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	<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>How to Do Great Work</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
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	</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1d31a69a99c0a265><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1d31a69a99c0a265 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-do-great-work-2.gif" width="185" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Do Great Work" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">July 2023<br /><br />If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot
	of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided
	to find out by making it.<br /><br />Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone
	working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the
	intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does
	have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."<br /><br />The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose
	needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a
	natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that
	offers scope to do great work.<br /><br />In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion.
	Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it.
	So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for
	and great interest in.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When
	you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different
	kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not
	even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at
	14, most have to figure it out.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly
	ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves,
	exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly
	ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach
	yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered
	questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.<br /><br />There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the
	rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let
	it have its way, will also show you what to work on.<br /><br />What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that
	would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.<br /><br />Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the
	next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the
	frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a
	distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get
	close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.<br /><br />The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because
	your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler
	model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions
	about things that everyone else took for granted.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often
	has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math.
	It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears,
	embrace it.<br /><br />Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested
	in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited
	about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have
	enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking,
	that's as good a bet as you'll find.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier,
	notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone
	who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.<br /><br />Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible
	to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the
	empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.
	That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply
	interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere
	diligence ever could.<br /><br />The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the
	desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and
	that combination is the most powerful of all.<br /><br />The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack
	in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world
	inside.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring
	out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't
	tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which
	means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for
	years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at
	it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning
	about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose
	late based on very incomplete information.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. 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.<br /><br />The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They
	expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what
	it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal
	trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.<br /><br />It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted
	that the system not only can't do much to help you figure out what
	to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow
	magically guess as a teenager. They don't tell you, but I will:
	when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own.
	Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will
	find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on
	the assumption that everyone does.<br /><br />What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know
	what to work on? What you should <i>not</i> 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.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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 <i>increasingly</i> interesting as you
	learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.<br /><br />Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than
	other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the
	better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste
	for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find
	new things if you're looking where few have looked before.<br /><br />One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like
	even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.<br /><br />But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in the
	course of working on one thing you discover another that's more
	exciting, don't be afraid to switch.<br /><br />If you're making something for people, make sure it's something
	they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something
	you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool
	you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests,
	this will also get you your initial audience.<br /><br />This <i>should</i> follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the most
	exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason
	I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong.
	Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some
	imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down
	that route, you're lost.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're
	trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion,
	fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But
	if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof
	against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,
	but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of
	obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it
	does take a good deal of boldness.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements
	you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich
	by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal,
	but you can't discover natural selection that way.<br /><br />I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy
	is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most
	interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call
	this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done
	great work seem to have done it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on
	it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new
	idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to
	work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't
	like that.<br /><br />You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.
	There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a
	technique to working, just as there is to sailing.<br /><br />For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too
	hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns:
	fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health.
	The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the
	type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for
	four or five hours a day.<br /><br />Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try
	to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in.
	You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.<br /><br />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. Work has a sort of activation energy, both
	per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the
	sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's
	ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over
	it.<br /><br />It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great
	work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm
	reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by
	saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes
	later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and
	I'm off.<br /><br />Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's ok to lie
	to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example.
	Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it
	be?"<br /><br />This is one case where the young have an advantage. They're more
	optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism
	is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.<br /><br />Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be
	more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise
	in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best
	work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.<br /><br />Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what
	you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you
	discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after
	all.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#dddddd>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per
	project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project
	procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting
	that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't
	quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can
	get a lot not done.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#dddddd>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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.<br /><br />The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I
	working on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's ok
	if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous
	as you get older.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#dddddd>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people
	an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of
	this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the
	work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most
	people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to
	think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon:
	the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more.
	Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more
	new fans they'll bring you.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's
	worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since
	we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done
	unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase
	of learning something new because they know from experience that
	learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their
	audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do.
	If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential
	growth, many more would do it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	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.<br /><br />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.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#dddddd>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important
	to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your
	mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that
	moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out
	of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on
	the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field.
	Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't
	know what you're aiming for.<br /><br />And that <i>is</i> what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to
	be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made
	by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth
	thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a
	phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where
	almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short.
	Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively
	different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is
	simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#dddddd>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Fortunately there's a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might
	seem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the
	best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It's exciting, and
	also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it's
	easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.<br /><br />One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will
	care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter
	more than your contemporaries', but because something that still
	seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best
	job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive
	way.<br /><br />Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying
	to is affectation.<br /><br />Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is
	doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while
	you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows
	in the work.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#dddddd>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They
	often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that
	problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently
	ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're
	not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and
	your identity will take care of itself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how
	would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to
	be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're
	earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar
	vices.<br /><br />The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're
	taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind
	of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new
	ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're
	trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can
	you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?<br /><br />One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight
	positive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willing
	to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken
	about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#dddddd>13</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality.
	Informality is much more important than its grammatically negative
	name implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It means
	focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't.<br /><br />What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as
	doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing
	it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being
	good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work:
	they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's
	basically the definition of a nerd.<br /><br />Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need
	in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood.
	So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than
	the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms
	of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense,
	and the route to great work is never easy.<br /><br />There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical and
	pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage to
	be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a
	fool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. The
	Old Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like a
	fool. But that's advice for <i>seeming</i> smart. If you actually want
	to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling
	people your ideas.<br /><br />Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes a
	conscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice. But I
	doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest.
	It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin
	for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected,
	intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f14n"><font color=#dddddd>14</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself.
	It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle
	of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.<br /><br />You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily
	have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some
	effort; when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias
	and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat
	this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert
	to what I have now?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Indeed, in some kinds of work it's good to strip whatever you're
	doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'll
	understand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself about
	whether there's anything real there.<br /><br />Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from
	the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant"
	applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior —
	that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical
	elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math.<br /><br />Elegance can be a long-term bet, though. Laborious solutions will
	often have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot of
	effort and they're hard to understand, both of which impress people,
	at least temporarily.<br /><br />Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively
	little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't
	have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard
	to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.<br /><br />When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or
	discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself
	as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.<br /><br />(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem
	to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case
	it's more like creating something. In the best case you create the
	field in the process of exploring it.)<br /><br />Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it
	gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition
	will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of
	eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit
	will be.<br /><br />Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something
	others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that
	others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer.
	The best ideas have implications in many different areas.<br /><br />If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer
	than you intended.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be
	true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new
	ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers
	of knowledge.<br /><br />In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity,
	and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name,
	because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possible
	to have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a great
	deal of what's often called <i>technical</i> ability — and yet not have
	much of this.<br /><br />I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading.
	Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers
	throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle
	grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.<br /><br />If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understand
	very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most
	original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got
	divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15
	year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see
	originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all
	the more clear.<br /><br />I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but there
	are definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. For
	example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're
	working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have
	original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something
	slightly too difficult.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f15n"><font color=#dddddd>15</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll
	often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often
	dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit.
	Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f16n"><font color=#dddddd>16</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas
	if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives
	the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because
	analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.<br /><br />Don't divide your attention <i>evenly</i> between many topics though,
	or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it
	according to something more like a power law.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f17n"><font color=#dddddd>17</font></a>]</font>
	Be professionally
	curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.<br /><br />Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds
	originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship
	is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality;
	it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since
	questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity
	at its best is a creative force.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of
	seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a
	new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this
	before?<br /><br />When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably
	a good one.<br /><br />Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having
	new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction?
	It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the
	way you look at the world. We see the world through models that
	both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas
	become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard.
	That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover:
	they're easy to see after you do something hard.<br /><br />One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other
	people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where
	they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these
	clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached
	to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend
	to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous
	it may seem in retrospect.<br /><br />To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead
	of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the
	wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was
	looking for new ideas as because he was stricter.<br /><br />The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical
	as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps
	to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. From the
	point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially
	shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.<br /><br />Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new
	ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem
	perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world
	they brought with them. But they didn't at the time; it took the
	greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally
	accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.<br /><br />Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to
	most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what
	you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of
	crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often
	ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of
	crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas
	ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.<br /><br />There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy
	breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases
	being aggressively and passively independent-minded.<br /><br />The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules
	don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional
	energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of
	a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it
	started.<br /><br />The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps
	even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often
	make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts
	as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies
	also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs.
	Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.<br /><br />Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination.
	In popular culture they're opposed. But popular culture has a broken
	model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial
	ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking <i>are</i>
	opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers
	can be truly strict.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	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.<br /><br />One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for <i>someone
	else</i> to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to
	protect you.<br /><br />You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other
	direction: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished
	but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable
	ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.<br /><br />Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So
	anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically
	as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow.
	Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f18n"><font color=#dddddd>18</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being
	too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident
	as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	People show much more originality in solving problems than in
	deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly
	conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream
	of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on
	fashionable problems.<br /><br />One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than
	solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy
	you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But
	even so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely
	responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems
	are undervalued.<br /><br />One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the
	problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't.
	Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its
	latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're
	interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let
	their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.<br /><br />Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's
	no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied
	elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And
	there's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that
	would otherwise be wasted.<br /><br />But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly
	unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't
	seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these?
	By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way,
	and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head
	that says you should only be working on "important" problems.<br /><br />You do need to work on important problems, but almost everyone is
	too conservative about what counts as one. And if there's an important
	but overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it's probably already
	on your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if you
	were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something
	just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The
	answer is probably more important than it seems.<br /><br />Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than
	originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people
	who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the
	initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key
	to the whole game.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas
	is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition.
	People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was
	in the question.<br /><br />Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used
	in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being
	answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can
	be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.
	How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to
	earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By
	even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel
	territory.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often
	comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before
	— in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about.
	People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful
	dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful
	questions alive.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f19n"><font color=#dddddd>19</font></a>]</font><br /><br />This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from
	the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are
	certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long
	as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else
	understands them either.<br /><br />Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new idea
	is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled
	about something. Which means that originality consists partly of
	puzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with
	the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them,
	but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f20n"><font color=#dddddd>20</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is
	one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best
	way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones.
	Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread
	protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it
	just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be
	obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict
	that. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to
	predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.<br /><br />It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on
	a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The
	initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side
	projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start
	lots of small things.<br /><br />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.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f21n"><font color=#dddddd>21</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything
	that's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun by
	trying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when you
	do look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when
	starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like
	two puzzle pieces.<br /><br />How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By
	making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in
	successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it,
	and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than
	anything you could have planned.<br /><br />It's particularly useful to make successive versions when you're
	making something for people — to get an initial version in front
	of them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.<br /><br />Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work.
	Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn't, this will at least get
	you started.<br /><br />Don't try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. There
	are names for doing this with the first version (taking too long
	to ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these are
	both merely instances of a more general principle.<br /><br />An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a
	toy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it has
	everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f22n"><font color=#dddddd>22</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it
	is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does
	usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized
	to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going
	to try x and see what happens." And it is more <i>organized</i>; it just
	doesn't work as well.<br /><br />Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a
	necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something
	you have to do because you're working with inflexible media, or
	because you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. If
	you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to
	plan as much, and your designs can evolve instead.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	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.<br /><br />Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's the
	young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear
	risk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most.<br /><br />Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working
	on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and
	encountered questions few others have asked. And there's probably
	no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying
	to do something slightly too hard.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages
	of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy,
	time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge,
	efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of
	the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.<br /><br />The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they
	have. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest
	is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time.
	The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly
	frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know
	about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just
	because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.<br /><br />That "slightly" is an important qualification. Spend time lavishly
	when you're young, but don't simply waste it. There's a big difference
	between doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doing
	something you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet,
	and possibly a better one than you think.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f23n"><font color=#dddddd>23</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience,
	is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain
	embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fit
	together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but
	occasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly
	and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the
	idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not
	to.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f24n"><font color=#dddddd>24</font></a>]</font><br /><br />So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay
	attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted
	to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you.
	And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep
	progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further
	into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If
	they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they
	probably represent an undiscovered idea.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience
	is to know what you <i>don't</i> have to worry about. The young know all
	the things that could matter, but not their relative importance.
	So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much
	more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.<br /><br />But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience.
	The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive at
	adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've
	acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be
	able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in
	the way of whatever type of work you want to do.<br /><br />Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools.
	We're so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to school
	as identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts of
	strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.<br /><br />For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child,
	there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you
	what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither
	classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts
	of the way schools are usually designed.<br /><br />The sooner you overcome this passivity, the better. If you're still
	in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your
	teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. That may seem
	a stretch, but it's not merely some weird thought experiment. It's
	the truth economically, and in the best case it's the truth
	intellectually as well. The best teachers don't want to be your
	bosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source
	of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.<br /><br />Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like.
	In school they tell you what the problems are, and they're almost
	always soluble using no more than you've been taught so far. In
	real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you
	often don't know if they're soluble at all.<br /><br />But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win
	by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You
	can't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way
	to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others
	have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you
	a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would
	be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential
	people.<br /><br />And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that
	impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different
	from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection
	committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of
	a feedback loop, and very few are.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	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.<br /><br />There's a good way to copy and a bad way. If you're going to copy
	something, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still,
	unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributed
	phrase "Great artists steal." The really dangerous kind of copying,
	the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that's done
	without realizing it, because you're nothing more than a train
	running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other
	extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f25n"><font color=#dddddd>25</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be
	in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a
	vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you're
	first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're
	going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once
	you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former
	gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two
	cases are more similar than they seem.<br /><br />Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimes
	makes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. New
	discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of
	existing things, <i>even by their discoverers</i>, because there isn't
	yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.<br /><br />There are definitely some dangers to copying, though. One is that
	you'll tend to copy old things — things that were in their day at
	the frontier of knowledge, but no longer are.<br /><br />And when you do copy something, don't copy every feature of it.
	Some will make you ridiculous if you do. Don't copy the manner of
	an eminent 50 year old professor if you're 18, for example, or the
	idiom of a Renaissance poem hundreds of years later.<br /><br />Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded
	despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the
	most likely to be the flaws.<br /><br />This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are
	jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that
	being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented
	is merely how they get away with it.<br /><br />One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from
	one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries
	of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by
	deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas
	from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors.<br /><br />Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you
	can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things
	done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's
	missing.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one
	place, it's usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will
	increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people
	are human, increase your self-confidence.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f26n"><font color=#dddddd>26</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you
	might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy
	to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're
	really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's
	interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their
	hobbies.<br /><br />It may take some effort to find the people who are really good,
	though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places,
	particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyone
	is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities
	can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in
	different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people
	doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	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.<br /><br />Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect
	you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.<br /><br />Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better
	to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good
	ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from
	history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests
	that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great
	work and not.<br /><br />How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my
	experience, when you do, you know. Which means if you're unsure,
	you probably don't. But it may be possible to give a more concrete
	answer than that. Here's an attempt: sufficiently good colleagues
	offer <i>surprising</i> insights. They can see and do things that you
	can't. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep
	you on your toes in this sense, you're probably over the threshold.<br /><br />Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but some
	projects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of those
	is not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you'll
	have to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude and
	interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there
	is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management
	as a second language, or avoid such projects.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f27n"><font color=#dddddd>27</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working
	on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a
	living organism.<br /><br />Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great
	work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of
	yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.<br /><br />Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If
	you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a
	refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism,
	it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by
	some of the greatest minds in history.<br /><br />Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which
	increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this
	cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing
	good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since
	it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right
	direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when
	you're stuck, just so you start to get something done.<br /><br />One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow
	setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting.
	You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering
	setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always
	involves some backtracking.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more
	than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends
	how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from
	bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar,
	your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience
	in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big.
	The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with
	its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if
	you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated
	audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people
	genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.<br /><br />To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between
	you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable,
	but it's so liberating to escape it that you might be better off
	switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f28n"><font color=#dddddd>28</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your
	morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and
	others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always
	what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and
	avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone
	you need to take care of, that takes precedence.<br /><br />Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work,
	or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're
	ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition;
	so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you,
	or does and doesn't care.<br /><br />Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's
	important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly,
	eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of
	drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise
	because they're good for thinking.
	<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f29n"><font color=#dddddd>29</font></a>]</font><br /><br />People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone
	else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact,
	if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous <i>not</i> to be productive.
	People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to
	become bitter.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people.
	The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the
	opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just
	adds noise.<br /><br />The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and
	sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough,
	you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of
	work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.<br /><br />Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose
	the problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasing
	something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors
	make you do anything much more specific than work harder.<br /><br />Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows
	more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the
	secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single
	word, my bet would be on "curiosity."<br /><br />That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to
	be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can
	nurture it and let it drive you.<br /><br />Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will
	choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to
	notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole
	process is a kind of dance with curiosity.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could.
	But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it
	this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so
	you're already further along than you might realize, because the
	set of people willing to want to is small.<br /><br />The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal,
	mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and
	luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can
	ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to
	do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest.
	Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will
	combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?<br /><br />Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different
	ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered.
	Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited
	for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close
	match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your
	ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by
	trying.<br /><br />Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds
	them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous
	to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if
	you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation
	is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do
	great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy
	away from the question.<br /><br />So I'm going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great
	work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that.
	I wouldn't have done it to a general audience. But we already know
	you're interested.<br /><br />Don't worry about being presumptuous. You don't have to tell anyone.
	And if it's too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have
	worse problems than that. In fact you'll be lucky if it's the worst
	problem you have.<br /><br />Yes, you'll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to
	work hard. And if you're working on something you find very
	interesting, which you necessarily will if you're on the right path,
	the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your
	peers'.<br /><br />The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
	<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
	I don't think you could give a precise definition of what
	counts as great work. Doing great work means doing something important
	so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. But
	there's no threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree, and
	often hard to judge at the time anyway. So I'd rather people focused
	on developing their interests rather than worrying about whether
	they're important or not. Just try to do something amazing, and
	leave it to future generations to say if you succeeded.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
	A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in
	everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing
	this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's
	reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
	That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited about
	something most authorities discount, but you can't give a more
	precise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're starting
	to drift into the territory of cranks.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
	Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding
	a match between the current version of you and a list of known
	problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's
	why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The
	search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible
	types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible
	future versions of you.<br /><br />There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have to
	rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope
	the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be;
	different types of work have been collected together as much by
	accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
	There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do
	great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide
	net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the
	first place.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
	It can also be dangerous to make things for an audience you
	feel is less sophisticated than you, if that causes you to talk
	down to them. You can make a lot of money doing that, if you do it
	in a sufficiently cynical way, but it's not the route to great work.
	Not that anyone using this m.o. would care.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
	This idea I learned from Hardy's <i>A Mathematician's Apology</i>,
	which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any
	field.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
	Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate
	what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done
	by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by
	procrastinating for several years.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
	You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want,
	especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work
	close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for
	doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side.
	Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your
	work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight
	to get time to do it.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
	If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax
	cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and
	that you walk to and from.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
	There may be some very unworldly people who do great work
	without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to
	cover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except the
	best.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
	This gets more complicated in work like acting, where the
	goal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to be
	affected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoid
	<i>unintentional</i> affectation.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
	It's safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionable
	if and only if they're also unfalsifiable. For example, it's safe
	to have the principle that everyone should be treated equally under
	the law, because a sentence with a "should" in it isn't really a
	statement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. And
	if there's no evidence that could disprove one of your principles,
	there can't be any facts you'd need to ignore in order to preserve
	it.<br /><br />[<a name="f14n"><font color=#000000>14</font></a>]
	Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty.
	Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in
	time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.<br /><br />[<a name="f15n"><font color=#000000>15</font></a>]
	Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact moment
	you have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairly
	recently.<br /><br />[<a name="f16n"><font color=#000000>16</font></a>]
	Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm
	skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.<br /><br />[<a name="f17n"><font color=#000000>17</font></a>]
	For example you might give the nth most important topic
	(m-1)/m^n of your attention, for some m > 1. You couldn't allocate
	your attention so precisely, of course, but this at least gives an
	idea of a reasonable distribution.<br /><br />[<a name="f18n"><font color=#000000>18</font></a>]
	The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken.
	Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to
	distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else.<br /><br />[<a name="f19n"><font color=#000000>19</font></a>]
	It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of
	questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're
	now in a position to do something about some of them.<br /><br />[<a name="f20n"><font color=#000000>20</font></a>]
	The connection between originality and uncertainty causes a
	strange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certain
	than the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper hand
	in disputes, even though they're generally stupider.
	<blockquote>
	The best lack all conviction, while the worst<br>
	Are full of passionate intensity.
	</blockquote>
	[<a name="f21n"><font color=#000000>21</font></a>]
	Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas,
	you must have many ideas."<br /><br />[<a name="f22n"><font color=#000000>22</font></a>]
	Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking a
	statement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantial
	criticism can be made to stick.<br /><br />[<a name="f23n"><font color=#000000>23</font></a>]
	One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if
	you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely
	to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where
	you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than
	playing games where you don't.<br /><br />[<a name="f24n"><font color=#000000>24</font></a>]
	Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anything
	publicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supports
	your earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieve
	eternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people,
	having previously published opinions has an effect similar to
	ideology, just in quantity 1.<br /><br />[<a name="f25n"><font color=#000000>25</font></a>]
	In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta
	Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted
	his own version to show how much better he was.<br /><br />[<a name="f26n"><font color=#000000>26</font></a>]
	I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As of
	this writing, being in the same physical place has advantages that
	are hard to duplicate, but that could change.<br /><br />[<a name="f27n"><font color=#000000>27</font></a>]
	This is false when the work the other people have to do is
	very constrained, as with SETI@home or Bitcoin. It may be possible
	to expand the area in which it's false by defining similarly
	restricted protocols with more freedom of action in the nodes.<br /><br />[<a name="f28n"><font color=#000000>28</font></a>]
	Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around
	intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably
	a good idea.<br /><br />[<a name="f29n"><font color=#000000>29</font></a>]
	It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, because
	that frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, and
	there is some historical evidence for it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b>
	to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Pam Graham, Tom Howard,
	Patrick Hsu, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Henry Lloyd-Baker,
	Bob Metcalfe, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, Courtenay
	Pipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, Garry
	Tan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts.
	</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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