How to Do Great Work (2023)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
One thing is art. I was in new orleans once and heard a kid play jazz saxaphone out on a street corner in the middle of the night. It was legitimately the most beautiful music ive ever heard in my life. I think that man put all his life into that solo and hit the frontier of how music can affect a listener's soul. I think he was doing great by paul grahams definition
I didn’t get much from it, but I’ve gotten that sort of advice my whole life, so it was a little boring. As a result of being bored, I skimmed it. As I skimmed it, it started to feel repetitive. It is possible that a deeper reading would reveal some non-repetitive aspect to the parts I found repetitive. It seems like a good blog post to give to a smart teenager.
Edit: I think we’ll get some dismissive responses here because most of the posters here are at least somewhat mid-career, so they’ve already gotten and acted on this kind of advice. Imagine reading it before college, though. I’d have enjoyed it.
If you're great work only consists of work that generates money, then you're neglecting the entire spectrum of the human experience.
Most people manage this. It is hard to earn a paycheck if someone isn't improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways. Great work has to be something a bit more. There are a lot of thresholds for that which could be reasonable, but if we aren't going to go with solid investor returns someone is going to have to come up with a rough standard that can be talked about.
> Starting after school programs or setting up mutual aid stations or community gardens or creating tenant unions, are all things any one of us can do to improve the lives of those around us.
I mean, sure. But my mind automatically drifts to China and the millions of people being dragged out of poverty by sweatshops and investors making out like bandits. Industrial improvements to living standards, driven by profits, are a lot faster and larger than people setting up mutual aid stations. The scales are just different once people figure out a way to improve the world profitably.
There are examples of people who managed to scale up their work to do amazing things without making a profit along the way (major religious figures spring to mind), but generally it is just easier to have a sustainable impact if the returns are good too.
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Newton, Gauss, Euler. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. Faraday, Darwin, Einstein.
(If you're looking for greatness on their scale, then of course the number will be "not that large" because work that great is very rare. But there are plenty of artists and scientists and whatnot achieving lesser levels of greatness and most of them are not getting large investment returns.)
>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.
>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.
Bull-shit. The set of all things you enjoy and have aptitude for is much larger than the set of things you can make money on. There's a reason why Paul Graham chased coding and making an e-store in the 90s and not becoming a great philosopher, which he seems to have natural interest in (and he probably thinks he has quite a bit of aptitude for it).
That reason is $$$. I've found in my time that the number one rule of making $$$ is that you must chase $$$. It doesn't knock at your door, it doesn't come when you least expect it. $$$ is degrading in that you must submit yourself to it. If the $$$ is in code then you code and there's no room for individuality beyond that. It's genuflect or be poor. That's why all these rich people narrowly chase code or similar cash cows. The number two and three rules is chase it a lot and chase it efficiently. If you chase something else a lot and efficiently you will still be poor.
Charitably maybe the concept of chasing $$$ is so ingrained in these people that it's not a conscious decision to them. That seems to be what he says anyway. You could call that greed and I think a lot of brilliant people don't have it to the same degree that most billionaires do so failing to acknowledge it even by accident leads to gatekeeping money.
There's nothing dishonest about what he is saying and if you think you can make money just by making it your optimising function then I suggest following it because that's the most pro-social thing you can do. The literal economy is design in such a way!
Depends on your definitions.
If by "chasing money", you mean "I want money, so I'm going to find out what people want badly enough to pay for, and I'm going to figure out a way to make that in a way that lets me profit", that may not be virtuous in a purely moral sense, but it's at least likely to lead to a virtuous outcome.
If by "chasing money", you mean "I want money, so I'll do whatever is the easiest way to make money, and that seems to be scams and grift so I'll start there", then no, there's nothing virtuous whatsoever there.
I think all the parts were invented by other people, but he got the right mix to make it work.
It's also like the wheel. Before it was a huge problem and no one know how to solve it. Now it's invisible.
Note that all modern versions use enhanced variants with a lot or trick to make it better.
So yes Bayesian spam filtering was impressive for its time. I remember it being done locally in mail clients.
It’s also one of the early popular deployments of a form of “AI” but that was still during the hangover from the first AI bubble when you had to call it “machine learning.”
Whatever you feel about it, it would be inaccurate to say that he has not found success. Clearly he has. So it is up to each person to decide whether or not any products of that success, including his writings, matches their own definition for 'great'.
You are somewhat smart in one specific domain; you are a "Genius".
You are successful in something; you are the "Greatest".
You fail in something; you are a "Loser".
You make one single mistake; you are "Dumb".
It is almost as if we have forgotten how we got here viz. lots of trial-and-error, sheer persistence, extreme specialization, building theories, sharing knowledge, building teams, focusing on goals, good dose of luck, etc.
Is this supposed to be relatable?
When Ivy League educated VC billionaires tell people that they can do great things and change the world if they want, one assumption is that you already have to be pretty close to the in-group.
- William James Sidis
In any case; I think you will get the most out of the article if you do not pay the relatility too much thought: Even if C) would be true and you (or me or others) are indeed not part of the intended audience, I am sure there are still interesting thoughts in the essay on can think about and potentially apply to ones own life.
and there is more to great work than being a child prodigy, except for those that have peaked at 21.
Being part of the incredibly, exceptionally ambitious group that this essay seems to be targeted at can come in all shapes and forms, I would assume. I am even convinced about it. Music, arts, crafts, social activities, literature, organizing, activism, physics, whatever - it would be very strange to assume that one cannot be highly ambitious in any of those or other areas, I think...
The only thing that matters for being included in that (small, by definition) group is being very ambitious, no statement was being made about which area that ambition should target (at least not by my me). In case you seem to think that PG thinks so: That might be you reading subtext where there is none, PG might have simply refered to the typical Stanford graduate that pitches him a startup idea, nothing more, nothing less.
The people who would benefit from the advice (resourceful people full of free time that are doing nothing meaningful) will likely ignore it anyway.
Can you go to a poor area and change it with a speech about ambition? Likely not that much. The issue there are not habits, it's an environment that disables dreaming big.
PG's text is for stragglers who were raised in environments that allow them to dream big, but they don't for some reason. That is such a low fraction of the world's potential, that seems like a waste of time.
Changing those environments I mentioned earlier is very hard. Absolutely brutal endeavour. I know hundreds of kids whose biggest dream is getting a high status paying job, because the entire environment shapes them for that. Those who can occasionally notice they can dream bigger ("doing great work") often feel intimidated, not uninspired. They can't afford to risk anything.
To me the greater change is possible on those environments who are intimidated, not the stragglers who feel uninspired.
There are plenty of instances that show that in reality this is not what happens, and in fact this is often a necessary step of reinventing yourself if things really aren't working for you. The mid-life crisis is a famous example of this, or even the quarter-life crisis. In some specific psychological circles this is referred to as "disintegration". Sometimes carefully backtracking is simply not enough, and growth needs this kind large shock to the system.
Follow up with Hamming's classic book; The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn available here (pdf) - https://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming_1997_-_The_Art_of_Doing_... It is a very unique one-of-a-kind book which is a must read cover-to-cover.
The last chapter of the above book is You and Your Research ;-)
Maybe you wanted to make a point about some aspects of the authors biography invalidated some claims they make? That would be interesting, then it would be good to be more specific regarding what you are refering to more concretely, though.
To the contrary I find why a particular post, especially on an axis like sociology separate from its content, is on the front page to be interesting in many cases. If you don’t that’s fine.
That makes sense, yes, I can understand that!
Regarding the method to do great work, does it not interest you as much as what the sociology angle in general, or did you find this post in particular to be generic/not worth commenting on?
That's actually my own problem too - I often use AI to summarize / shorten my own texts. (Opposite of what most who seem to use it for generation?)
Things I do appreciate that are good-ish nuggets:
- Don't try to work on something "prestigious". I agree with that; a lot of people became poor out of ego, myself included a few times in the past.
- Working on something that interests you deeply is a great way to become a super specialist which is honestly a coin toss; it can make you a highly-sought-after expert commanding serious rates... or yet another burned out nerd who knows something very deeply that nobody wants to pay for. I mean OK, I love being satisfied and fulfilled but I can't be like that if I can't pay bills. So that passion is never the #1 priority and that's a fact of life for 99.9999%+ of humanity.
- Investing in something on the side a few hours a week sounds great until you wake up 10 years later _still_ not having the side hustle doing you $2000 a month. As above: coin toss. But I agree that's the right and the pragmatic strategy for working people. Success is not guaranteed and that's of course not a reason NOT to try. Still: work-life balance!
- Getting to the frontier and then filling the gaps is a solid strategy, yep. As per above: make sure you work on something people would pay for, though.
- When to be earnest and when to be [faux] sophisticated is generally not clear and cut. There are events during which you have to be a bit posh or nobody would take you seriously, and sadly those are often the events that might be life or death sentence for your new business idea. I think us the tech nerds are earnest way too much and too often, and don't know when to be "sophisticated". Me putting a formal shirt and pants and pretending to know more about a field than I really did, did net me money that my impostor syndrome screamed that I didn't deserve (but years later, with the objectivity that a brutal hindsight can give you, I absolutely did).
- Ownership of one's work is a great advice, probably the best one in the article... until you realize most startup CEOs understand this and will give you +30% more salary than everyone else because they love having somebody on a stable wage who does 80% of their work and does not ask for percentages of the Series A/B/C/D tranches. Nah, thanks. As we say on the Balkans (butchered translation): "The quality of the music depends on the quantity of the tip". I'm done taking your cause so seriously that I don't have time for my wife. Dangle $25k+ a month in front of my face and we'll talk.
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So my TL;DR is: yes, compound knowledge and work on what you like and try to make it a side hustle, absolutely. Put on some suit when you get to events. Don't always be super humble, that by itself can be a turn off and no you cannot afford to gamble your future on this so yes, sometimes be posh and sophisticated. It frakkin helps with some people! And I don't care if you don't want to be associated with them; many of them are gatekeepers of wealth so, deal with it.
I'll agree: passion shines through and wins people over. It's not enough, though. "Making it" requires making good decisions on multiple lanes.