Great Work

06/16/2024

word count：1901

estimated reading time：10minute

How to Do Great Work

I just finished reading an essay that was sent to me by a friend - HTDGW. This essay was written by Paul Graham, a very interesting persona overall, and specifically the co-founder of Y-Combinator. Paul is also a Doctor of Philosophy apart from his Masters in Computer Science, two fields I’ve always admired, but never thought they can go together. 😬

So I open the link, and aside from getting sunburn from this light mode ugly website (as a dark mode lover), the first line I noticed, right of the bat was line number 9:

The following recipe assumes you’re very ambitious.

This was an instant trigger to continue and read this huge essay (don’t worry I split it to 2 sessions).

Why I built this Blog

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?

This one is not from the Great Work article, but a common saying in philosophy, and this is what came to mind when I thought about the fact that no one would ever read my blog posts, it took me quite a bit of time to understand this, but I don’t care.

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.

This is WHY I started this blog. I want to be writing about the things I’m interested in, as well as trying to explain the concepts I’m studying to any one so that I’ll be able to understand them better myself. It also helps me organize my thoughts and ideas.

Have you heard about the 10,000 Hour Rule? Then you should understand what I mean when I say I need to commit to idea of writing online if I want to be better at everything I’m interested in. Maybe post once a week or two weeks should suffice, I don’t know.

Essay Conclusions

The following points represent my key takeaways from this essay, stuff I like, things I want to remember etc:

all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.

The first section discuss how selecting a career path is often more challenging than it appears. Many people choose their field of study and, consequently, their career based on misguided criteria. For instance, I pursued Computer Science because I have a genuine passion for it. However, many of my university peers, despite being highly intelligent and capable of completing the degree successfully, have expressed sentiments such as “I don’t even like coding,” “I’m not connected to this field,” or “I’m here for the money.” While these reasons are valid, I believe that lacking passion for one’s chosen field can significantly impede the ability to excel.

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.

Can’t stress this more, I was first introduced to this concept when I was listening to a Lex Fridman podcast, about “Deep Work” when I was a student, and sought after ways to improve my efficiency of studying.

3 Most powerful motives:

Curiosity
Delight
Desire to do something impressive

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.

This is precisely what I have experienced. I had a genuine interest in the subject, but Computer Science is such a vast field that it’s challenging to determine the specific path to pursue. In my case, the answer was to explore various areas within the field and continue focusing on the ones that I found most enjoyable. By doing this, I could gradually narrow down my interests until I fully committed to a single field. Keep in mind I also believe luck has a lot to do with it. If you believe in luck (duh.).

The following quote is a great advice for any teenager, or someone who is not sure what to work on. I would love to tell this to my future kids:

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.

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.

Can anyone else relate? Sometimes, looking back after working for a long time, I realize that if I hadn’t spent so much time “preparing” to start my work sessions, I could have achieved much more.

Consistency is key.

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.
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.

The following always reminds me of the famous “walks” Steve Jobs was doing, sometimes you just need to disconnect from everything (most importantly social media) and like Eckhart Tolle preaches, just BE. I often find this very helpful.

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.

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.

This is also something I often find hard to do, its basically admitting your’e wrong, and that’s a hard thing to do unfortunately. I want to be better at this.

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.

This should be something I can keep in the back of my mind about any of my ideas. It seems like every time I think about something and think it’s innovative, my subconscious mind immediately tells me it’s too hard to do, or it is not worth it, etc.

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.

Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential.

A reminder that sometimes being late to the party is the better option.

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.

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.

Fail often === Success:

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.

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.

I find that very true. I remember copying anime drawings when I was younger, and then someday I was just able to draw original anime figures on my own. Sounds silly but that is what came to my mind when I read this quote. It also motivates me to keep exploring and writing stuff after I read them somewhere else, at first I thought that this is weird, that I’m not original enough, but that’s nonsense, just need to keep doing it until the originality and creativeness will take the place of mimicking.

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.

This. I can see it on myself and my close friends from home, the group I grew up with, we were always interested in the same stuff, computers, tech, gaming, coding etc, and we wound up in similar places. I also see this on the opposite direction, people I know that hung out with bad influence people also found themselves in similar places as them. Of course there are exceptions, but I wouldn’t want to be waking up some day and realize I have spent too much time hanging out with the wrong people. This advice should be given by any parent to their children.

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.

I hope this post gets you motivated to do great work, well, I think that if you have made it this far, you must be interested in it. And if you aren’t, well I don’t care. This blog is for me more than it is for you :)