{"id":3643,"date":"2025-02-14T08:50:44","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T08:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/?p=3643"},"modified":"2025-02-22T12:21:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T12:21:01","slug":"how-to-do-great-work-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/?p=3643","title":{"rendered":"How to do Great Work 101"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/p3643.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">I recently came across to a podcast where the podcaster apparently was analyzing and talking about an essay named&nbsp;<em>\u201cHow to do Great Work\u201d<\/em>. I rolled my eyes at first but then I saw the title&nbsp;<em>\u201cby Paul Graham\u201d<\/em> which got me, since I knew Paul Graham and was very aspired to what his&nbsp;<em>Y Combinator<\/em>&nbsp;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">After reading it I knew already that despite it not being a book, I had to add it to my <em>Books 101 series<\/em>&nbsp;because of it\u2019s tremendous value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Paul Graham formulates it as a&nbsp;<em>guide to do great work<\/em>, separate from the \u201cwork hard\u201d label, and indicates at the very beginning that this guide\u2014this recipe\u2014assumes you\u2019re very ambitious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What to work on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">First, he says, you have to decide, what to work on. Yet before choosing it, you have to look for three qualities: \u201c(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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">But in case you haven\u2019t decided on that yet, don\u2019t just sit down and blow your mind about what is the best suited for you. Instead you should \u201cguess it, pick something and get going.\u201d You might and probably will guess it wrong but don\u2019t worry there is a lot of trial and error involved in this phase. Don\u2019t mind knowing about multiple things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you&#8217;re not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You&#8217;ll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that&#8217;s fine. It&#8217;s good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Personal Projects<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Furthermore, \u201cdo your own thing\u201d it says. Do personal projects. Don\u2019t let your mind define \u201cwork\u201d as a responsibility that someone holds you accountable for so that you earn a salary to survive. Rather, do your own work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don&#8217;t let &#8220;work&#8221; 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&#8217;ll be driving your part of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Curiosity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">You should choose such projects according to your taste and interests: \u201cWhatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.\u201d And they might or should change with time. If you build Lego houses at 7, you won\u2019t necessarily do it now. But maybe you rather build AI Agents or a personal blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Your \u201cexcited curiosity\u201d will drive you and tell you what projects to work on, it says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">What you are excessively curious about \u2014 curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That\u2019s what you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Four steps to great work<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">This next quote has truly inspired me and got me thinking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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\u2019s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Luck<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">There was a quote I had heard long before, it was something like: \u201cSome day you get lucky, and if you don\u2019t miss a day, you won\u2019t miss any lucky day.\u201d and my single role model and the core player behind my ambition and vision\u2014my father always used to say: \u201cLuck is always on the side of hustlers.\u201d So don\u2019t expect to be lucky without any effort to become lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Paul Graham also mentions the importance of luck and say that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">How? You might ask: &#8220;Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Optimize<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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&#8217;re like.&nbsp;But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s probably not for you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Do not Overcomplicate<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">But while you need boldness, you don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">I used to do this a lot. Sam Altman also underlines this fact in a podcast: \u201cThe world belongs to DOERS.\u201d Meaning, \u201cJust Do It.\u201d as Phil Knight\u2019s Blue Ribbon Sports emphasizes. I used to think a lot, imagine a lot, plan a lot, but when it came to the \u201cdo a lot\u201d part, I used struggle. After my \u201caha\u201d moment about this simple yet existential fact, I try to minimize the \u201cimagining\u201d and \u201cplanning\u201d part and to prioritize the \u201cdoing\u201d part without any further complication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Types of Procrastination<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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\u2019t exist. This is one thing. but the really disturbing thing about per project procrastination is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You&#8217;re not just sitting around doing nothing; you&#8217;re working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn&#8217;t set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You&#8217;re too busy to notice it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hard (Continuous) Work<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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&#8217;re genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you&#8217;re surprised how far you&#8217;ve come.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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 \u201cexcited curiosity\u201d and a great interest for the thing. Because this it the way to do the hard work continuous. Let alone being successful, you won\u2019t be consistent at the thing you hate. Don\u2019t confute this. It doesn\u2019t matter that you hate it just because your are lacking consistency. Mathematics express this beautifully:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><em>You hate it. \u21d2 you lack consistency<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left has-medium-font-size\">You lack consistency if you hate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">But it doesn\u2019t matter that you hate it, just because you lack consistency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">So, you should know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Cumulative Effect<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Another thing about hard work is the compound effect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">The reason we&#8217;re surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn&#8217;t sound like much, but if you do it every day you&#8217;ll write a book a year. That&#8217;s the key: consistency. People who do great things don&#8217;t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">You sure have heard about the \u201cPlateau of Latent Potential\u201d, the exponential growth of hard work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn&#8217;t; it&#8217;s still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can&#8217;t grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Subconscious Mind<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Paul Graham also addresses this and says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Work doesn&#8217;t just happen when you&#8217;re trying to. There&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;t just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">This is a long and phenomenal essay. There are many more aspects that I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently came across to a podcast where the podcaster apparently was analyzing and talking about an essay named&nbsp;\u201cHow to do Great Work\u201d. I rolled my eyes at first but then I saw the title&nbsp;\u201cby Paul Graham\u201d which got me, since I knew Paul Graham and was very aspired to what his&nbsp;Y Combinator&nbsp;was doing. They [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-inspiration"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3643"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3660,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions\/3660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpermert.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}