I recently came across to a podcast where the podcaster apparently was analyzing and talking about an essay named “How to do Great Work”. I rolled my eyes at first but then I saw the title “by Paul Graham” which got me, since I knew Paul Graham and was very aspired to what his Y Combinator was doing. They were funding and so giving birth to new and innovative startups in Silicon Valley: Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Twitch, Dropbox and many more were born there. Even Sam Altman was the president of YC before OpenAI. So I clicked on it and listened carefully for an hour straight. I eventually was so inspired and felt appealed that I decided to read the thing myself.
After reading it I knew already that despite it not being a book, I had to add it to my Books 101 series because of it’s tremendous value.
Paul Graham formulates it as a guide to do great work, separate from the “work hard” label, and indicates at the very beginning that this guide—this recipe—assumes you’re very ambitious.
So in this blog article I will share my personal takeaways and highlights in short chapters as an individual who considers themselves to be ambitious af and thirsty to do Great Work.
What to work on
First, he says, you have to decide, what to work on. Yet before choosing it, you have to look for three qualities: “(1) it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, (2) that you have a deep interest in, (3) and that offers scope to do great work.”
But in case you haven’t decided on that yet, don’t just sit down and blow your mind about what is the best suited for you. Instead you should “guess it, pick something and get going.” You might and probably will guess it wrong but don’t worry there is a lot of trial and error involved in this phase. Don’t mind knowing about multiple things:
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.
Personal Projects
Furthermore, “do your own thing” it says. Do personal projects. Don’t let your mind define “work” as a responsibility that someone holds you accountable for so that you earn a salary to survive. Rather, do your own work.
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.
Curiosity
You should choose such projects according to your taste and interests: “Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.” And they might or should change with time. If you build Lego houses at 7, you won’t necessarily do it now. But maybe you rather build AI Agents or a personal blog.
Your “excited curiosity” will drive you and tell you what projects to work on, it says.
What you are excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.
Four steps to great work
This next quote has truly inspired me and got me thinking:
Four steps: (1) choose a field, (2) learn enough to get to the frontier, (3) notice gaps, (4) explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
I do not have much to add to this visionary guide. I sincerely embrace it and see myself at step two. So from here on it’s just hard, dedicated and focused work as the author also indicates, perhaps a whole decade of hard work until step three.. Meanwhile it is critical to maintain these three motives: curiosity, delight and the desire to do something impressive, Paul Graham adds.
Luck
There was a quote I had heard long before, it was something like: “Some day you get lucky, and if you don’t miss a day, you won’t miss any lucky day.” and my single role model and the core player behind my ambition and vision—my father always used to say: “Luck is always on the side of hustlers.” So don’t expect to be lucky without any effort to become lucky.
Paul Graham also mentions the importance of luck and say that it’s remarkable and undeniable how much luck is involved in success of people who have done great work. Because they create space for luck, they make themselves a big target for luck. You also have to do so.
How? You might ask: “Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.”
Optimize
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.
Do not Overcomplicate
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.
I used to do this a lot. Sam Altman also underlines this fact in a podcast: “The world belongs to DOERS.” Meaning, “Just Do It.” as Phil Knight’s Blue Ribbon Sports emphasizes. I used to think a lot, imagine a lot, plan a lot, but when it came to the “do a lot” part, I used struggle. After my “aha” moment about this simple yet existential fact, I try to minimize the “imagining” and “planning” part and to prioritize the “doing” part without any further complication.
Types of Procrastination
There are two types of procrastination, the author asserts: Per day- and per project procrastination. Per-project-procrastination is far the more dangerous than the per day one, he indicates. The cause of that is that one always tends to wait for the perfect time to get that project going, which doesn’t exist. This is one thing. but the really disturbing thing about per project procrastination is:
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.
I sometimes observe this at my working behavior, fooling myself about being productive whilst working at non-priority task that very well can be avoided or delayed.
So just as one must prioritize the working part, one must also work at priorities. Graham also gives the technique to identify this camouflage of per project procrastination:
The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?
Hard (Continuous) Work
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.
Sometimes you do not realize how fast time has passed by, usually when spent great time with loved ones. This must apply to your work, you must possess “excited curiosity” and a great interest for the thing. Because this it the way to do the hard work continuous. Let alone being successful, you won’t be consistent at the thing you hate. Don’t confute this. It doesn’t matter that you hate it just because your are lacking consistency. Mathematics express this beautifully:
You hate it. ⇒ you lack consistency.
You lack consistency if you hate it.
But it doesn’t matter that you hate it, just because you lack consistency.
So, you should know it.
Cumulative Effect
Another thing about hard work is the compound effect:
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.
You sure have heard about the “Plateau of Latent Potential”, the exponential growth of hard work:
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.
Subconscious Mind
Do you get your best ideas just before sleep, or on a morning walk? You probably do, if you have a pursuit that you genuinely are convinced of. This has a scientific explanation about you switching off your conscious mind and activating your subconscious mind, just before bed or while walking or any other similar activity, which lets you to have great ideas.
Paul Graham also addresses this and says:
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.
This is a long and phenomenal essay. There are many more aspects that I’ve not covered in this article but are very inspiring and useful too. So I will soon try to cover all of them. Yet I strongly recommend you to read it yourself if you really desire and value to do Great Work.
