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 makes us more curious and more exciting.
Sure, we all have our duties life; certain responsibilities. The younger you are, the less, but still school, homework, uni, work, etc. And not most of has the greatest aptitude or interest in these. Rather we have our own interests, hobbies, curiosities.
These indeed are the ones, which Great Work can occur from. On topics we have a great interest in. The best ways to express these interests, is through personal projects. It’s like making the theory to practice, turning an asset into tangible form or achieving a greater degree of expertise in our topic of interest.
A personal project, could literally be everything, I’d argue. But the main criteria of a personal project is 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 no projects, even though they appear so. Since they are just abstract, undefined goals or more like manifestations, you’ll also lack at interest, curiosity, excitingness, and motivation to act on them.
Instead, they could seem like: “run a marathon in 3 months” if your interest is running, or “create a short docu movie” if you are into filmmaking or “solve a physics problem everyday for a month” if you are currently excited about physics, and so on and so forth. There sure are an endless spectrum of possibilities for exciting projects for various topics.
However, it is not just the expression of our interest and curiosity or the probability that something great will more likely occur from them, why we should work on excitingly ambitious projects. But it’s also the best method to learn, master, get good at something. So, do not wait to become the theory expert to start that interesting project, go experiment. Get just some idea about the topic and the context and directly cold plunge into practice, work: PROJECTS! go run to that half marathon before your marathon, instead of watching “how to run a marathon and what gear to buy” tutorials, go shoot and edit that first video, which won’t be the best, but still teach you more than you could after spending hours watching how videos and taking courses. 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 call a thumbs-up rule; a 20/80 ratio, depending on the subject, is useful. It might be less of 20% theory while studying maths or more whilst learning to code, but majority of your time and energy should go into practice; projects. You’ll both learn much more theory and learn how to implement it at that 80% of practice than at the 20% of theory. So, your projects, of course, should also be continuous, speaking of a single interested field, one after another iterating on the previous one, getting better and better as well as more and more exciting and interesting, over time.
How to get project ideas?: By being advanced and more interested in the topic. How to get more advanced and more interested in a topic?: By doing projects.
If you think you don’t have any interests, (it’s very unlikely, you have probably not noticed them yet) just try out new and possibly interesting but also useful things, as long as you’ve found some, from which exciting projects could occur. Work on them, if they work out for you, stick to them; if not: continue with your experimentation. Thus, avoid both drifting around passively and expecting some interesting thing to come and find you, as well as keeping this experimenting phase to long and jumping from topic to topic. It’s in fact the challenge to find its 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. Only way to do so is to work on exciting ambitious, curious, and interesting projects. If you get lost in you responsibilities, you won’t enjoy working.
