just like this idea of and this is just so true in life, like whenever you're learning something new. I think copying is actually wonderful, you know, and

What do I mean by that and why is it a positive thing? Well, I think part of copying is trying to figure out your tone and your voice and your take. And again, I have a profound belief, Paul echoes it in here, that what's the best way to learn about something? I think of it as like, you need to come into reality, you need to come into contact with it, because your only way you get to ground truth is by actually trying and doing. You have to get out of hypothesis and theses and what do I think could happen, and you just need to jump in and start doing it. And I would say,

You know, one of the ideas in this essay is like, just start, find something, be okay making some mistakes, be okay taking some risks, be okay intellectually honest with yourself about what's working and what's not, but try something. And you know, be unafraid to copy. But what you want to do is you want to, you know, just like remember that you can copy in the sense of using old ideas, ideas that aren't yours, ideas that have been in the industry or in the vein of work for a long period of time.

Daniel Scrivner (01:17:01.846) But ultimately, great work has originality, it has some novelty to it. And so, originality is a presence of new ideas. And so ideally, don't copy outright, don't copy wholesale, but copy and then modify. And I would say one of the best ways, one of the best ways I would say to copy well is to copy from many different places and be a master at conglomerating those things together. Because often new ideas are the amalgamation of a bunch of surprising other ideas that no one's tried fitting together.

Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded despite of. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the are most likely to be the flaws. This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the experience that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't. Being talented is merely how they got that way. One of the most powerful kinds of copying is copying something from one field into another.

Daniel Scrivner (01:18:02.23) That it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. Metaphors like this wonderful abstraction layer. I can take an idea from one field, I can try to abstract it slightly by turning it into a metaphor, and I can take that almost like a piece of a game or a Lego block and go and apply it somewhere else. Negative examples can also be as inspiring as positive ones.

In fact, you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well. Sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing. If a lot in this then very different tangent. So that was the end of that idea of just you know kind of copying what that means, good ways to copy, bad ways to copy, and that oftentimes when you try to copy outright you're actually copying the flaws. You're copying, one way I've thought about it is you're copying the output and not the input that got that output.

Daniel Scrivner (01:19:00.506) Yeah, I won't share a reference there. There's plenty that come to mind, but I feel like that captures the idea well. Okay, so this is very different. This is almost like a call to action of a way, again, if you want to do great work, we're now going to talk about the people aspect of that. If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it's usually a good idea to visit for a while.

It will increase your ambition and also by showing you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence. If you're earnest, you'll get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist interest in it and the hobbyist always want to talk their hobbies.

Daniel Scrivner (01:19:47.674) So related to this, so that idea, one way of saying it's like, if you want to be the best in the world at something, go and find out where many of the most talented people are and you want to go put yourself in that network. This is why if you're a founder, historically the advice would be to go to Silicon Valley. It's still great advice, although now there are multiple hubs where there are amazing founders and amazing investors and incredible talent employees that want to work in early stage companies. But it's an easy hack. And I just love the note because I think it's very true.

Part of going there and being there in person is just you actually come and counter with other people that are doing this at a really high level. And you will, in my case, maybe I'll frame it that way, it's probably more accurate. In my case, I've had the chance to work with exceptionally talented people. Keith Raboy at Square, who's now gone on to Open Door, Founders Fund, Jack Dorsey, profoundly talented executives that have gone on to do some really amazing things.

And you absolutely find by working with those people, I would say it's kind of a 50-50 case of things that are intimidating about how good they are and aspects of what they do. And from that, you can pull so much inspiration and you can pull so many ideas of how you can tactically get better or strategically get better. But similarly, you're gonna find out that they're human and you're gonna find out that, you know, everybody has rough edges and corners and things that they have to work on and things that they're not great at. And part of becoming successful is learning how to work around those things.

And you know, just disabuse yourself of this notion that anybody does not have things, you know, that cannot be improved. And you know, why is this all important? Well, sure, we're all imperfect. But I think, you know, Paul captures the right idea that a big part of just doing great work is having the confidence that you can. And part of that confidence, I would say, is, you know, knowing, knowing people that have done great work and knowing that they're humans, knowing that, you know, they're not all that different. Okay.

Similar but different idea, you know, so you want to obviously want to seek out the best colleagues. You know, 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 encourage you and to bounce ideas off of absolutely. Colleagues don't just affect your work, though. They also affect you. So work with people you want to become like because you will work with people you want to become like. So you will quality is more important than quantity and colleagues. It's better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. Amen.

Daniel Scrivner (01:22:09.666) 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. But it may be possible to give a more concrete answer than that. Here's an attempt. Sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They see and do things that you can't.

So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep you on your toes in the sense you're probably over the threshold. And I think that's exactly right. What is the bar for good colleagues? Good colleagues are, there's a degree to it that it's intimidating. It makes you wanna show up with your A game. It makes you want to contribute at the level that they're contributing. And it makes you want to combine your efforts to really create something that either of you independently would not be able to create.

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. This next piece I love, which is obviously if you're going to work on something ambitious, morale is critically important.

And so the kind of meta note here is like husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism. Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist and more likely if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim. Morale also compounds by a work. High morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. Maybe said another way.

morale works like a flywheel. You want to have a positive flywheel of morale. One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inculcate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks as part of the process. Again, explicitly considering setbacks as part of the process. Solving hard problems involves some backtracking. I'm gonna stop here for a second just to add a meta-reflection.

Daniel Scrivner (01:24:28.522) I used to have a belief that you know, that optimism meant that I should expect that there are no setbacks and I should expect that, you know, I should just have an unrealistic view about how things would go. And I would say as I've done more ambitious things, as I've gotten older, as I've had success and failure, I feel like that's been tempered and it's accurately reflected in how Paul Graham talks about it here, which is now I think about optimism as I have an undeniable underlying belief that I can overcome.

And then I can figure something out and then I can persist. But I have no, I know that it won't be easy. I know that there'll be setbacks and I know there'll be surprises. I know that there'll be periods where I feel wrong and stuck and like I can't make progress. And I would say that version of optimism that's tempered with reality is so much more helpful than a version of optimism that is tempered in just an unrealistic view of the world. And so I love here.

It's like you want to be optimistic, you want to work with ambitious people, but you also want to, you know, understand that there's going to be setbacks. You want to see that as part of the process. Why? Because then you're not going to be surprised if you know so much of reality and our emotional realities based off our expectations. I just think that's profound. So if at first you don't succeed, try, try again isn't quite right. It should be if at first you don't succeed either try again or backtrack and then try again.

Never give up is also not quite right. Obviously there are times when it's the right choice to eject. Or more precise version would be, never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than need be. Corollary, never abandon the root node. It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. Such a good insight. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort. Bad pain is a sign of damage.

Daniel Scrivner (01:26:22.026) One of the things that Paul talks about here, which is, you know, I think is helpful to reiterate is, you know, there's a physical component of doing great work. And I think that's not talked about enough. Like one of the insights I've had, and we'll get into how this relates to Paul's thoughts in a second, but one of the insights I've had is, you know, if you look at successful people, by and large, they tend to be much more athletic and focused on physical health and just, you know, being at the top of their physical capabilities than people that aren't.

And I would say one way of thinking about that is actually just to record. It's not that these people are superhuman. It's not that these people really care, you know, about looking and feeling good. But it's not, it's important. And I think they see, they see the, they know that they're how they're feeling physically and their physical body. It will color everything else that they do. And so again, it's just the idea of like, if you have, if you want to do great work, if you want to have a very high bar for yourself, if you want to be able to persist over decades, you need to care for yourself physically. You're one.

whole entity. And so I just love, you know, a couple of lines from this essay that relate to that. Ultimately, morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the most dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking. People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't.

In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. It's okay to want to impress other people but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise. The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you. Don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder. Again, curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies and it knows more about you, more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. Notice how often the word has come up.

Daniel Scrivner (01:28:42.75) If you asked an oracle the secret, and I think this is all profound and we'll start wrapping up here in a second. We're almost at the end of the essay. And so this, you know, is the conclusion of just rerouting it in 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. It doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to be curious. You can't command curiosity anyway, but you can nurture it and you can let it drive you. Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work.

It'll choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of curiosity. So again, I'll just read the last bit of this because I think it's too good not to read again. And so this is how Paul closes the essay. I'm then gonna end with a couple of footnotes because those are really great, but we're nearly there. Okay, so here's the closing.

Believe it or not, and you know now, we've been talking about this, we've been going through this essay for 90 minutes. So there's, and hopefully I have done a good job of exposing the wealth of insights that I found inside this. Because my whole job, my whole goal with these is to not only use this as a way for me to really meditate on this, be able to articulate these thoughts, but I want to be an amazing conduit for compressing and distilling these for other people. 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. The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal mathematical sense, and they are ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition, you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort if you do in fact wanna do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest.

Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? Here, there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited for is probably a pretty close match, probably a comically close match. It's just a question of finding it and how far into your ability and interest can, how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying.

Daniel Scrivner (01:31:05.394) 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 can 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 gonna pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you wanna 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.

Discoveries are out there waiting to be made. Why not by you?" So that was, I'll end in a second by just tossing in a couple of the footnotes that I really enjoyed. But that was How to Do Great Work. It's an incredible essay, 11,800 words. Took me 90 minutes to go through and talk through. And you can find more about it.

You can see all of my notes, excerpts, quotes, some amazing stuff at outlieracademy.com/great-work . And I'm gonna end with just a couple of footnotes. And so one of the things I really like, I rarely do this, I always notice when people will add basically notes or footnotes to a document. And as I was reading this, I started noting like, wow, there's actually kind of a lot. I think in total there's 20, something like that, 20, 29, 29 footnotes. And some of them are just great. So I thought I couldn't conclude without including some of those.

So I'm just going to talk through them really quickly. These are some of my favorites. Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's idea of what's possible. You know, my takeaway from that is that that's actually the definition of great work. One of the things I really like collecting is, you know, definitions of words or terms that feel personal to me and have significance.

Daniel Scrivner (01:33:23.07) Just try to do something amazing and leave it to future generations to say if you exceeded. I think it's a great way of kind of taking the pressure off of yourself. Again, aim to create something that's as relevant 100 years from now. Just aim to create something amazing and don't worry about judgment. Don't worry about judgment now. I thought this insight was interesting. A lot of stand-up comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. Did you ever notice? Dot, dot, dot.

New ideas come from discovering this about non-trivial things. It's about noticing anomalies. Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You'll often have to co-evolve with the problem. This was an interesting way of thinking about how you might pursue a problem, how you might spar with the problem through time. You know, you might, you know, you'll often have to co-evolve with the problem.

Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do for over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.

If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus, relax cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in, in that you walk to and from. So obviously, you know, one of the things we talked about a lot here is just doing great work is all encompassing. It requires all of you. Um, and just this idea that of course, a piece of that, because doing great work is going to mean you're going to have to pursue a big problem that allows for greatness over a long period of time. You're going to need to move between focus and relaxation and just this idea that, you know, keep that front of mind.

Think about how you can set that up in your life so you can enable yourself to be able to really persist over the longest period of time possible. That's how compounding works. Consistency over long periods of time. Don't try to be anything except the best. I think that's a great, ridiculously simple takeaway to take away from this. Just focus on being the best. Be earnest. It'd be a good exercise to try writing down a list of questions you rendered about in your youth. Again, this idea of like keeping your youthful questions alive.

Daniel Scrivner (01:35:25.994) You might find you're now in a position to do something about them. I haven't done this exercise. I don't know if I'd have anything particularly insightful, but someone listening might. So I encourage you all to think about that. Are there questions from your youth you might want to rethink about?

You talk to this idea, you know, I think it's just helpful to keep in mind. If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas. Another way of saying that's if you want to have good ideas, you must have bad ideas. Bad ideas are a precursor to good ideas. It's absolutely essential. Bad works, you know, is a precursor to great work. A shitty draft of an essay is a precursor to a great draft of an essay. Start small, work on something that's stable that has substance, work iteratively.

One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if you're producing or consuming. This was a really interesting question. Writing computer games is less likely to be a waste of time than playing them. And playing games where you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than playing games where you don't. So one way to tell if you're wasting time is to ask whether you're producing or consuming. OK, I will leave it there. Again, I highly encourage you to read How to Do Great Work in full.

You can find a link to that essay in the show notes below this podcast, this video on YouTube. You can find my notes as well as my favorite excerpts and quotes from this essay at outlieracademy.com slash great work. You can also subscribe to the podcast there. You can find all of our previous episodes. We've got 160 plus now. And then finally to get my top 10 highlights from this essay. So I, everything that, everything that I go through and share here, I ultimately distill down, it's a great forcing function for me into my top 10 highlights.

It's a great way for me to say just, you know, in this case I read 11,800 words. What are the 10 highlights that I want to save that for me, I will think of as if I reread those that's kind of getting the essence, the distillation of this idea. I do this for everything and I share this. And so if you're interested in getting this, I do it for every book, letter speech that I share, sign up for my email list at newsletter.outlieracademy.com . That's newsletter.outlieracademy.com . Thank you so much. And again, this was a summary, really more of like a deep dive dissection of How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham.

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Essay Summary: “How To Do Great Work” by Paul Graham

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The Big Ideas

Who is Paul Graham?

Paul Graham's essay on "How To Do Great Work" begins with the following words:

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

A few fascinating bits of background on the essay:

In all, it took nearly 7 months to write. ( Source )

It sprung out of a single paragraph in another essay he was writing. It seemed such an important topic that he cut it out and made it into its own essay. ( Source )

Reflecting on this last point Paul shared: "It's strange to think that such a huge essay could grow out of one paragraph in another essay. But this has happened before. Beyond Smart began that way too. There's nothing like writing essays to give you ideas for essays." ( Source )

Listen & Watch: Listen now on Apple , Spotify , or Google . Watch on YouTube . Or find a link to your favorite player on Pod.link .

While nothing beats reading the essay in its entirety, here's an attempt to sum up some of the big ideas:

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A Silicon Valley insider gave up watching TV aged 13 and says the secret to success involves completely reframing the meaning of hard work

Paul Graham is the cofounder of startup factory Y Combinator.
In a personal essay, Graham revealed that he gave up television because he felt like he wasn't achieving anything.
He says there are 3 ingredients to hard work: natural ability, practice, and effort.

There is a reason famous people make things look effortless, according to Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham: Years of practice and hard work.

In a June post on his website , Graham shared his thoughts about what hard work really means, and how it can be learned.

Over recent years Graham, who majored in philosophy, has drawn attention and occasional controversy for his essays on his l ong-running blog . His subjects include anything from coding language, NFTs, to the case for ending the death penalty.

Now living in the UK, he remains highly influential in Silicon Valley, not least thanks to Y Combinator minting successes such as Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.

There are three ingredients to great work

Drawing on lessons from his career so far, Graham wrote that hard work is inevitable if you want to achieve "great things" and that there are three ingredients to hard work: Natural ability, practice, and effort.

Most people can get by with two, but to do the best work you need all three, he wrote, adding that people who have equal levels of talent and capacity for hard work are outliers.

There are two types of goal to work towards

Graham also said that people have to learn how to work towards two types of goals if they want to achieve them.

He wrote that people tend to have a specific understanding of what goals are and how they can be achieved — this is mostly drilled into us as 12-year-olds in school.

Successful people on the other hand have relearned how they approach goals.

While aims that are "clearly defined" and "equally imposed" are easier to achieve, you still have to learn discipline and to avoid distractions.

Working towards goals that are less clearly defined or for which there is no externally imposed deadline is more challenging, but the most basic level of which is simply a feeling that you should be working without anyone telling you to, wrote Graham, who also revealed that he stopped watching TV at the age of 13 "out of a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything."

In Graham's view, school can often be the "biggest obstacle to getting serious about hard work" because it can make hard work seem boring and pointless. In this context he says there are two kinds of "fakeness" that people need to separate in order to understand what hard work really is.

"Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual practitioners," he wrote.

"The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork."

But hard work doesn't mean working too hard

While hard work is essential, Graham concedes that everyone has a limit, although this limit may differ depending on the different types of work.

While running a startup, Graham wrote that he could work all the time — but he can only pursue writing or coding tasks for a maximum of five hours a day. The only way to discover your limit is to cross it, an ongoing process.

He wrote that successful people do good work because they are honest with themselves about when they've reached theirs.

"If you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off," he wrote.

Watch: Drew Houston and Paul Graham on how Dropbox was created on a Chinatown bus and how determination is key to starting a business

Main content

Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent (Ep. 186)

Plus, his bizarre strategy for getting over a fear of flying..

Peter Thiel

Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what’s gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he’s optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we’re underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.

Watch the full conversation

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or your favorite podcast app to be notified when a new episode releases.

Recorded July 15th, 2023.

Read the full transcript

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler . Today I’m here with Paul Graham . Paul, welcome.

PAUL GRAHAM: Thank you.

COWEN: You’ve written several times that your wife, Jessica Livingstone , is a better judge of character than you are. What other areas of talent judgment is she better, or much better, than you?

GRAHAM: Practically everything to do with people. She’s a real expert on people and social protocol — what to wear at events, what to say to someone, [laughs] anything like that.

COWEN: But you have all this data, so why can’t you learn from the data and from her to do as well as she can? What’s the binding constraint here in limiting someone as a judge of human affairs?

GRAHAM: Well, partly, I just don’t have as much natural ability, and partly, I just don’t care as much about these things. The conversations we have are not “Paul, you can’t wear that.” They are like, “ Paul , you can’t wear that .” [laughs] I’m like, “Really? Why not? What’s wrong with this?” I just don’t care as much.

COWEN: But say, when you’re judging talent — Sam Altman , Patrick Collison — you’re judging people, right? Of course, it’s the business plan, but much of it is the talent.

GRAHAM: Oh, it’s all the people. The earlier you’re judging start-ups, the more you’re just judging the founders. It’s like location for real estate. The founders are like that, so yes, sure. Which is why the earlier stage you invest, the more you want to have these people who are good judges of people.

On judging people

COWEN: If she’s better than you at human affairs, comparing you to other people, what exactly, in the smallest number of dimensions, are you better at than the other people?

GRAHAM: What am I better at?

COWEN: Yes. What are you better at? You can’t be so terrible at this, right?

GRAHAM: You mean to do with start-ups?

COWEN: To do with people — how well they will do with their start-ups. What’s the exact nature of your comparative advantage?

GRAHAM: I can tell if people know what they’re talking about when they come and talk about some idea, especially some technical idea. I can tell if they know, if they actually understand [laughs] the idea, or if they just have a reading-the-newspaper level of understanding of the thing.

COWEN: How well can you judge determination?

GRAHAM: Determination — it’s hard to judge by looking at the person. The way you would judge determination — because people act determined; people think they’re supposed to act determined. No one walks into their Y Combinator interview thinking, “Well, I need to seem diffident.” [laughs] Nobody thinks that. They all think they’re supposed to seem tough, which is actually really painful and stressful. It’d be better if they just were themselves because someone trying to act tough — it’s so painful to watch.

But the way you tell determination is not so much from talking to them as from asking them stories about things that have happened to them. That’s where you can see determination.

COWEN: It’s how they tell the story, or it’s what happened?

GRAHAM: No, it’s what they did in the story, right?

COWEN: What they did in the story.

GRAHAM: Something went wrong, and instead of giving up, they persevered.

COWEN: Why are there so few great founders in their 20s today, saying that they are —

GRAHAM: Is that true, though? I’ve heard about that.

COWEN: Ten, fifteen years ago, you had a large crop of people who, obviously, have become massive successes. Today, it’s less clear. Companies seem to be smaller. The important people seem to be older. Sam Altman was important early on, but now he’s very, very, very important. He’s what, 37, 38?

GRAHAM: Something like that.

COWEN: Seems like more of a synthetic set of abilities we need.

GRAHAM: I’m not even sure this is true. It could be that it’s not actually true, and that there’s something else going on. If you look at athletes, for example, athletes learned how to stay good for longer. You have people who are really international quality soccer players at age 34. That didn’t used to happen back in the days of Johan Cruyff , smoking cigarettes between halves. [laughs] He didn’t last till 34. It might have seemed like all the good football players are 34, and it’s just an artifact of them lasting longer.

COWEN: But the 20-year-old stars seem to have vanished. There’s not a next Patrick Collison, who was evidently so.

GRAHAM: Well, Patrick Collison probably didn’t seem to most people to be the big star, and you can prove this, because if he had, they would have invested in early Stripe rounds, and they didn’t. Anybody who claims they knew early on that Patrick Collison was going to be a big star — show me the equity.

COWEN: Okay, but there was Peter Thiel , there was Sequoia , there was yourself. A bunch of people knew, in fact, or strongly suspected.

GRAHAM: Sure, yes. Some people did, but certainly not everyone. I don’t know if this is true. I’ll investigate this summer when we’re going to go back to YC and talk to some founders, and I’ll talk to the partners, and I’ll see what’s going on, because I had a mental note to check and see if this is actually true.

COWEN: There’s a Paul Graham worldview in your earlier essays, where you want to look for the great hackers , and a lot of the most important companies come from intriguing side projects.

GRAHAM: Oh, yes.

COWEN: But if we want older people who are somewhat synthetic in their abilities, are those other principles still true?

GRAHAM: No, not necessarily. Not as true. Part of the reason you want to find young founders who’ve done stuff from side projects is that it guarantees the idea is not bullshit. Because if young founders sit down and try to think of a start-up idea, it’s more likely to be bullshit because they don’t have any experience of the world.

Older founders can do things like start supersonic aircraft companies, or build something for geriatric care, and actually get it right. Younger founders are likely to get things wrong if they try and do stuff like that. It’s just a heuristic. It’s a heuristic for finding matches between young founders and ideas.

COWEN: Why is venture capital such a small part of capital markets? It’s big in tech, it’s somewhat big in biotech, but most other areas of the economy, you finance with debt or retained earnings or some other method. What determines where VC works and doesn’t work?

GRAHAM: Well, growth. You’ve got to have high growth rates because VCs — it’s so risky investing in start-ups, investing in these early-stage companies that maybe don’t even have any revenues. The only thing that can counterbalance the fact that [laughs] half the companies completely fail is that the ones that don’t fail sometimes have astonishing returns.

COWEN: Can you imagine a future where there’s a lot more tech in terms of the level, but slower rates of growth, and VC quite dwindles because the growth rates aren’t there? Or VC goes to some other area?

GRAHAM: Well, VC has been dwindling in the sense that they have smaller and smaller percentages of companies. If you go back and look at the stories from the 1980s, they would do these rounds where they would get 50 percent of the company. Even when YC started, they would get 30, and now it’s down to 10 in these rounds — God knows what they’re called; they keep renaming the rounds. For a given round size, the amount of equity they get is much smaller than they used to.

COWEN: It at least seems we have a new, dynamic Microsoft that ships products quickly and innovates and, on the surface, appears to act like a start-up again. How can that be true? We all know your famous essay about Microsoft culture . What has happened?

GRAHAM: I did not say that they wouldn’t make money.

COWEN: But they’ve done more than make money. They’ve impressed us with their speed.

GRAHAM: Well, I meant something very specific in that essay. Incidentally, I talk in that essay about how I was talking to a founder, and I was talking about how Microsoft was this threat. You can see he was clearly puzzled, like, how could Microsoft possibly be threatening? I didn’t mention who the founder was, but it was actually Zuck. It was Mark Zuckerberg, [laughs] who was puzzled that Microsoft could be a threat.

Still to this day, if you ask founders, “Are you afraid that Microsoft might do what you’re doing?” None of them are. It’s still not a threat to start-ups. Yes, it makes more money now, but it’s still not a threat like it used to be. It doesn’t matter in the sense of factoring into anyone’s plans for the future. No start-up is thinking, “Well, I better not do that because Microsoft might enter that and destroy me.”

On founders

COWEN: In the early years of Sam Altman, what did you see in him other than determination? Because he’s not a technical guy in the sense of —

GRAHAM: He is a technical guy. He was a CS major.

COWEN: But you’re not buying the software he programmed, right? There’s something about what Sam Altman does that —

GRAHAM: Well, now he’s become a manager, but he knows how to program.

COWEN: But that’s not why his ventures have succeeded, right?

GRAHAM: Oh, no, he does a lot more than —

COWEN: There’s some ability to put the pieces together.

GRAHAM: Yes, but he’s not a nontechnical guy. He’s not just some business guy. He’s a technical guy who also is very formidable, and that’s a good combination.

COWEN: There’s a now-famous Sam tweet where he appears to repudiate his earlier advice of finding product-market fit early and then scaling, and saying, “Oh, maybe I was wrong saying that.” What OpenAI has done is not exactly that. Do you agree, disagree?

GRAHAM: Well, maybe OpenAI is a special case because you have to have giant warehouses full of GPUs. You can’t just mess around and throw something out there [laughs] and see if it works. Maybe it requires some amount of advanced planning for something on that scale. I don’t know. I don’t know what he meant by it, and I also don’t know what it’s like inside OpenAI, really. I don’t know either.

COWEN: Do you still take a dim view of solo founders ?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s harder. I know I wouldn’t start a start-up alone because it’s just so much weight to bear to do something like that.

COWEN: But it’s very hard to find a partner as good as you are, right? It’s harder and it’s easier. You can just do it.

GRAHAM: Well, people should do some work. When I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a start-up, I tell them, “Instead of sitting around thinking of start-up ideas, you should be working with other people on projects. Then, you’ll get a start-up idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of, and you’ll get a co-founder too.” I wish people would do more of that. You can get co-founders — just work with people on projects. You just can’t get co-founders instantly. You’ve got to have some patience.

On increasing ambition

COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?

GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.

COWEN: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?

GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]

As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”

It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.

COWEN: How much of what you do is reshuffling their networks? There are people with potential. They’re in semi-average networks —

GRAHAM: Wait. That was such an interesting question. We should talk about that some more because that really is an interesting question. Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people can be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. There’s got to be more to it than just the fact that I don’t have to do the work.

COWEN: I think a lot of it is reshuffling networks. You need someone who can identify who should be in a better network. You boost the total size of all networking that goes on, and you make sure those people with potential —

GRAHAM: By reshuffling networks, you mean introducing people to one another?

COWEN: Of course.

GRAHAM: Yes.

COWEN: You pull them away from their old peers, who are not good enough for them, and you bring them into new circles, which will raise their sights.

GRAHAM: Eh, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there’s often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They suddenly become more excited because there’s a critical mass of like-minded people around. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. I mean, that is a big thing.

COWEN: Think of it as the power of London in the 17th century. The Industrial Revolution happens further north, but the ideas, the science, in or near London, maybe Cambridge.

GRAHAM: And Oxford.

COWEN: Those are the networks people are brought.

GRAHAM: Near London only in the sense that everything in England is near everything else by American standards. It’s not really that London was the center of ideas. There were a lot of smart people there, but things were more spread out. Be careful with English history there.

Back to this idea, though, of how to get people to be more ambitious. It’s not just introducing them to other ambitious people. There is a skill to blowing up ideas, blowing up not in the sense of destroying, like making them bigger. There is a skill to it, to take an idea and say, “Okay, so here’s an idea. How could this be bigger?” There is somewhat of a skill to it.

COWEN: It’s helping people see their ideas are bigger than they thought.

GRAHAM: Yes . Oh, yes. We often do this in YC interviews .

COWEN: People say you’re especially good at that. This is what the other people say.

GRAHAM: Well, that’s why I’m mulling over what actually goes on, because there is this skill there. The weird thing about YC interviews is, in a sense, they’re a negotiation. In a negotiation, you’re always saying, “Oh, I’m not going to pay a lot for that. It’s terrible. It’s worthless.” Yet in YC interviews, the founders often walk out thinking, “Wow, our idea is a lot better than we thought,” just because of what we do.

You know what we do in YC interviews? We basically start YC, the first 10 minutes of YC is the interview. You see what it’s like to work with people by working with them for 10 minutes, and that’s enough, it turns out.

COWEN: So, you think the 11th minute of an interview has very low value.

GRAHAM: I’ve thought a lot about where the cutoff is. Like, where’s the point? If you made a graph, what’s your probability of changing your mind after minute number N? After minute number one or two, the probability of changing your mind is pretty high. I would say YC interviews could actually be seven minutes instead of ten minutes, but ten minutes is already almost insultingly short, so we kept it at ten. We could have made it seven.

COWEN: I think there’s often a threshold of two, and then another threshold at about seven, and after that, it’s very tough for it to flip.

GRAHAM: Yes. Although that doesn’t mean you’re always right.

COWEN: It could just be, after three hours, you would still be wrong.

GRAHAM: It’s just not going to flip. I didn’t say seven minutes is enough to tell, notice. [laughs] I said seven minutes is the point where you’re probably not going to change your mind.

COWEN: If it’s going somewhat badly, and the person is flipping positive at minute six, what is it that’s happening, both in the interview and in you?

GRAHAM: If it changes from two to seven, uh —

COWEN: Clearly, from zero to one or two, they get over nerves, or they adjust the sound volume. There are plenty of those stories.

GRAHAM: It’s probably that we misunderstood what they’re working on initially.

COWEN: So, great idea, bad at presenting it?

GRAHAM: No, more like they’re near some idea that we’re familiar with, and we just assume they must be doing that idea. And they say, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re not doing that . We’re doing this.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Thank goodness.” Then, they get extra points because not only they’re not doing the stupid thing, but they understand that the stupid thing is stupid. They get extra credit for what we were subtracting for it in the past.

COWEN: Who falls through the cracks in the YC process, as you’ve experienced it?

GRAHAM: Well, YC — one of the reasons I’m so contemptuous of university admissions is that I am also in the admissions business. I am obsessed. [laughs] We not only measure when we fail, but we’re obsessed with the failure cases. YC has a list of all the companies that we’ve missed, that have applied to YC and we’ve turned down, and they’ve gone on to be successful . We spend a lot of time, like someone thinking about past injuries.

COWEN: What’s the common element, though, now that you think of it?

GRAHAM: When there are common elements, my God, do we act quickly to fix that. I remember early on, there was this company doing email, if you wanted to send mass emails. I forget what their name was. This was back when we were reading the applications. If the first reader gave it a sufficiently low grade, it would never be seen by anybody else.

The first reader was Robert Morris . He was designated wet blanket of YC. He gave this application a C, with the comment “spam company.”

Nobody ever saw it again. They ended up going public. After that, I changed that thing in the software that made it so that no second reader would see it. After that, every application had to be seen by at least two people.

On getting over the fear of flying

COWEN: How did you get over your fear of flying?

GRAHAM: Oh, really? Did I already talk about this? Do you know the answer to this?

COWEN: There are two or three places in your writing where you mentioned that you had a fear of flying, but you used the past tense, which implies you got over it, but you never told anyone how.

GRAHAM: Well, it’s a bizarre strategy. I learned how to hang glide, which sounds crazy.

COWEN: [laughs] That will do it, though, right?

GRAHAM: If you’re afraid of flying, how could you learn how to hang glide? The answer is, you learn how to hang glide gradually. You start by just running along the flat. If there’s a headwind, maybe you feel a little lift. Then you go 10 feet up the hill, run as fast as you can, and you reach a total altitude above ground level of like a foot. You’re not afraid when you’re a foot above the ground. You go out a little further up the hill until a month later, you’re jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on your back.

After I was good at hang gliding, I took flying lessons. There’s this intermediate point where I was totally comfortable jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on my back, moderately comfortable flying a Cessna 172 — where the instructor had just turned off the engine [laughs] and said, “Okay, land it,” because the glide ratio is actually similar to a hang glider — and still afraid of getting on an airliner.

That shows you how irrational these things are. But when I finally did get on an airliner, my God, it was like a spaceship [laughs] compared to the planes I’d been flying. It was fabulous. It totally worked. My fear of flying was completely cured.

COWEN: What did you learn about start-ups and talent selection from that process?

GRAHAM: Boy, if I learned anything, I haven’t considered it until this moment.

COWEN: But you might have learned it quite well, just not articulated it.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. You ask me these hard questions. I don’t have time to think about them. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously used anything I learned there. It was certainly convenient to be able to —

COWEN: Do you see founders who go through a comparable process with something other than flying, and it’s like, “Oh, I get where you’re at, and here’s what you need to do next.”

GRAHAM: Yes, a lot of technical-type founders hate the idea of doing sales and going and talking to people, and so you can tell them, “Look, just go do this.” You know, after a few months, they’ll be used to it. They may never like it. I would hate doing that myself now, but they can at least do it.

On Florence

COWEN: Were the Medici good venture capitalists, or do you give greater credit to the Florentine guilds?

GRAHAM: I have no idea. I need to learn more about the —

COWEN: The guilds would run competitions. The Medici would just pick the people they liked. They both have good records in different ways, but obviously, they’re competing models.

GRAHAM: You’re an economist. You’ve read books about this stuff. I don’t know. What do I know about the Medici? [laughs]

COWEN: I think the Medici were overrated, and the guilds were more important, but that’s a debatable view. You could argue it either way.

GRAHAM: They could well be overrated. They were the ones who had all the publicity. I have no idea.

COWEN: Your time spent at RISD and in Florence — how did it alter or affect your thoughts on software design and talent selection?

GRAHAM: Man, if you asked how it affected my ideas about painting , I can give you an answer.

COWEN: We’ll get to that, but Florence was all about talent selection because how many people in quite a small area became both great and famous?

GRAHAM: One thing I remember — there was one moment I was sitting in Florence, and I realized I had gone to the wrong place. Because I was studying Florentine history, all the buildings are right around you, and I found myself thinking, “Damn, Florence was New York City [laughs] in 1450.”

COWEN: That was 60,000 people, yes.

GRAHAM: That’s why it was good at art. It wasn’t some weird Florentine thing about art or some special Florentine sense of aesthetics. They were just the most progressive city. It’s really too bad that the far left has hijacked that word. It’s such a good word. Maybe we can get it back.

GRAHAM: I remember thinking, “I’ve gone to the wrong place.” I went to the place where the puck used to be over hundreds of years ago. [laughs]

COWEN: You can learn a lot from studying where the puck used to be.

GRAHAM: Oh, not really.

COWEN: Are you sure?

GRAHAM: The Academia was a pretty crappy art school.

COWEN: Being in Florence itself had —

GRAHAM: Oh, I can learn a lot from looking at the works, but I don’t have to go and live there.

COWEN: What is it you learned that was relevant for Y Combinator? Because you’re doing something comparable to what the Florentines did: picking a pretty small area, making it the absolute center for talent selection, a magnet that drew people in, and having a lot of winners. You copied what you were living.

GRAHAM: I had already learned that from Harvard.

COWEN: Maybe you had to learn it twice. [laughs]

GRAHAM: No, no, no. I was already very well aware of this phenomenon, to the extent YC uses anything like that. We were definitely thinking. YC was started within the convex hull of Harvard, [laughs] like the places Harvard spread out through Cambridge, but YC’s original office was within it. We’ve consciously tried to make YC the Harvard of start-ups. No question about that. We had the model right there.

COWEN: Harvard’s very screwed up, as you know. You look at their admissions — how much is dean’s favorites and legacies and affirmative action? It’s not Y Combinator. They’re trying to build a coalition, and you’re just caring about picking winners.

GRAHAM: The thing is, though, all universities have an admissions process that’s corrupt in that way, except possibly Caltech. Caltech might actually do undergrad admissions properly. So, since they’re all messed up, Harvard does still have this draw compared to the others.

On AI and painting

COWEN: Does AI make programming even more like painting?

GRAHAM: God, what a question. How do you make these questions? Does AI make programming more like painting? I have no reason to believe that. [laughs] It might be true.

COWEN: You’re piecing things together more, arguably, in this new post-GPT world.

GRAHAM: Well, what I was seeing when I said programming was like painting is that they’re both building something. You’re not building something any more with AI than when you were writing code by hand, so I would guess not.

COWEN: How far is Midjourney from “real art”?

GRAHAM: I don’t know.

COWEN: Is it more decrepit modernism? Is it a fantastic revolution? Or, as art — put aside the start-up angle — how do you view it?

GRAHAM: Well, I see all these AI-generated images, and I don’t know which ones are from Midjourney and which ones aren’t. I can’t say for sure about Midjourney, but I have definitely seen some AI-generated stuff that looks amazing, that looks truly impressive.

COWEN: As art. Not just that it looks impressive. It’s amazing as graphic design, but do you think it’s art in the same way that Rembrandt is art?

GRAHAM: This whole thing about what’s art and what isn’t? I think it’s all a matter of degree. My crap carnation coffee mug is art. It’s just not very good art. [laughs] There’s not some threshold, where above this threshold it’s art. Everything people make is art, just to varying degrees of goodness. I can tell you, some of the things I’ve seen that were AI-generated, I’d be impressed if a person made them. That probably is over your threshold.

COWEN: If you’re good at talent selection, who is an underrated painter and why?

GRAHAM: Ah, wow. [laughs] Boy, there is a topic I think about a lot. There’s a bunch of different reasons people can be underrated. Almost all good artists are underrated.

COWEN: I agree.

GRAHAM: It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices. How many people does it take to generate an auction price? Two . Just two. So, you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they’re legit, or hedge fund managers’ wives who’ve been told to buy impressive art to hang in their loft so when people come over, they’ll say, “Oh, look, they’ve got a Damien Hirst .”

The way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people, [laughs] which is great , actually. When I was an artist, I used to be annoyed by this. Now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I’m delighted because it means there’s all this money. You see Andy Warhol’s screen prints selling for $90 million.

COWEN: Yes. Old masters can be, I wouldn’t say cheap, but I would say radically underpriced.

GRAHAM: A couple hundred thousand.

COWEN: Or even less for some good ones.

GRAHAM: Yes, I know because I buy them. [laughs] I used to be annoyed by this, and now I think it’s the most delightful thing in the world because there’s all this loose money sloshing around, and so-called contemporary art is like this sponge that just absorbs all of it. There’s none left. Some of the things I buy, I am the only bidder. I get it for the reserve price. No one else in the world wants it, or even knows that it’s being sold, so I am delighted about this.

The answer to your question, which artists are undervalued? Essentially, all good artists. The very, very, very famous artists, artists famous enough for Saudis to have heard of them — Leonardo, I would say, is probably not undervalued. But except for the artists who are household names — every elementary school student knows their names — they’re all undervalued.

COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?

GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.

COWEN: So, you think it’s mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft?

GRAHAM: It certainly helps.

COWEN: Then talent’s responding accordingly. Fundamentally, what went wrong?

GRAHAM: You invent some shtick, right?

COWEN: Right.

GRAHAM: And then — technically, it’s called a signature style — you paint with this special shtick. If someone can get some ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your shtick and hangs it on the wall in their loft in Tribeca. And people come in and say, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a so and so,” which they recognize because they’ve seen this shtick. [laughs]

COWEN: Say, if we have modernism raging in the 1920s, and the ’20s mass media is radio for the most part —

GRAHAM: No, no, no, newspapers were huge. Modernism was well —

COWEN: But not for showing paintings, right? There’s no color in the papers. You had to be —

GRAHAM: Well, the 1920s were good enough to make painting like Cezanne fashionable. It was just about getting going in the 1920s.

COWEN: Why can’t we build good British country homes anymore?

GRAHAM: [laughs]

COWEN: Or do you think we can?

GRAHAM: Well, there’s nothing stopping you —

COWEN: But it doesn’t happen, right?

GRAHAM: — except the planning people. Do you know anything about building houses in England? You just cannot build.

COWEN: It’s impossibly difficult. It’s one of the worst countries, right?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s the reason it looks so nice here.

COWEN: Yes.

GRAHAM: If they had America’s zoning rules here, the entire countryside would be plastered with houses. You wouldn’t have any fields left at all because the difference in value between agricultural and building land — it’s like, God, 100X or something like that, and this place is small .

COWEN: Yes, but there are new buildings, say, in Cambridge, many other parts of Britain, and the new buildings are not country homes. Yet everyone, on average, is wealthier. Why the change?

GRAHAM: Wealthier than where?

COWEN: Wealthier than Britain in the old days. Even before the railway, you have large numbers of country homes, and most country homes being built when living standards were pathetically low.

GRAHAM: A country house has got to have a certain amount of land around it. You can’t just have them plastered down a street. It would look wrong. You want a different style of architecture or something like that. There is a place where they build big houses.

You know what it is? It’s like when the Macintosh appeared, and you could have whatever font you wanted, right? Most people have bad tastes. In the old days, you had to have a classical-looking house because that was the only way to build houses. In the Victorian period, actually, was when things went wrong. You could have an Italian villa, or wait, no, it could be a Greek temple, or [laughs] something that looked like it was from the Tudor period. Take your pick and mix them together, Greek temple with Tudor bits. It was all over from that point on, really.

It’s not like they build good houses in America either.

COWEN: No, neighborhoods are worse yet. There are nice individual homes, but is there any truly beautiful neighborhood built after 1950? Where would it be? In any country, put aside Asia?

GRAHAM: No, in Palo Alto, there are neighborhoods of houses built by this guy called Eichler , this developer who hired some of the best midcentury architects. And arguably, those neighborhoods are good, although they messed up the trees.

COWEN: When were those built?

GRAHAM: ’50s and ’60s.

COWEN: Okay, but that’s 70 years ago. Now, I mean, we haven’t done anything in 70 years? What’s your model of that?

GRAHAM: I’m sure someone is building some good houses somewhere. The point is, you don’t really need to, and so it only happens by accident. The developers mostly are thinking, “We need to just turn this land into houses as soon as possible. The buyers don’t have any taste. We don’t need to sweat that, so we’ll just build random houses that look big and have large master bedrooms. People will buy them. We’ll get our capital back and go on and do the next one.”

They don’t need to be good. Houses don’t need to be good. They didn’t need to be beautiful in the old days, either. It was just technology was so constrained, you didn’t have any choice.

On traveling back in time

COWEN: You get to go back in time. Your health is guaranteed, and you know whichever languages you might need, and you spend six months somewhere safe. Your safety is guaranteed. Where do you choose?

GRAHAM: I often think about this question.

COWEN: You seem like someone who often thinks about this question.

GRAHAM: Yes, sadly, the way I think about it is, I keep trying to escape from the obvious answer, and I don’t manage to, because the obvious answer to that is Athens, right? Which is, that’s where everyone would pick.

COWEN: It’s not what I would pick, but what’s your choice number two, then? I’ll tell you mine, I think.

GRAHAM: Well, there are things where I am obsessed with the mystery of what the hell was going on in Dark Age Europe. I’m deliberately using the term “Dark Age” because they’re trying to outlaw it. [laughs]

COWEN: It’s correct, I think.

GRAHAM: If the term “Dark Ages” hadn’t been invented already, that would be a fabulous invention to describe that period. Yes, sure, new things were getting invented. Some people were doing good things just like always happens. But it was as bad as things have been. There are so few records, nobody knows how things happened.

I would be really interested to know when barbarians infilled the Roman Empire, but there were still big Roman landholders, and they had to give a large percentage of their estates to these new barbarians, who were in a sense running things. They were in the cockpit, but they didn’t know what the buttons did.

COWEN: You want to go to Northumbria or northern France? Or where do you want to be?

GRAHAM: No, no.

COWEN: Dark Ages — you’ve picked the era, now give us the spot.

GRAHAM: Like Provence.

COWEN: Provence?

GRAHAM: Provence in 600. What was going on? What was going on in Provence in 600? I would be very interested to see that. Almost like morbid curiosity. I wouldn’t learn as much as I would in going to Athens, [laughs] but I just really want to know what was going on.

COWEN: I’m a big fan of morbid curiosity, by the way. It’s the best kind of curiosity, in many cases.

GRAHAM: I can tell.

COWEN: I would pick the Aztec Empire before the Spanish arrived. I feel I have vague glimpses of what ancient Athens was like. There are still Greek ruins. The Europeans marveled at the cities they saw, and they burnt all the books, and I think I would learn more by somewhere more strange.

GRAHAM: Maybe, maybe. The reason I’m interested in medieval Europe is, it’s where our world came from — the clocks we use, the writing system, all the clothes eventually evolved from that. The reason I’m interested — I long ago realized that the medieval period wasn’t a dip. It wasn’t like there was this high level of civilization, and then it dropped down for a while, and then it rose back up again.

It was more like there was one civilization that was high and went down, and another civilization based in the north that rose up. In a sense, it was the beginning of everything. That’s why I want to know what the hell was going on in 600 or 700.

COWEN: Did Rome have to fall? Or can you imagine a path where Rome has an industrial revolution, and we save ourselves 700 or however many centuries of time? Like you need the fragmentation to get the competition for Britain to become significant?

GRAHAM: Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. Oh, 2,000 years is a long time, or even 1,700 years. Actually, Roman was half decent —

COWEN: Because China never falls.

GRAHAM: — until 200, so, 1,500 years. But 1,500 years — things could have changed a lot.

COWEN: But did they in China? Chinese Empire never collapses. It takes many forms, many dynasties, but it ends up stalling. So maybe the collapse of the Roman Empire was one of the best things that could have happened, for Europe, at least.

GRAHAM: I’m sure people didn’t think so at the time. People were thinking at the time, “It didn’t have to be this bad.” [laughs] I don’t know. Neither of us knows about this kind of thing.

COWEN: Looking forward, how optimistic are you about the future of the UK? No real wage growth since 2008, no real productivity growth for as many years. What’s up, and what’s the path out of that?

GRAHAM: I am optimistic because they still have a gear that they haven’t shifted into. I suppose I’ll really have gotten native when I say “we” instead of “they.”

COWEN: [laughs] But you grew up in Pittsburgh, right? Near Pittsburgh.

GRAHAM: Yes, but I’m British by birth.

COWEN: Does that count? Are you really British, or your parents were diplomats here?

GRAHAM: No, no, no. Yes, I’m really British.

COWEN: You’re really British?

GRAHAM: Yes, yes. Just ask HMRC. As far as they’re concerned, I never left. [laughs] HMRC is the British IRS.

Okay, the reason I’m optimistic about Britain — I was just thinking about this this morning — is because people here are not slack. They’re not lazy, and they’re not stupid, and that’s the most important thing. Eventually, non-lazy, non-stupid people will prevail.

I’ve funded a couple of start-ups here. You can see, when you introduce these people to the idea of trying to make something grow really fast and have these really big ambitions, it’s like teaching them a foreign language, but they do learn it. They do learn it. It’s not like English people are somehow genetically inferior to Americans. I think they have all that potential still to go. I’m astonished when I see statistics. I think GDP per capita in the UK is only two-thirds of what it is in America.

COWEN: It’s about the same as Mississippi.

GRAHAM: It’s preposterous , I know. Imagine the potential there. Imagine the potential.

COWEN: You don’t feel that way about Mississippi, necessarily?

GRAHAM: No, I think Mississippi’s probably already up close to its full potential. I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there. I shouldn’t say things like that.

COWEN: Why and how did so many things here end up undercapitalized? The water utilities, the NHS — it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don’t reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. You’re an economist. I don’t know what the term capital maintenance means.

COWEN: But you’re a British person, I’m told.

GRAHAM: Undercapitalized — I don’t know what these things mean.

COWEN: They’ve been postponed.

GRAHAM: The NHS is run by the government, so things run by governments are often bad. Although the NHS seems to be pretty good. Even though people attack it, it’s a lot more civilized than the American system.

COWEN: How long it takes an ambulance to arrive if you call one up?

GRAHAM: Well, that’s only recently got bad. That’s just in the last couple of years.

COWEN: That’s what undercapitalization means. You keep on borrowing against the future. You don’t plow resources back in, and then at some point you don’t have anymore.

GRAHAM: Actually, when things get bad enough, they fix things. This place is not run by the kind of yahoos that America is. It may be a small country, but people running things — they’re not just boneheaded political appointees. [laughs] When things are wrong, they notice they’re wrong, and they fix them. This is a very old country. That’s another reason it’s not going to tank. They’ve been through some bad stuff before. There have been ups and downs.

On optimism for San Francisco

COWEN: Are you an optimist about the city of San Francisco? Not the area, the city.

GRAHAM: Yes , I am.

COWEN: Tell us why.

GRAHAM: I can’t tell you because there are all sorts of things happening behind the scenes to fix the problem.

COWEN: In politics, you mean, or in tech start-ups?

GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.

GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.

Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.

COWEN: Now, we’re in 2023. Say, two or three years from now, what do you think the regulation of AI will look like?

GRAHAM: Oh, God knows. You keep asking me questions I have no idea about.

COWEN: You have plenty of ideas. You know as much as anyone, I suspect.

GRAHAM: No, that’s not true. That is not true. [laughs] I really have no idea what AI regulation will look like, or even should look like, which is an easier question.

COWEN: Here’s an easier question, yes. There is a broadly tech community in the Bay Area.

GRAHAM: If you said I had to make up the regulations for AI this afternoon, it would be really hard.

GRAHAM: [laughs] That’s how far away I am from being able to answer that question on the spot. I couldn’t even figure it out in a day.

COWEN: Like when it should be modular, or when there should be a regulation on AI is a thing that itself is intractable.

Making safe AGI is like writing a secure operating system. It's hard to do it, and it's easy to convince yourself you've done it. Anyone who actually manages to do it, knows that it's hard. If you've written an OS and you think making it secure was easy, that thing ain't secure — Rob Miles (✈️ Tokyo) (@robertskmiles) April 29, 2023

GRAHAM: I’ll tell you one meta fact though. There was a guy on Twitter — I think his name was Rob Miles — who said that trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system.

That is absolutely true, and therefore frightening, because the way you make a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles for making a secure operating system. More like you try and make such principles, and then someone hacks your operating system. [laughs] Then you think, “Oh, okay, sorry.” You patch it, and then they hack that.

Making a secure operating system is like making a fraud-proof tax code. It’s basically a series of patches that were based on successful hacks. Is it Mellon ? They say the US tax code is, basically, a series of responses to things Mellon did.

COWEN: Some parts of it, yes.

GRAHAM: Secure operating systems are like that . I’m worried about AI because you’re not going to be able to figure out — whatever the regulations are, they’ll be wrong, I’ll tell you that. They’ll be overregulated in some ways, and miss and just have huge holes in others.

COWEN: There’s a Bay Area tech community. At least in the not-too-distant past, they agreed about many things, but very recently, it seems, on AI, there’s quite a divergence of views. People who are very, very worried: “Oh, it’s going to kill us all in the world.” People who say, “Oh, there are problems, but this is going to be great.”

In as few dimensions as possible, what accounts for that difference in perspective from people with broadly similar backgrounds, and who used to agree on many things? Is it temperament? Is it genes? Is it like a snake bit when —

GRAHAM: It’s probably which aspect of the problem they choose to focus on. You could focus on either one. If you focus on how it could be good, there are all sorts of exciting things to discover, and you discover lots of genuine ways it could be good. If you focus on how it could be bad, it’s true there, too. So it could be either.

I manage to keep both thoughts in my head simultaneously. I simultaneously think there will be all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things. They will be unimaginably good and unimaginably bad. [laughs] It sounds like that produces oscillation, doesn’t it?

GRAHAM: That’s worrying. That in itself is worrying.

COWEN: Why hasn’t Lisp been more successful? Or do you think it has?

GRAHAM: Well, Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and Clojure’s very successful, so it’s been successful in that respect. There’s another way it’s been successful. Some languages that are not considered dialects of Lisp, like JavaScript — if you showed JavaScript to people in 1970, they would say, “This is a Lisp. Except for the syntax, this is a Lisp.” It’s literally successful through Clojure. It’s de facto successful through JavaScript.

But why doesn’t everybody use Clojure or some other dialect of Lisp? Because the notation is frightening. There’s an initial hump with the notation, and if you give people initial hump — you must know about this. There must be names for this in economics.

If you put some sort of obstacle, like a container, right in front of people’s front door, they’ll go off to the left, and then they won’t go right back in front of the container and resume their original path. No, they’ll take this other path that goes miles out of their way, just because of that one block in front of their front door. The syntax, the reverse Polish notation , puts people off.

COWEN: Is AI-generated programming going to vindicate you on Lisp over time, or cousins of Lisp?

COWEN: Because the AI doesn’t care about the notation, right?

GRAHAM: It does .

COWEN: It does?

GRAHAM: Because it’s trained based on the amount of code that’s out there.

COWEN: But you could train it on something more like Lisp if you wanted to.

GRAHAM: You can’t. You have to train on actual examples people have written.

COWEN: But you have AI write some code in a perpetual motion machine, train other AIs on that code, and converge to something better, better, better. No?

GRAHAM: There was some research paper recently, where they trained an AI on the output of AIs, and it converges on crap. Maybe there’ll be some solution because it is a very rapidly evolving field, but I think you have to have a large corpus, initially, of examples written in the language.

COWEN: Other than hackers and hacking, what other human activities are what you have called high-cost interruption ? That is, if you’re interrupted, you lose your train of thought, have to start all over again.

GRAHAM: Oh, math, I think must be like that. I think anything .

COWEN: Painting — yes, or no?

GRAHAM: Not as much in my experience, not as much. You don’t have to think ahead as much in painting. It’s annoying to be interrupted, no matter what, but it doesn’t absolutely destroy you, like it does in the middle of writing a program or something. You don’t build a big mental model of something in your head when you’re painting. That’s what it is. It’s when you’ve got this giant house of cards in your head. That’s when you get destroyed by an interruption.

COWEN: Do you think kids today spend too much or too little time learning high-cost interruption activities?

GRAHAM: Do they spend too much or too little time working —

COWEN: Like, are we underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities?

GRAHAM: Well, if you think about what it’s like in schools, kids are constantly being interrupted, and they always have been.

GRAHAM: So, whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be kids these days. It will be a statement about school for centuries. Kids have such short attention spans. The one thing they can’t do is things that are big and long. I think if you said, “Okay, you have five hours to sit in a quiet room and build something,” I don’t think they’d be up to it, anyway.

On the Paul Graham production function

COWEN: Our last segment is what I call the Paul Graham production function, which is how you got to be Paul Graham. Would you major in philosophy again at Cornell, if you were doing it all over?

GRAHAM: No, I would not major in philosophy.

COWEN: Why not? Didn’t it allow you to think at a very general level?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. It’s good to be able to take ideas and flip them around like a Rubik’s Cube, and take them apart, and notice the two parts are the same shape or something like that, but I don’t think I actually learned that in philosophy classes. I think I would’ve learned that in classes about anything hard.

I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths. It sounds great to a high school student. “Why do I have to learn all the specific crap? I’ll just learn the most general truths.” Needless to say, that’s one of those things that sounds too good to be true, and it is, because if you go and look in philosophy classes . . .

I remember when Bill Clinton was saying, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” I’m like, “Hey, that’s what I majored in, [laughs] what the meaning of ‘is’ is, literally.” I think it was pretty much a waste.

COWEN: Which kinds of ideas come more naturally to you while you’re walking?

GRAHAM: Which kinds?

COWEN: Yes. Maybe not painting ideas, but some kind of ideas, because you’ve written about how using walking to learn ideas is a good thing, but which kinds of ideas? There’s cross-sectional variation, right?

GRAHAM: Yes. Well, ideas about whatever you’re thinking about. I remember, until a few years ago, I was working very intensely on programming. I had the problem I was working on loaded into my head, and whenever I was doing something without any interruptions, I would start to think about that, so I think it’s good for whatever you happen to be thinking about. Mathematicians, apparently, walk a lot.

COWEN: I find it best for learning from what the other person knows, not so good from my own ideas. It’s better —

GRAHAM: What, when you’re walking with someone else?

COWEN: With someone else, and I’m talking with them, and I learn from them better. I don’t find that I’m very generative when I’m walking.

GRAHAM: Walking makes all kinds of thinking better. I’ve seen images — like MRI images or something like that — of brain activity. I don’t know how they do MRI images, [laughs] but some kind of images of brain activity. Your brain is definitely more active when you’re walking . Classic YC office hours were to walk down the block and talk as you walk, which also has the side benefit that you are side-by-side, and not looking the other person in the face, which I think may be better. It’s certainly better than —

COWEN: It’s less threatening. It’s like confession in the church. You don’t see the priest. Or you’re on a therapist’s couch — probably you’re not looking right at them, and vice versa.

GRAHAM: Or you’re driving your kid back to boarding school. You’re taking kids —

COWEN: And they’ll say things they would not otherwise have told you.

GRAHAM: Or talk at all. [laughs]

COWEN: What are the best environments for learning while walking? Urban, British countryside, or —

GRAHAM: Oh, my God.

COWEN: How do you optimize this dose?

GRAHAM: I actually have —

COWEN: I think Britain is wonderful for learning while walking because it’s never too hot. You heat up while you’re walking.

GRAHAM: It doesn’t pour with rain on you like it did today? I was drenched today.

COWEN: It ends in four minutes. You can bring an umbrella. You run to the gazebo, but there is a gazebo.

GRAHAM: There was no gazebo where I was this morning.

I think it’s good to always walk in the same place. You don’t want to see things that distract you. If you’re trying to have ideas, you’re not going to get ideas from things you see. Probably not. Not relevant ones. You want to walk in the same place, and it should be something where there’re no distractions, so I would think the countryside. Where I go walk is on this preserved medieval common — to an American, it would look like a large park — and it’s the perfect thing. I just always take the same route. There’s not much on it. [laughs] I see grass and trees. That’s about it.

COWEN: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about soundproofing ?

GRAHAM: Boy, there’s a good question. I’ve learned a few things about soundproofing. Can I only say one thing?

COWEN: One thing is fine. The most important.

GRAHAM: No, no. You said, “What’s the most important?” Can I say some more?

COWEN: Oh, no. You can say more than one.

GRAHAM: Okay. Well, one is that sound comes through holes. It doesn’t come through your walls; it comes through your windows, probably, in most places. If you fix the holes, you fix the noise problem.

The other thing I’ve learned is basically, the solution — it’s either multiple layers, in the case of windows, or simply mass. You make some big, thick door, and make it have hinges that make it sink down. That’s what recording studios have. When the door opens, it rises up a little bit, and when it closes, it goes shoomp right down onto the floor.

So, great big, heavy doors, multiple-paned windows. And , weirdly enough, I’ve managed to soundproof some places so effectively that I’ve noticed this phenomenon you only notice with soundproofing — all kinds of things make annoying noises you never noticed before.

COWEN: That’s right. It’s a war of attrition of sorts.

GRAHAM: Yes, exactly. Soundproofing is worth it, though. Quiet is really good, at least for me.

COWEN: There’s an optimal level of fame. Do you feel you have too much or too little?

GRAHAM: What is the optimal level of fame? I suppose it’s when you can get resources you need or something like that, or if there’s someone you need to talk to, they’ll talk to you. I can now talk to most people I need to talk to. If I want to talk to somebody, I can find somebody who will introduce me, so that must be enough.

COWEN: Are you past the optimal?

GRAHAM: I don’t know. That’s the thing. This sounds very arrogant, but I realized this with Y Combinator. I realized that Y Combinator had become famous long after it had become famous. As far as I was concerned, I was just doing what we’d always been doing. Every six months, we would get all these applications. We’d have to find the needle in the haystack, [laughs] get all these start-ups, help them grow, find investors for them, and then it would start again.

It didn’t seem like YC was any different. It was the same building, the same people. We would get more start-ups. Meanwhile, YC was starting to be considered as this giant gatekeeper for Silicon Valley or something like that.

COWEN: But Jessica knew it was different, right?

GRAHAM: You’re not aware. Famous people don’t know how famous they are, unless they’re experts on it, like movie stars or something like that. They’re always basically taken by surprise. We were especially taken by surprise because the thing is, the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees, but YC itself didn’t grow.

YC’s market-wise — the value of the portfolio grew with these giant companies, but we didn’t see it. We were still just a few people doing the same thing we’d always been doing, so how could we be famous? I discovered that was one of the biggest mistakes I made with YC. I didn’t realize how many people were watching us. I thought we could just keep doing what we were doing, and nothing really mattered.

COWEN: Why was that a mistake, per se? Maybe it was better being oblivious.

GRAHAM: No, because when — basically, anybody outside Silicon Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something, well, who do they blame? They’ve never heard of the people who are actually powerful in Silicon Valley. They only know a handful of people who have consumer brands, me among them. Basically, the world sucks because of tech, and tech sucks because of Paul Graham, [laughs] because they’ve never heard of any of the other people.

I don’t seem to get quite so much of that anymore. I don’t know. I’m glad about that. With YC, definitely, I didn’t know how prominent YC was becoming, and how many people would be out to get us as a result.

COWEN: Very last question. In my view, a life properly lived is learn, learn, learn all the time.

GRAHAM: That’s what Charlie Munger said, right?

COWEN: Yes. Now, what have you recently been learning about, other than soundproofing?

GRAHAM: Well, Tintoretto. [laughs]

COWEN: What are you learning?

GRAHAM: Well, Vasari had a very low opinion of him.

COWEN: Vasari is unreliable on most things, right?

GRAHAM: I don’t know. I don’t know.

COWEN: He way overrated his patrons, the Medici.

GRAHAM: Yes. You have a thing about the Medici, clearly. He said that Tintoretto was too independent-minded, that Tintoretto was a mad genius, and that he would’ve been better if he had constrained his creativity and stayed within the limits of proper art. You know what I mean? A very Florentine sort of idea. I think Tintoretto would have looked down on Vasari as a minor-league artist, but that was interesting. That was interesting to learn that’s how at least some of Tintoretto’s contemporaries viewed him, and Vasari in particular.

COWEN: And a Y Combinator co-founder is not going to buy that argument, is he?

GRAHAM: Which Y Combinator founder?

COWEN: Of Vasari’s, that he was too radical, and too off on his own.

GRAHAM: Oh, I thought you meant Jessica was and agreed with me about Tintoretto.

COWEN: Well, there are two of you. Neither of you would agree with Vasari.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. I’m now going to look. I never thought about this, but I was just looking at some Tintorettos. I was just in Venice, looking at the Scuola Grande di San Marco , where all those Tintorettos are, and they were so dirty. It was hard to tell [laughs] what the paintings actually looked like, [laughs] but I’m going to go look. I’m going to go look and see if they seem freakish.

COWEN: Paul Graham, thank you very much.

GRAHAM: [laughs] Thank you. Boy, that was so many hard questions.

Biographies, Books & Articles

Paul Graham: How To Do Great Work

Niko Juranek | August 6, 2023 | min

Paul Graham’s article “How to Do Great Work” is an inspiring guide that highlights the importance of curiosity, choosing the right field of work, hard work and the right environment to achieve true excellence – a must-read for anyone who wants to take their work to the next level.

Brief summary of the essay

Paul Graham's article " How to Do Great Work " is an inspiring guide that highlights the importance of curiosity, choosing the right field of work, hard work and the right environment to achieve true excellence - a must read for anyone who wants to take their work to the next level.

The meaning of "Great Work

Success is a result of ambition, perseverance and hard work.

Life is complex - people want to be successful in their job, life, so they constantly try to improve. If you excel in your field, that's a huge competitive advantage. Disadvantage: It is usually exhausting and often takes longer than expected.

Especially in the area of personal development, people therefore look for easy solutions and shortcuts on how to reach their full potential, be maximally productive, and perform at their best.

Unfortunately, often only rather superficial tips can be found, especially from people who themselves want to explain to others how it works without having walked the path themselves. People who have themselves achieved what they say and therefore know what they are talking about are often rather hard to find in all this noise.

Paul Graham , founder of the well-known start-up incubator Y Combinator , is such a role model for me - when he says something, it has a hand and a foot, he has repeatedly shown that he knows how to build great things as a pioneer. So it's a good idea to listen very carefully and take notes when he says something.

Recently, he wrote a new, incredibly detailed essay that addresses this very topic: "How To Do Great Work" (make sure to read the essay in the original, even though it is very long!). [1]

In today's article, I would like to go into the most important points and summarise my personal learnings:

Key Learnings and Notes on "How To Do Great Work" by Paul Graham

1. definition: what is "great work".

It should be mentioned that Graham himself does not give a definition of what "great work" actually means exactly. For him it simply means

"doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what is possible".

People should focus on their interests instead of worrying about whether they are important or not - and leave it to future generations to evaluate whether you have succeeded. Ambition, of course, he presupposes.

2. How do I find the "right" work that is worth putting time into?

Talent, interest & opportunity.

Young people in particular often find it very difficult to find out what interests them or what they are good at. Graham puts this into perspective by saying that this is not so important, and that one should give oneself time, because this only becomes apparent through increasing discovery.

According to him, you need three things to choose the right work:

A certain natural talent
A deep interest in one/several field(s)
The possibility for greatness

In a way, the aptitude is the easiest point - there is usually something you do more skillfully than others, something that just feels natural to you. This is also what Naval Ravikant says:

"Find something that feels like work to others, but feels like play to you." [2]

Basketball legend Michael Jordan, physicist and inventor of the Polaroid process Edwin Land, Apple visionary Steve Jobs are just other examples that prove this - all acted on the principle of " find work that feels like play ." [3]

Staying upwind

Sometimes, however, talent and interest drift apart, which makes it even more difficult to start because you are afraid of doing something "wrong". Graham says here to just guess and start with one thing, as it is the only way to find out the right one. The best strategy is not to plan too much - the work process itself gives the best feedback.

He calls this principle "staying upwind" and recommends doing at each stage what seems most interesting and gives you the best opportunities for the future. In retrospect, this is what most people who have done great work would have done. Ravikant also agrees:

"99% of the effort is wasted. [...] 99% of the seminar papers you wrote, the books you read, the exercises you did and the things you learned were not really relevant later. [...] Of course these learning outcomes count, you have learned the value of hard work. [...] But at least in terms of goal-oriented learning, only about 1% of their effort pays off." - Naval Ravikant [4]

Accordingly, the possibility for greatness is also rather irrelevant - after all, with enough time, attempts, experiences, there is some possibility of achieving greatness in a field everywhere.

Try to be the best in your field

My favourite quote from the essay is definitely Graham's statement:

"If you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good."

When you try to be the best, you often come out ahead in practice. This is exciting and also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways, wanting to be the best is easier than just being good. Another advantage of this is that you don't even have to try to differentiate yourself from others, as this is a necessary consequence of doing so. When you are the best, you set the standard for others to follow - not the other way around. [5]

In this context, it is also important to find one's own definition of what meaningful "work" is for one personally, especially since this term is very much influenced by upbringing, education, societal expectations etc:

"Don't let other people define what work is."

Therefore, one should always choose something that excites one and in which one has a certain talent, and just get started. One's own curiosity, one's own enthusiasm are the strongest forces for great work.

3. What to do when your interests change?

Interests are the strongest drive - follow them.

It's okay if your area of interest changes (Graham cites enthusiasm for Lego at age 7, for example, which is often gone by age 14 or 21). The most important thing is simply to maintain enthusiasm.

He sees curiosity as both the biggest driver and a directional guide to what you should be working on. Graham: " Interest will make you work harder than mere diligence ever could. ". On motivational factors, he said:

"The three strongest motives are curiosity, pleasure and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they come together, and that combination is the strongest of all."

Besides, he says, subject fields are not people, which is why you don't owe them any loyalty. Therefore, if in the course of working on one thing one discovers another that is more exciting, one should not doubt switching.

An important issue he raises is patience: often you have to work and develop for years before you discover a subject for yourself or see how good you actually are at it ("You often have to co-evolve with the problem").

Narrow focus vs. broad interest

What I find very interesting is the relationship between narrow focus and broad interests that Graham addresses. So both are important, but only in the right proportion: too narrow a focus on only one narrow area is a danger of neglecting other things because of it and not learning further; many broad interests also bring many new ideas and perspectives:

"There are many reasons why curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle ones is that if they cast a wide net, they are more likely to find the right thing to work on."

At the same time, Graham specifically warns against diluting his focus too much:

"Don't divide your attention evenly among many topics or you'll get bogged down. Divide it up according to a 'power-law'."

This means that while you should focus on a few things, you should also have an open, superficial, not consciously active awareness of a few other things:

"Be professionally curious about a few subjects and idly curious about many others."

For the worst thing would be to decide wrongly too late and on the basis of very incomplete information, or even worse, not to reflect, re-evaluate one's enthusiasm, abilities, the possibilities and thus follow an unhappy path until the end of one's life.

4. Learn until you recognise gaps in knowledge

Learn until you reach the limits of knowledge.

Something that no one is spared is working hard and concentrated on the same thing for a long time to get really good at it. Learn enough about it until you reach the limits of knowledge in the field, because only then will you be able to " notice the gaps " that other people have missed.

Admittedly, noticing the gaps is challenging because our brain likes to ignore gaps because it prefers to make a simple model of the world. From a distance, the explored "circle of knowledge" of an area looks round and complete, but if you look closely, you will always find gaps at the edges.

Find patterns that others overlook

If you look at history, many of the greatest achievements or insights come from things that have been around for a long time but have been overlooked by other people . A prominent example of this is given by Adam Grant in his book Originals with Galileo, who could see mountain landscapes on the moon only because of his expertise in painting through zig-zag patterns and the associated light and dark areas, even though his telescope could not technically confirm this at the time due to insufficient magnification power. He had the necessary depth of knowledge in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing:

"Thanks to his artistic training in the so-called "chiaroscuro" technique, which focuses on the depiction of light and shadow, Galileo was able to see mountains where others did not." [6]

Graham says this with a metaphor:

"The big prize is the discovery of a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, break it open, and inside is a whole world."

Contradictions & anomalies are your friend

It therefore pays to keep at it, especially you should not be put off by answers that seem strange and contradictory at first glance. Especially small anomalies are often an indicator to be on to really great work in a field. [7]

5. What to do when others don't understand my interests or smile at my curiosity?

Pursue ideas, even if they step out of line..

Graham clearly states:

"Boldly pursue ideas that step out of line, even if others don't care about them - or even especially if they don't. If you're excited about an opportunity that everyone else is ignoring, and you have enough expertise to say exactly what everyone else is overlooking, that's the best chance you'll find."

You know that feeling when you can't describe why others are wrong, but you can't put it into words except, "They don't get it?" That's exactly what they're looking for here: The best thing that can happen to you is that you discover gaps that others can't or maybe don't want to see.

It's not easy to find "the" area

Another problem is that education systems in many countries claim that it is easy to find "your" field. It is expected to decide on a field early on, long before one actually knows what it is really like (e.g. when one has to decide at the Matura which specialisation to choose in order to be able to study medicine, law, economics, technology, etc.). Some are lucky and know from the start, others are lucky and guess correctly - but most then struggle with their lives in the long run, assuming that everyone would guess correctly.

My own example is law - for a long time in my education (which was rather theoretical at university) I assumed it was useful to have as a good basis, but didn't think I wanted to work in the field or could imagine being really good at it. It was only after a few years of practical experience in a legal profession that I saw the really exciting dimensions, developed a new enthusiasm for it and am now training to be a prospective lawyer. As Graham says, you don't know until you actually try it.

Following your interests takes courage

When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're often on your own. "Following your interests" sounds like a very passive approach, but according to Graham it is not at all, because it usually risks a lot of rejection and failure, and therefore takes a lot of courage. There are a lot of distractions and resistance because of this, but again, self-interest is the only way to persevere in the long run.

The good thing is that courage and uncertainty do not require much planning - planning only works for known circumstances and goals. Graham therefore recommends working hard on excitingly ambitious projects and something good will come out of it. If necessary, he says, one can always adapt to circumstances along the way and try other variations. Another clue is that as you become more active and experienced in the field you are in, your enthusiasm should increase - otherwise it is probably the wrong field for you after all, and you are just torturing yourself unnecessarily where something else is waiting for you.

Be the person you are working for

If you are doing something for other people, do something that they really want:

"Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, that's how you'll find your first audience."

This is a good middle ground to start with, combining your own interests with external factors.

6. How much luck does it take to be successful?

"there is no such thing as "self-made".

Many people proudly claim that they are "self-made", i.e. that they owe their success exclusively to themselves.

However, if you read biographies of very successful people, it is remarkable what a significant influence luck - in addition to hard work - has had on their respective careers. Thus, for many people, a chance encounter or reading a book they happened to get their hands on helped them figure out what to work on.

It is known, for example, that successful film directors James Cameron and Christopher Nolan independently watched the same film (2001: A Space Odyssey) [8] before their careers and thought to themselves, "I can do that too." There are similar accounts of Mark Twain, who followed an extremely unlikely career path, was marked by the Civil War, almost ended up as a drug dealer, put down his gun (due to suicidal thoughts), and took up paper and pen instead - all this after meeting great people on the journey who gave him fantastic advice, and he only began his journey as a result of famous writers. [9]

Put yourself in a situation that happiness can find you

The thing is, though, that - even if luck was involved - these people put themselves in advance into a situation that luck can find them too. Graham recommends trying lots of things, meeting lots of people, reading books and asking lots of questions, and disregarding "random luck":

"Luck, by definition, cannot be influenced, so we can ignore it."

Naval Ravikant shares this view. He has a good metaphor for "forced luck" - according to him, there are four types of luck:

Blind luck , because something happens over which one has no control. This includes chance, fate, force majeure.
Luck through perseverance , hard work, activity. This is also what Graham is talking about here when he says to try many things.
Developing a "happiness sensor" . Through his qualification, one learns to recognise patterns and breakthroughs in one's field, which others overlook. This coincides with Graham's learning and recognising gaps.
Developing a "lucky character" . One develops a unique character, a certain mindset that ensures that "luck finds you".

As a striking example, Ravikant cites a deep-sea diver who has gained years of experience in diving. Out of sheer luck, a person finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast, but cannot get there on his own. Now his sheer luck has become the diver's luck, as he needs the diver to recover the treasure - and the diver is well rewarded. [10]

"You have made your own luck. You have put yourself in a position where you could benefit from luck or attract luck, while no one else has created this opportunity for you." - Naval Ravikant

Success comes late for most

David Senra, Founder & Host of Founders Podcast, also confirms this. According to him, very few people succeed in their younger years or with their first venture. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is a rare exception.[11] He attributes this to the experiences - and above all - the self-discovery that people have gone through along the way. Graham also states:

"Take the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age when you have them. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money and power. If you make an effort, you can acquire some of the latter in youth and retain some of the former in old age."

Even though you can't really plan with it unfortunately, luck has been involved in some way with many successful people after the fact. So through your commitment, your activities, put yourself in a position where luck can actually find you and forget about chance.

7. Challenges on the way to great work

External influences & disruptive factors.

Besides the opinions and lack of understanding of others, there are many other factors that can hinder you from doing great work:

"There are many forces that lead you astray when you are trying to figure out what to work on. Arrogance, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's desires, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what really interests you, you are immune to all these things. If you are interested, you are not astray."

Too much ambition

Yes, paradoxically, too much ambition can also hinder you: According to Graham, there are two forms of ambition, one that precedes interest in a subject and one that follows from that interest.

Most people who do great work have a mixture of both, but the more you have of the former, the harder it becomes to decide what to do. This especially affects people who get excited about many things quickly. Don't plan too much, but jump in at the deep end and you can make ambition work for you.

Procrastination & Procrastination

Graham says that there are two ways to start something (per day and per project), accordingly there are two ways you can procrastinate.

Project-based procrastination, he says, is by far the more dangerous, as people put off starting an ambitious project from year to year because the timing is never right. The problem is that this form of procrastination masquerades as work, because you're not just sitting around doing nothing, you're working diligently on something - you're simply too busy to notice.

As a solution, Graham suggests asking oneself: "Am I working on what I would most like to do? At a young age, he says, "no" is still rather OK, but as you get older, this becomes more and more dangerous.

Unrealistic time commitment

Many people overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can make happen in the long term. In the quick motivation, it is fun to start things before effort, stress, lack of expected successes set in. A certain degree of realism is therefore helpful, even to anticipate the obstacles.

Paradoxically, these "lies" can also help to start the project in the first place: If one were always thinking up front about how complex, lengthy and challenging the thing will turn out to be (and any thing of significance will be), then many people would probably not have started in the first place.

In this respect, Graham definitely sees an advantage especially with young people who still think less about the consequences and more "unrealistically" about the possibilities and just start. Graham even says that this justifies a rare "self lie", since success can only come about as a result and would by no means represent a character flaw, but rather lie in the nature of things.

Other examples of such effective self-lies include saying to oneself, "I'll just read through what I have," and then getting right back into it, or saying to oneself, "How hard can it be?" and just starting. Also, you are allowed to exaggerate the importance of the thing you are working on if that is an important motivating factor for yourself. If that helps you then discover something new, it will turn out not to have been a lie after all.

Too hard work & wrong priorities

You do have to work hard, but you can also work too hard, according to Graham, and when you do, you will find that the returns diminish:

"Fatigue makes you stupid and eventually even harms your health. The point at which work is no longer worthwhile depends on the type of work. Some of the hardest work you might only be able to do four or five hours a day."

Graham recommends setting aside longer, continuous blocks of time (4-5 hours), as this is the only time you can really do great work. This is similar to the " deep work " concept of Cal Newport, who also stresses the importance of such uninterrupted, long blocks of time. Otherwise, one can never get to such depth, as it takes time for concentration, mind, brain to adjust to the work. This is why constant interruptions (notifications, emails, calls, social media, etc.) are so counterproductive, as they not only eat up time, but would also completely prevent or destroy this deep focus. [12]

A balance of hard work and rest is important, also because it is only in the break that the input can be properly processed, and only then can new ideas and approaches to solutions emerge that would otherwise be suppressed. Graham defines what constitutes "hard work" in another essay (How To Work Hard). [13]

Summary and conclusion

In summary, there are four important steps on the path to great work, according to Graham:

Choose an area in which you have interests and talents.
Learn enough to reach the limits of knowledge.
Spot gaps , patterns, anomalies that others miss.
Explore the most promising gaps.

This is how virtually every person who has achieved great things has done it, from painters, athletes, entrepreneurs, to physicists.

If you follow your interests, you will always have the necessary drive that will see you through lows, external resistance and obstacles and give you an individual advantage because it is natural for you, while for others it seems impossible.

What does "great work" mean to you?

Graham, How To Do Great Work (2023).
Jorgenson, Der Almanach von Naval Ravikant * (2021), 83.
Senra, Founders Podcast (2023), #314 Paul Graham (How To Do Great Work) .
Jorgenson, Der Almanach von Naval Ravikant * (2021), 48.
Original: " If you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. " – Paul Graham.
Quoted insight from the psychologist Dean Simonton in Grant, Originals – How Non-Conformatists Move The World * (2016), 48.
Original quote on anomalies & strange deviations: "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." – Paul Graham .
Film by Kubrick, 2001: Odyssee im Weltraum (1968).
Senra, Founders Podcast (2023), #312 Mark Twain .
Jorgenson, Der Almanach von Naval Ravikant * (2021), 87f.
Newport, Deep Work – Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World * (2016), 3f, 16.
Graham , How To Work Hard (2021).

Note : The books marked with * contain affiliate links. This means that I receive a small contribution if you buy the book via my link. You will not incur any additional costs, but you will help me to finance the blog so that I can continue to write such extensive articles. Thank you! - Niko

Adam Grant: 4 Options For Dealing With Unsatisfactory Situations

How to be successful: a recipe for success by openai founder sam altman, mag. nikolaus juranek.

Nikolaus Juranek is a jurist and certified trainer for communication, rhetorics & leadership. In his articles he deals with how to acquire practice-relevant skills and abilities from a wide range of fields in order to grow in one's job, hobbies and private life.

Self-management

Adam Grant: Timing, Strategic Procrastination and the First-Mover Disadvantage

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Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Moscow

The exhibition of French prominent architect Le Corbusier, held in The Pushkin Museum, brings together the different facets of his talent. Source: ITAR-TASS / Stanislav Krasilnikov

The largest Le Corbusier exhibition in a quarter of a century celebrates the modernist architect’s life and his connection with the city.

Given his affinity with Moscow, it is perhaps surprising that the city had never hosted a major examination of Le Corbusier’s work until now. However, the Pushkin Museum and the Le Corbusier Fund have redressed that discrepancy with the comprehensive exhibition “Secrets of Creation: Between Art and Architecture,” which runs until November 18.

Presenting over 400 exhibits, the exhibition charts Le Corbusier’s development from the young man eagerly sketching buildings on a trip around Europe, to his later years as a prolific and influential architect.

The exhibition brings together the different facets of his talent, showing his publications, artwork and furniture design alongside photographs, models and blueprints of his buildings.

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Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, said, “It was important for us to also exhibit his art. People know Le Corbusier the architect, but what is less well know is that he was also an artist. Seeing his art and architecture together gives us an insight into his mind and his thought-processes.”

What becomes obvious to visitors of the exhibition is that Le Corbusier was a man driven by a single-minded vision of how form and lines should interact, a vision he was able to express across multiple genres.

The upper wings of the Pushkin Museum are separated by the central stairs and two long balconies. The organizers have exploited this space, allowing comparison of Le Corbusier’s different art forms. On one side there are large paintings in the Purist style he adapted from Cubism, while on the other wall there are panoramic photographs of his famous buildings.

Le Corbusier was a theorist, producing many pamphlets and manifestos which outlined his view that rigorous urban planning could make society more productive and raise the average standard of living.

It was his affinity with constructivism, and its accompanying vision of the way architecture could shape society, which drew him to visit the Soviet Union, where, as he saw it, there existed a “nation that is being organized in accordance with its new spirit.”

The exhibition’s curator Jean-Louis Cohen explains that Le Corbusier saw Moscow as “somewhere he could experiment.” Indeed, when the architect was commissioned to construct the famous Tsentrosoyuz Building, he responded by producing a plan for the entire city, based on his concept of geometric symmetry.

Falling foul of the political climate

He had misread the Soviet appetite for experimentation, and as Cohen relates in his book Le Corbusier, 1887-1965, drew stinging attacks from the likes of El Lissitsky, who called his design “a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style).”

Not to be deterred, Le Corbusier returned to Moscow in 1932 and entered the famous Palace of the Soviets competition, a skyscraper that was planned to be the tallest building in the world.

This time he fell foul of the changing political climate, as Stalin’s growing suspicion of the avant-garde led to the endorsement of neo-classical designs for the construction, which was ultimately never built due to the Second World War.

Situated opposite the proposed site for the Palace of the Soviets, the exhibition offers a tantalizing vision of what might have been, presenting scale models alongside Le Corbusier’s plans, and generating the feeling of an un-built masterpiece.

Despite Le Corbusier’s fluctuating fortunes in Soviet society, there was one architect who never wavered in his support . Constructivist luminary Alexander Vesnin declared that the Tsentrosoyuz building was the "the best building to arise in Moscow for over a century.”

The exhibition sheds light on their professional and personal relationship, showing sketches and letters they exchanged. In a radical break from the abstract nature of most of Le Corbusier’s art, this corner of the exhibition highlights the sometimes volatile architect’s softer side, as shown through nude sketches and classical still-life paintings he sent to Vesnin.

“He was a complex person” says Cohen. “It’s important to show his difficult elements; his connections with the USSR, with Mussolini. Now that relations between Russia and the West have improved, we can examine this. At the moment there is a new season in Le Corbusier interpretation.” To this end, the exhibition includes articles that have never previously been published in Russia, as well as Le Corbusier’s own literature.

Completing Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Russia is a preview of a forthcoming statue, to be erected outside the Tsentrosoyuz building. Even if she couldn’t quite accept his vision of a planned city, Moscow is certainly welcoming him back.

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U.S. Entrepreneur Is Gunned Down in Moscow

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By The Associated Press

Nov. 4, 1996

An American businessman involved in a long dispute over control of one of Moscow's best-known hotels was shot to death today by an unknown assailant with a machine gun.

The businessman, Paul E. Tatum, 39, a native of Edmond, Okla., and a former fund-raiser for the Oklahoma Republican Party, was killed near the entrance to the Kievsky metro station in downtown Moscow, a police spokesman said. The station is located near the Radisson-Slavyanskaya hotel, where Mr. Tatum had his office.

The police spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the shooting had occurred at 5:10 P.M. and that top-level police officials were investigating the case.

Russian businessmen have frequently been killed since the collapse of Communism, although the slaying of foreign businessmen has been relatively rare. Many of the murders are contract killings and remain unsolved.

Mr. Tatum, a founding partner of the riverfront hotel, was involved in a long power struggle with the management of the joint venture that administers the property. Courts in Moscow and the United States have been looking into the dispute.

The struggle came to a head in 1994, when Mr. Tatum tried to oust the joint venture's director, reportedly going as far as to cut off his phone lines. In response, guards were posted at the hotel entrance to keep Mr. Tatum out.

The dispute is said to involve the Moscow city government and the Radisson Hotel Company, the Minnesota-based company that is Mr. Tatum's American partner.

Matt Seward, former chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, said his longtime friend refused to be intimidated. Mr. Tatum told him a few weeks ago that he expected a decision in the dispute soon. ''And he was 95 percent sure he had won,'' Mr. Seward said.

Mr. Seward described Mr. Tatum as the ''quintessential entrepreneur'' who became fascinated by the business potential in Russia in the decade before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

''Paul's a risk-taker -- he wouldn't have built a hotel in Moscow if he wasn't a risk-taker,'' Mr. Seward said.

The Radisson-Slavyanskaya houses a string of shops and Western offices, including those of large broadcast media companies, and serves as the home in Moscow for dozens of expatriates. President Clinton has been staying at the hotel during his trips to Moscow.

Mr. Tatum had vowed to continue doing business in Russia despite the hotel struggle.

''This is entrepreneurs' heaven,'' he said in a 1994 interview. ''There's no telling how quickly this country could develop and how much it could look like the United States in a very short period of time.''

Officials at the hotel refused to answer questions today, and phone calls to hotel management in the United States went unanswered.

The American Embassy in Moscow had no immediate comment, apart from a terse statement saying: ''We deplore the murder of any U.S. citizen.''

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Essays
How to Work Hard: A Project of One's Own: Fierce Nerds: Crazy New Ideas: An NFT That Saves Lives: The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty: How People Get Rich Now: Write Simply: Donate Unrestricted: What I Worked On: Earnestness: Billionaires Build: The Airbnbs: How to Think for Yourself: Early Work: Modeling a Wealth Tax: The Four Quadrants ...
How to Do Great Work
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. In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion.
How to Work Hard
There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [ 1]
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Notes from "How To Do Great Work"
These are some direct key snippets from Paul Graham's essay, "How To Do Great Work." I'd highly recommend his full version here.Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone ...
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Essay Summary: "How To Do Great Work" by Paul Graham
Most of you will recognize the name. Paul Graham is best known for Y Combinator, which has become the world's foremost startup accelerator whose alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, and DoorDash. In addition, Paul is widely known for his essays including timeless classics, which have become common vernacular, like Default Alive or Default Dead.
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Published Sep 7, 2023. + Follow. Paul Graham recently shared with the world one of his newest essays, titled "How to Do Great Work". It also starts with a foreword mentioning that "the ...
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Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.
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COWEN: There's a Paul Graham worldview in your earlier essays, where you want to look for the great hackers, and a lot of the most important companies come from intriguing side projects. ... GRAHAM: Well, people should do some work. When I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a start-up, I tell them, "Instead of ...
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Brief summary of the essay. Paul Graham's article "How to Do Great Work" is an inspiring guide that highlights the importance of curiosity, choosing the right field of work, hard work and the right environment to achieve true excellence - a must read for anyone who wants to take their work to the next level.
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Le Corbusier's triumphant return to Moscow
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“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

Notes from "How To Do Great Work" - Essay by Paul Graham

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A Silicon Valley insider gave up watching TV aged 13 and says the secret to success involves completely reframing the meaning of hard work

There are three ingredients to great work

There are two types of goal to work towards

But hard work doesn't mean working too hard

Watch: Drew Houston and Paul Graham on how Dropbox was created on a Chinatown bus and how determination is key to starting a business

Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent (Ep. 186)

Peter Thiel

On judging people

On founders

On increasing ambition

On getting over the fear of flying

On Florence

On AI and painting

On traveling back in time

On optimism for San Francisco

On the Paul Graham production function

Paul Graham: How To Do Great Work

Paul Graham’s article “How to Do Great Work” is an inspiring guide that highlights the importance of curiosity, choosing the right field of work, hard work and the right environment to achieve true excellence – a must-read for anyone who wants to take their work to the next level.

Brief summary of the essay

The meaning of "Great Work

Key Learnings and Notes on "How To Do Great Work" by Paul Graham

2. How do I find the "right" work that is worth putting time into?

Staying upwind

Try to be the best in your field

3. What to do when your interests change?

Narrow focus vs. broad interest

4. Learn until you recognise gaps in knowledge

Find patterns that others overlook

Contradictions & anomalies are your friend

5. What to do when others don't understand my interests or smile at my curiosity?

It's not easy to find "the" area

Following your interests takes courage

Be the person you are working for

6. How much luck does it take to be successful?

Put yourself in a situation that happiness can find you

Success comes late for most

7. Challenges on the way to great work

Too much ambition

Procrastination & Procrastination

Unrealistic time commitment

Too hard work & wrong priorities

Summary and conclusion

Adam Grant: 4 Options For Dealing With Unsatisfactory Situations

Adam Grant: Timing, Strategic Procrastination and the First-Mover Disadvantage

Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Moscow

U.S. Entrepreneur Is Gunned Down in Moscow

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