Paul Graham's Principles for Accomplishing Great Work
Summary of My Recent Reviews on Life and Work #4
In my previous article, I shared Sam Altman's insights on Productivity & Time Management. Recently, I revisited another my long-time favorite blog post titled "How to Do Great Work".
The author, Paul Graham, just happens to have a connection with Sam Altman as well. He is the co-founder of Y Combinator and a renowned American venture capitalist. Back in 2005, Graham co-founded Y Combinator. As Y Combinator became a well-known startup incubator, Graham also gained the title of "Silicon Valley Godfather". He is also author of Hackers & Painters (it's a good read!).
An interesting fact about Graham - he's the best painter among programmers, holding a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University and having studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
Turning to today's focus, "How to Do Great Work" was recommended to me years ago when I worked in the technology sector. For me, this article delves deeper into the foundational principles covered in Productivity & Time Management, particularly the decision-making process of what to pursue and what to avoid. It also explores various valuable topics, such as Cultivating Originality, Good Idea Generation, Finding the Best People and etc.
The original post is quite long with over 10,000 words (though the author has condensed it). I typically allocate 60 minutes to read and reflect on it. Each time I revisit it, I find it refreshing. If you're pressed for time, you can skim through my notes first and then decide which sections interest you, but I highly recommend reading it in full. You won't regret it.
Discovering What to Work On
The first step:
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.
Beyond the three qualities, there are three of the most powerful sources of motivation that are rarely mentioned: curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
Figure out your talents and interests:
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. As Steve Jobs said, "Connecting the dots."
Develop a habit of working on your own projects which you want to work on. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.
How to tell if you find it:
The sign that you've found what you're truly meant to do is that you find things that others find complex and daunting, to be absolutely delightful.
What are you excessively curious about - curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
Last steps:
Once you've discovered something you're truly curious about, the last step is to learn enough to get you to the top of the field. Knowledge is accumulated slowly, and from a distance you may see a perfect arc filled with your knowledge, but when you learn enough to look closely, you'll see the gaps in between. So the next step is to look at those gaps.
This will require some skill, as our brains are always wired to ignore these gaps and trick ourselves into building a simpler cognitive model of the world. But many discoveries are born from questioning what others take for granted. Leo’s note: this is insightful and vividly explained by Graham. It reminds me of a tennis ball under high speed camera (see below images).
In summary, there are 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.
On this path of self-discovery, you can only rely on yourself. Some lucky people can guess right away, but the rest will stumble and retry among many paths, just like most people.
When you have doubts, optimize everything around your interests. A field will change gradually as you learn more about it. For example, what mathematics is really about is very different from what you learned in high school math, so you need to understand these things from different angles and aspects more comprehensively. But you should pay attention to if a field does not become more and more interesting as you delve deeper into it, then you should stop, that is not what you should do.
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.
Cultivating Originality
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. Leo’s note: this works well for me.
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.
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. Leo’s note: beautiful idea!
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.
The Art of Good Idea Generation
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.
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. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.
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.
Choosing Problems Over Solutions
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.
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 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.
Leveraging the Stages of Your Life
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 most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience, is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes.
Finding the Best People
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 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.
Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can't be done alone, and even if you're working on one that can be, it's good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.
Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.
Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.
How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my experience, when you do, you know. Which means if you're unsure, you probably don't. 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.
Keeping Your Morale High
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
As always, thanks for your reading and I hope you enjoy it.