I’m reading the essay “How to do Great Work” by Paul Graham for the 3rd time, I think. Every time something new strikes me and grabs my attention.
“Great work happens through excitingly ambitious projects,” he says — humble side projects that make us more curious and more excited.
Sure, we all have our duties in life; certain responsibilities. The younger you are, the fewer they are, but still — school, homework, uni, work, etc. And most of us don’t have the greatest aptitude or interest in these. Rather, we have our own interests, hobbies, and curiosities.
These are, indeed, the ones from which great work can occur — topics we have a genuine interest in. The best way to express these interests is through personal projects. It’s like turning theory into practice, transforming an asset into a tangible form, or achieving a greater degree of expertise in our topic of interest.
A personal project could literally be anything, I’d argue. But the main criteria for a personal project are that it should be tangible and well-defined. I used to make this mistake: “attend more events & meet people,” “learn physics,” or “master filmmaking” are not projects, even though they appear so. Since they are just abstract, undefined goals — or more like manifestations — you’ll also lack interest, curiosity, excitement, and motivation to act on them.
Instead, they could look like this: “run a marathon in 3 months” if your interest is running, or “create a short documentary movie” if you’re into filmmaking, or “solve a physics problem every day for a month” if you’re currently excited about physics, and so on. There is an endless spectrum of possibilities for exciting projects across various topics.
However, it’s not just the expression of our interest and curiosity, or the probability that something great will occur from them, that makes us want to work on excitingly ambitious projects. It’s also the best method to learn, master, and get good at something. So, don’t wait to become a theory expert before starting that interesting project — go experiment. Get some idea about the topic and the context, and then directly plunge into practice. Go run that half marathon before your full marathon instead of watching “how to run a marathon and what gear to buy” tutorials. Go shoot and edit that first video — it won’t be the best, but it will teach you more than hours of watching “how-to” videos or taking courses ever could. Make that first ugly design project to get started.
So, as you might have realized, both “get some idea” and “jump into practice” parts are essential to set some foundation and actually master the thing. But to give an idea — and to call it a thumbs-up rule — a 20/80 ratio, depending on the subject, is useful. It might be less than 20% theory while studying maths, or more while learning to code, but the majority of your time and energy should go into practice — projects. You’ll learn much more theory and learn how to implement it in that 80% of practice than in the 20% of theory.
Your projects, of course, should also be continuous — speaking of a single field of interest — one after another, iterating on the previous one, getting better and better as well as more exciting and interesting over time.
How to get project ideas? By becoming more advanced and more interested in the topic.
How to become more advanced and more interested in a topic? By doing projects.
If you think you don’t have any interests (which is very unlikely — you’ve probably just not noticed them yet), try out new and possibly interesting but also useful things until you find some from which exciting projects could occur. Work on them. If they work out for you, stick to them; if not, continue experimenting. Thus, avoid both drifting around passively and expecting something interesting to come find you, as well as keeping this experimenting phase too long and jumping from topic to topic. It’s a challenge to find the sweet spot.
So, do not let “work” to be defined as something you do not want to but have to do, but rather something you enjoy doing. The only way to do so is to work on exciting, ambitious, and interesting projects. If you get lost in you responsibilities, you won’t enjoy working.
