"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."
I very much agree with this sentiment. That's how you find good problems to solve. In general, we don't teach enough about "problem finding" which is arguably harder and more important than problem solving.
It's not exactly play, it's more like focused exploration. Eg Columbus setting sail without knowing what he would find. You wouldn't say he was playing but you would say he was discovering.
> 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.
It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application is about intersections, and the combinatorics brings novelty right to your nose.
Pick a random combination of tech, domain, and theory and it’s unlikely to have been explored. It’s unlikely to be useful, but that’s what makes it exploration and not farming.
It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works.
I really believe that this is the best time to be a polymath, or at least have a broad spectrum of knowledge and references to look into and pull information from; and that being a true generalist that can dive as deep as needed enables you to build great stuff. But maybe that’s just my experience.
I second that, I feel like right now, with the rise of ML tools in audio production, demucs, audio to midi, voice clones etc, the rise of image generation and text. Coupled with some coding skills and interests in many different fields I could not get bored in a million years because there can be so much to jump into and learn/create/explore
> It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works.
It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well:
> 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.
The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other.
Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.
> The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest.
Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this while they're discussing a specific object level problem and see how that goes.
I don't really follow. You've quoted a few statements and I also don't know what you mean by a specific object level problem.
Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too hungry.
There are certain complexities that only seem (currently) accessible from an abstract state of mind.
For example, people (including right here on HN) will often enthusiastically agree that they are subjective to various cognitive flaws when discussing a psychology paper on the subject, but this fact typically cannot be realized or even considered when discussing specific political matters. Ironically, genuine intelligence and knowledge often seems to make the problem even worse.
And of course, all of this theory is subject to the theory itself!
Re. "this is the best time to be a polymath". I was noticing something like that. For a while it became impossible to know or do "science" ("philosophy", was it?) as a whole. Too broad, too deep. That was not the end of the polymath but it was the end of truly broad expertise in one individual. Then the net in general made so much info available painlessly. (Much faster to dig deep on a narrow issue and switch issues - than say, even with a large academic library.) So that now, it's still not possible to master the forefront of tech or science on a very broad front, but it is possible to dig deep as needed to address this or that problem in the pursuit of what is now just about always a multidisciplinary project.
With the very present danger that many feel that a couple youtube videos is as deep as they ever need to go.
Being able to gauge how deep and broad you have to go for each difficulty you encounter has become an important skill. But polymath seems very possible.
Yes! I've found this approach very useful with my own projects. I might not be out here inventing C++ or Linux, but it's actually not too hard to find projects where you can apply well known computing techniques or technologies to a new domain to do something truly new.
I think this is really motivational because doing something new and showing the world is really fun!
Some categories are explored or unexplored because either they didn't have a compelling, defining entrant like smart watches or they're Chindōgu like flying cars and VR.
Build something that's currently painful you know there's a definite need for and people would gladly pay money for. Solving a burning pain is far more compelling than incrementally better with the gotcha of introducing the risk of change.
The biggest mistake people make is not letting things soak in a lean, passive income marketable way. They'll build something, shake the trees for customers for a little while, and then turn it off 3 months later when they're not instant internet billionaires. Not working would be 15 years later <$10k/year net profit. Let it simmer with as little engineering investment as possible. Never waste time on churn for churn's sake, or effort that doesn't add end-user UX value.
> Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.
I spend eight hours+ a day supporting my addiction to food and shelter. Why would I spend my free time working toward “greatness” instead of doing hobbies I enjoy and spending time with friends and family?
Any other time I have I’m spending working out and training for runs - neither of which I will ever be great at.
Sure, but also sometimes you waste your life working thinking you kick ass left and right, till you arrive at certain point, ie retirement and realize you actually wasted your life, and no amount of money can change that. Sure, you have a some freedom ahead of you, but only as much as your health, finances and other circumstances allow you to, and this is usually less than people project earlier.
Plus family happens now for many of us, and not later. Kids need their parents, not their money. Its a grave mistake that hurts badly your closest ones for life to prioritize excellence in 1 direction over everything else, especially them.
I'll always have endless amount of respect of people raising their kids properly themselves into mature, happy adults who know what they want in life and go for it, even if it means they just worked to live. I don't have even a cubic picometer of respect for folks who end up doing the opposite, regardless of what they achieved professionally. This world needs new generation of balanced adults much much more than some search optimized by 0.1% or some marginally improved social graph monetization.
Of course not everybody wants, needs or can create a family, that's fine but another topic, then I agree with you more.
After staying at a job for too long by 2008 and barely surviving the recession at a startup until 2012 and also getting married the same year and (gladly) becoming the father to my then 9 and 14 year old stepsons, I changed jobs six times and pushed myself to get ahead until 2020 and falling into a mid level position at BigTech (cloud consulting department).
I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”.
I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely.
I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different:
I found it much better to work “overtime” at my day job to learn new to me technologies and do POCs if the company is not using the technology or to volunteer for assignments based on something I don’t know well and put in extra time to meet the deadline.
One reason is that I can seek feedback from coworkers and polish the POC. I also can take advantage of infrastructure that may be cost prohibitive to test something at scale based on real world usage.
The other reason is that for my next job, it’s much more impressive to say I spearheaded work for a company than a hobbyist side project.
Yes I know one advantage of your own side project is that you can show your code. But most of the time the hiring manager isn’t going to take time to look at your work anyway.
I have personally been fortunate enough to have unfettered Admin access to an AWS account on someone else’s dime between two jobs for the past five years where I could experiment and learn on the job.
I certainly don't think you have to, and I don't think that's what Graham is saying, either. For those who are ambitious/do seek "greatness" in some form, though, I think this is a good article.
There’s literally a note that says the text assumes you’re very ambitious. If you have no desire to work towards some definition of “greatness”, I assume that you’re not ambitious, and the text doesn’t apply to you.
Which is ok! You don’t need to be ambitious, but it also means you shouldn’t take this essay so personally.
Ambition is a pretty ambiguous term for what I think—here—means “A strong yearning for a type of success characterised by western capitalist-individualistic schema of wealth and status.” Cool if you want that I guess. But it’s narrow af.
Can you give me an example of a very ambitious goal that doesn’t fall under the western definition you posted, and yet, can not benefit from the article?
> Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire … his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure".[64] Kafka visited brothels for most of his adult life[65][66][67] and was interested in pornography.[63] In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company. A week after the meeting at Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:
Isn’t that the point though? Do you think on his death bed when he looked back at his relatively short life he took solace in the fact that years in the future some random people admired his “greatness” even though his personal life was a mess?
I don't pretend to have any idea of his interior life but I do think that if he invested his time in being great at his job rather than a passion project with no real practical purpose he would be forgotten. I like being a dad but I don't think everyone has to do that or aspire to it.
> The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
No reason why. PG isn't writing to you. If you've got hobbies that make you happy, relationships you love, and runs that keep you healthy, I'm sure PG would tell you not to change anything.
I think the idea here would be to manage your manager so you can tie what work interests you into your job whenever possible, implied by this section:
"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."
as for time with family and friends, I'd say you can't have it all. It's a personal decision on whether you want to achieve "greatness" and what you are willing to sacrifice for it
I enjoy working on my side projects more so than other hobbies, I have fun with them, it's not "work" in the sense as I think you mean. I'm not working towards "greatness" as much as I have ideas for projects that I think should exist and then want to bring them into existence.
I truly and deeply find my chosen projects interesting and stimulating in a way other things aren't.
I don't view work as a bad thing, with the caveat that it has to be productive and interesting work that goes towards something I think is impactful where the definition of impactful is personal.
I'm not saying your way is incorrect or bad or anything, just providing the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time working and how I feel about it.
If your personal projects are "work" then yes do not bother. These are my creative outlet and where I get to enjoy coding again. My day job is massive .net/angular/sql projects that are just meh.
What's your complaint? That this article is not targeted at you? The article is titled "how to do great work". If you aren't interested in doing great work then you are not the target audience.
Does HN really think this? 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem. None of us are the target audience is this article
The words you wrote make sense but are filled with so many assumptions and beliefs that I actually don't understand what you are trying to say.
For example
> 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem
What does it even mean to have a negative impact on the "world"? Do you mean a negative impact on humanity? Also, where does the 99% number come from.
> None of us are the target audience is this article
Do you think humanity would be worse off with more people working hard to create and discover things to improve their own lives and the lives of others?
Anyway, your comment is filled with cliche cynicism. Cynicism is a cheap way to appear smart. I think people learned it from TV when they watched tv shows like House or Sherlock.
I am amazed how many people take their fortunes for granted and then preach about how they "worked harder than anyone else hence deserve much more than the others". You have to be incredibly lucky to get to that point. In case of chronic illness (like brain fog) you are pretty much destined to fail.
I’m also amazed how people will take a self-improvement article like this, and take it so personally. Like yes, pg was lucky to have a lot of things work out for them, but that doesn’t mean his advice here (which encompasses more than just “work hard”) is invalid for everyone just because it’s invalid for some people.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s a survival bias for all winners. But the pendulum swings too far if you believe you can’t learn anything at all from winners.
Can you say that, for all winners of any field, there’s no correlation between the winners and the losers that is not attributable to luck?
I think there are probably some persistent differences between the superachievers and the normals but I am very skeptical in the ability of the former to teach (and of the latter to learn from the former).
Yep, get yourself a bs job first while implicitly getting yourself stroke, cancer and diabetes from it to pay for utilities and a few gallons of water per month and only then do great work.
This is a common attitude that I think overlooks a big part of the benefits of secure transport.
If all your traffic is TLS then you have a number of benefits, including principally
1) Noone can MITM the traffic. They can't insert anything in stream or do anything else funky that they absolutely can with clear traffic if they own your route somehow.
2) The amount of information leakage is less due to chaffing. Consider a situation where all your sensitive traffic is HTTPS and all your other traffic is HTTP. In that world a bad person monitoring your traffic may not know the details of your sensitive traffic, but they know that the metadata of any HTTPS indicates sensitive traffic. If everything is HTTPS on the other hand literally any of the metadata could be sensitive or non-sensitive and they have no way of telling. The more non-sensitive traffic is encrypted the greater the benefit of this protection.
So given those are pretty significant benefits for visitors to your site it's nice to provide the option of HTTPS. On a seperate note, the amount of CPU cycles consumed by serving HTTPS these days is really trivial especially if you use a EC cert or similar.
Some telecoms carriers inject their own Javascript into every HTTP page.
I've seen some of that break my pages for some users. It went unnoticed for months until someone complained that "my" Javascript was badly written and breaking something. After a difficult round of conversations where each of us assumed the other was seeing the same page contents, we compared source and found the culprit was injected by the carrier.
I quite like being able to do stuff simply. There's a lot of moaning as to what happened to the old internet where you could just put something up, why does it all end up gate keeped on medium, facebook and the like, and then when someone just puts some text on the web everyone moans that it isn't encrypted like medium, facebook and the like.
I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have:
- enough experience and context to do great work, and
- the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications
It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE job. The choices he made affected where I am now, but he definitely made some sacrifices on my behalf.
I think people can do great work at any age. Sometimes newcomers look at a long-standing problem and discover or design a new approach that is substantially better. Other times established experts can leverage the breadth of their experience to develop a better solution or offering. For me, the key elements are the desire to create something of value or make a contribution, a willingness to collaborate to extend what you can accomplish, and the self-discipline to work hard for extended periods of time.
have you got any kids?
I'm 30 and one of my biggest worries is that starting a family will mean I will never get the time to do great things.
I also got a fair share of skills under my belt and a lot of motivation. My relationship always ends to taking time away from my projects however and that's only going to get worse once there's a kid 5 years down the road.
Then again Bach had a lot of kids, and look at the body of his work.
There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely.
In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."
I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it.
Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup…
There's an unspoken aspect of the word "important" here — important to you, or important to the world (society, etc)?
From Hamming:
"I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things."
It seems he is talking about the important to the world aspect. He wants to have a big impact on the world, and be where the action is. The goal is to make a name for yourself, or to at least have a hand in the next big transformations.
But there is also the "important to you" aspect. In Hamming's case, those two notions of importance align. But not so for everyone.
Quoting again:
"I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another."
So, he is happiest when working on problems that have big "important" implications for the world. Good for him; I'm glad he discovered that about himself, and followed what made him happy.
So now for my actual point: I'd encourage a person to actually first and foremost focus on what is important to them personally — what makes them happy — rather than what seems "important" from some external perspective.
I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy. But to put that choice on a pedestal as though it is the True Goal — to put "important to society" above "important to oneself" is putting the cart before the horse. It's how you get a bunch of unhappy people chasing after other people's dreams.
It's actually somewhat touched upon in TFA, with:
"The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious."
Indeed — like Hamming was. But not everyone is, and not everyone needs to be to be happy. I am just slightly irked by our somehow reserving the word "great" for ambitious people's accomplishments.
Right now, the audio tech/software niche is abuzz with ideas and attempts related to using transformer technology within the field. Music generation, new synthesis techniques, generative DSP and more.
According to the field, viewed from some altitude, these the "important (to the world)" things.
But for myself, with 25+ years in the field, I couldn't give a rat's arse about any of it. Absolutely not "important (to me)".
Am I ambitious (still) ? I think so. But I'm also picky about where I'm willing to put my energy.
Not the industry, but the rush-to-"AI" is certainly over-hyped and displays a very shallow understanding of the role of art of any form for most human beings.
The older I get the more I think this is fine, and more or less the way of the world.
Let the young ones expend their energy and drive trying to do all kinds of weird, pointless and occassionally very useful shit while we keep the world running.
>I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy.
In my 37 years of experience: people do want to be where the action is, but many people who are the main examples of 'being at the action' already were at a location where the action happened to end up. I.e., people working for a long time on an 'obscure' problem interesting to them suddenly see that 'obscure' problem become important and fall into success (think of all the CS people working on DL/ANNs in the 90s. I don't think Yann LeCunn was a known name in the 90s).
The tragedy is that it's very hard to predict where the action will be. Literature is full of people who lucked into that position, and obviously ignores the millions who were where the action never ended up.
With some experience you can shift your focus to where you think the action will be: it's probably best not to run after the money, but walk towards it.
> 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.
I’m 53 and some of my greatest joys still come from well executed Lego builds. Wonder if I’m stuck in a rut :/
I “rediscovered” LEGO in my early 30’s. Turns out when you’re an adult, LEGO isn’t that expensive and you can just buy a set. Walk into a store and walk out with a brand new set!
It’s an amazing and dangerous freedom. 3 short years later and I have more sets than space.
Now all I need is the time and space I had as a kid to treat LEGO as a tool for invention. Build stuff out of imagination, not a blueprint. Then again, as an adult, I could also get a bunch of power tools and “play with LEGOs” without using actual LEGOs … hmmmm
I used to be thrilled with big sets because they were… well, big.
Now, I find Lego building relaxing with the occasional delight at a technique the master builders came up with to create some sort of texture or shape using those bricks.
Some of my greatest joys are cooking a meal and doing the lawn. They are so much different than writing software. There's a start, an end, and a clear set of steps in between where you can easily see your progress. When you're done, you can step back and admire your work, and show it to others.
Do you ever refactor your LEGO builds into new builds? Do you prefer kits or building something of your own design from generic sets?
I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.
Perhaps I am a bit too cynical here, but I think that it is harder to criticize a long-winded article than a short bold statement -- thereby making it slightly more comfortable to publish. For a critical reader, it takes a lot of effort to read the entire article, then check that its flaws are not nullified by some additional arguments, etc.
> "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."
I scrolled up and down quickly through the essay, and the above was the very first thing I randomly read.
Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find:
Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples.
I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
By the way, and only because your comment suggests you care about detail and will find this valuable: it’s “pored over” unless there was a liquid you were dumping on them.
It’s hard to not be lazy in today’s corporate environments. You simply don’t get much for putting in the extra effort.
Hard work needs incentives. Companies want you to light that fire yourself so they don’t have to pay extra. It’s why I’m not curious about anything work-related (plus it’s hard to be interested in CRUD apps after a decade). Even if I was, I’d give the benefits to myself and not my company.
Hah, and make sure to be a genius with a workaholic attitude, otherwise the 100 people that are like that will make the groundbreaking discoveries a few years before you.
The more people alive and able to work on research, the higher the bar gets. For most people, implementing existing bleeding edge knowledge is already an achievement.
Well put. What the article (and others like it) lacks is the fallback, the plan B, the exception handling.
There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and end up with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser.
So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99th guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries.
Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".
It feels like this takes a very narrow definition of greatness which is more aligned to innovation and "What will make you famous" or "What will be commercially successful".
From plant life and human health all the way up to nation states, there are lots of people doing great work just making sure that things keep running smoothly.
There are also lots of innovations in keeping things running smoothly. And the wonks in those fields recognize those innovations and those innovative folks do tend to enjoy _some_ level of fame or notoriety (if not at a general public level).
IMO he’s talking about innovation and creation as “great work”.
Sure there’s vast numbers of people doing great work that isn’t innovation and creation.
You’re dismissing the insights here too quickly if you’re just wanting to find fault with the intersection of the term “great work” with all the people in the world doing all sorts of different types of great work.
This is about creation and innovation as great work.
Both are necessary. I think the difference is that Group A (keep things running) without Group B (explore new territory) would have kept us in the stone ages.
However, that is not to understate their importance: a humanity consisting entirely of Group B would be much more unstable, and possibly have gone extinct.
Could it be possible that there is also overlap between groups A and B, and the interdependence is what fuels societal progress more than “it’s all group B”?
A tortured analogy could be line cooks and dishwashers, the line cooks made all the tasty food, but the kitchen would crash and burn without the dishwashers and busboys and prep cooks.
This is contrived. You can do a good job bagging groceries, but no society will ever elevate that to "greatness". Colloquially it's either in reference to mastery, or prolific/high-impact work as society is concerned.
great: immense; notable; momentous; exalted; grand
If you can dig ditches faster than anyone else, then you're a great ditch digger, and you're doing great work. Similarly, if you're a surgeon who saves much more lives than the average, you're doing great work. Etc.
> It feels like this takes a very narrow definition of greatness which is more aligned to innovation and "What will make you famous" or "What will be commercially successful".
The guy invests money in and profits from other people doing "great work". So it shouldn't be too shocking his primary focus is on the commercial or the innovative.
"Follow your interest/passion" - is such an easy advice.
However in some societies / economies, it's simply not possible. Where I'm from (India), where a majority of my generation has to lift their families from money problems, there's no option of following passion. There's only "learn/do what makes money". It's not entirely a bad thing though.
For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc).
The other alternative is to spend precious younger years of my time in search of "passion". This happens too, but mostly from folks who already have financial freedom to explore and experiment, who are relatively scarce in some societies.
I'm surprised Paul gets upvoted so much, no matter what platitude he serves up. His writing is good for a software engineer, but doesn't hold a candle to a capable journalist or writer. Basically it feels like you're reading a documentation page about the last idea he's had in the shower.
> "Follow your interest/passion" - is such an easy advice.
> For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc).
No one said you first had to sit down, ponder hundreds of life options and then choose your passion. Passion might also come to you as you progress in whatever field you're in. Put differently, you might as well follow your natural inclinations (whatever you find somewhat interesting in the moment) or submit to life/financial constraints (choose a promising career path), and as you become better and better at what you do, develop a passion for it.
India is essentially at the development stage matching that of XIX century Europe and the US. Back then, nobody was following passions, and everyone was just starting practical businesses and investments which will (hopefully) bring in some money. Now it's India's turn to go through that phase.
So lewisjoe, maybe one way to address this problem would be a fellowship that came with an extra stipend that would keep your family afloat? How much extra would that have to be, in India for a year, or would the required amount be far too variable to estimate?
(Also, the essay did indicate that if you're taking care of someone then his standard advice needs adjustment.)
I haven't finished this yet, will take more than one sitting to digest, but I'm already 90% sure I'm going to disagree with this one a lot.
I like to validate people's advice by playing it out in hypotheticals, so let's take some random fields people may think they want to be great at, and apply this advice: chess, piano, philosophy, quantum physics, soccer. I think it's self-evident that his algorithm isn't suited for the wide set of cases.
Here's my alternative proposal:
- If you're interested in a field, first ask, what % of people who dedicate their life to that field get any kind of fame/wealth/recognition (or whatever greatness means to you). So if we're talking chess, and you're already 14 and can't play, you have a 0% chance of getting to the top 100. Or if it's being a famous writer good to know what your base odds are.
- Look up people who RECENTLY (within 30 years) succeeded in this field and look for patterns. I know 0 famous philosophers of the last 30 years, but the closest ones would probably be youtube philosophers. So maybe that's the current meta.
- Look at the power-structures that determine success in the field (soccer is a fair game, art is judged by a few powerful tastemakers, news may be judged by clicks, some academia is judged by splash), decide if you are okay with the system and think you can excel in this system. Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear."
That's all I got for now, it's his blog post not mine.
> Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear."
I think this is terrible advice for doing great work, probably good advice for doing shallow work that gets you paid. Great does not (always) mean wealthy, popular or well liked. Plenty of writers went through life with people telling them they sucked and then eventually people got it. Look at Charles Bukowski for example.
I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure you see what I'm saying.
If you want to maximize your chances of being a great writer, obviously write. But if you want to maximize your chances of being great period, then you need to decide if writing the next great american novel is the course you want to work toward. IMO you are an order of magnitude more likely to become famous/great from youtube than from writing, even if your best skill is novel-writing.
Sure there are people who persevered at writing at made it work, but also probably more people persevered and wasted their lives on writing than most other pursuits.
I quite like to read an article like this from time to time, because it can be motivating when your ambitions are low.
However, I also believe that it can be detrimental and even lead to burn-out or depression if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success. This seems like a recipe for disaster.
Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? The concepts of "thrownness" and "survivorship bias" might be relevant to look up in this context. Is it possible to train curiosity, ambition, intelligence, passion, perseverance, if you did not grow up with it?
I think that it shouldn't lead to burnout if you keep the "play" or "interest" aspect. It's not "I have to find something at the frontier, so I have to pursue this until I get there." It's "I'm interested in this, and so I'm pursuing it because I want to."
> Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident?
Yes and no. Yes, they stumbled on a promising gap by accident. No, it's not pure chance. Their odds go way up by being out there stumbling around, looking at things they find interesting.
> if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success.
What's the point of motivation of you don't believe what you do matters? The antitode to these kind of arguments is always to bring it to a closer level. Can you control how clean your house is with work? Would hard work help you tend to a farm better? Where does it stop helping you?
>Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident?
to some degree, but it's not like you can luck your way into writing an app by slapping the keyboard. The degree of success might differ, but generally there's some kind of barrier of entry in terms of the work to learn the base skill needed. Right place at the right time is a thing, but plenty of people miss out because they don't even try at all
Anecdotally: I think of myself as one of those people who is by nature driven to do great work. Tbd if it happens. But in my life I see most other people as having written off almost everything I find interesting, all the places where it seems like there is great work to be done if one digs hard enough.
It seems obvious that someone like me, who believes this and is looking and working everywhere, will be the type of person who does the great work, rather than someone who thinks that, ah well, it's probably an accident that others found things and they didn't. Because, seriously.. The gaps are everywhere! in everything! Some of us can scarcely go a day without having an idea that seems to have huge potential and it's a question of deciding what to focus on and how far to go. The problem is never thinking of something that could be great work to do... it's picking which one.
So basically, strong disagree, it's no accident at all.
That said the main reason everyone is writing off all the potential is, yes, lack of ambition, lack of curiosity, lack of perseverance, etc. Can those habits be unlearned? Dunno. Probably. I think most people are 'followers' at heart, and to imagine doing something truly novel is to imagine, ultimately, not trying to do what they're told, not trying to be safe. And the thought gives them intense anxiety so they explain a hundred reasons why they're right, why nothing can be done. Well, from my perspective that's just a matter of perspective.
As usual, Ancient Greeks had it figured out already. Aristoteles wrote: "make war to have pace. Do business to enjoy leisure". That's the natural proclivity of 99% human beings. The other 1%, for whatever internal reason, does work for work's sake, and is often pushing civilization forward.
People with high-paying careers rarely choose to radically reduce their work hours after achieving financial security. I don't think the idea of doing great work often enters the equation.
Perhaps I have worded my argument somewhat too poetically. You say that you are driven to do great work _by nature_. That is what I would call "by accident", as you had very little say in that nature.
Pushing the argument a bit further: When you are so lucky to have what it takes to do great things, would you be able to _not_ do great things?
I feel like I’m doing my greatest project at the moment.
I enjoy PGs work but I’m not a fanboy.
However in this case it’s uncanny that the path of this work I am doing is precisely as he has described here.
I kinda knew already I was making something special but it’s almost like PG has been leaning over my shoulder watching my thinking and watching my work process over years.
In fact this article is “great work” because actually distilling the essence of, and describing, great work would have been incredibly hard.
The article describes the process it must have taken to write the article. Kinda recursive.
I feel the same way, and I think it's really nice read for someone who's a decade or so into their career and has been head down chasing their interests im obscurity. The privelege of doing that is its own reward but it's easy to see why this approach leads to great outcomes.
P.S.Why do you feel the need to say you're not a fanboy? Are you assuming that a positive statement about his work implies that you are and that you afraid of that impression ?
This is a good article, but I don't think it acknowledges the challenges and dangers that come with working in disruptive technology fields. There are certain fields where great work is welcomed by all, and although their may be a competition between interested parties over who gets to control (i.e. profit from) the fruits of your work, nobody is interested in actively suppressing technological progress in that field. For example, nobody I know of wants to suppress the development of faster computer chips - although the US government doesn't want China to have access to the latest ASML process technology.
There are many fields where this is not true - e.g. neither Apple nor Microsoft were thrilled about the development of the open-source Linux operating system for decades. Similarly, renewable energy technology funding has been actively suppressed at the federal funding level in the USA by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel sector since the 1970s, as even a cursory examination of DOE budgets will reveal. Decentralized robust energy grids not under the control of large investor conglomerates are another touchy subject.
Nevertheless, it's possible to do great work in these fields but only if you understand the forces arrayed against you in great detail. In some cases, making progress might require fairly radical solutions. For renewable energy development, moving to a country whose economy is not based on fossil fuel exports and which already is interested in replacing fossil fuel imports with renewables might be the optimal solution, particularly if the kind of work you have in mind requires expensive technological support. Otherwise, you'll have to accept shoestring budgets and active opposition to your work.
There are a rather large number of fields where these issues arise. Academic institutions have largely been corporatized in the USA, and one side-effect is the gutting of environmental contaminant research programs that measured things like heavy metals, organochlorine contaminants, etc. in water, plants and soil. Similarly, research progams that focused on the potential uses of out-of-patent medicinal compounds were eliminated because the private pharmaceutical partners of universities were only interested in new patentable compounds. Of course, there are fields where you'll get lots of support - development of military drone technology, say.
This kind of situation isn't a new phenomena. Historically, technological stagnation is associated with the rise of autocratic monopoly power in all civilizations. The printing press was a threat to the established order in medieval Europe, the electric lightbulb was a threat to the kerosene lamp and oil business (note it took FDR's New Deal to electrify Rural America), and so on. Therefore, if you plan on doing great work in a disruptive technology field, don't be surprised when you run into headwinds of various sorts. Such forces can often be overcome (Linux eventually succeeded on a large scale), but pretending they don't exist is the worst mistake you can make. Understanding those opposing forces in detail is going to be a necessary first step.
hmm… depends what you consider great. last time i checked companies you helped, one of them was Rappi.
they came to Brazil and basically destroyed the bicycle courier scene with anti-competitive practices on other companies just because they were rolling on money.
after them, it is pretty rare to see someone working with deliveries and bicycles… and they are more silent and ecological than any motor-cycle or car. and actually smart considering the amount of damage noise and pollution from motor does.
anyway, considering something great is a sensible topic. specially if you taking the amount of money made as a important factor.
maybe that is why the world is full of people digging CEOs status on top of zombie-like consumers that can not think for themselves
As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty.
Then there’s this:
> 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.
> [18] 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.
First, anything can be either literally or metaphorically described as a religion, so that makes this an empty principle, since it either covers nothing or everything or both. (“Cheesecake is my religion.” Etc.)
Second, the footnote is literally impenetrable to me. Honestly. I can discern no coherent meaning. That everyone could adopt a principle or belief does not mean it must be false just because everyone uniformly and indistinguishably believes it and therefore nobody disbelieves it. Whether people can be distinguished from one another with respect to some belief (say, that in base 10 arithmetic that 1+1=2) has nothing to do with the truth vel non of that belief.
And honestly, I am genuinely struggling to fathom a mind that could not only believe that statement but believe it so deeply that they breezily announce it as obviously true. So it’s funny that this is the next paragraph:
> 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?
The only, and I mean, literally only, interpretation that I can come up with is that PG is using “religion” and “religious” in enough different ways that when he mixes them, as it seems to do here, he doesn’t notice. Or he means them ONLY in the sense of “too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think.” But I have a very strong suspicion that he is definitely not using them only in that way.
It’s more a tone issue. He’s a skilled enough writer to come across as sincere and well-meaning. Whether he is or not I have no clue, I don’t know the man.
Traditionally, footnotes are straightforward explanations of terms or passages. Tech writers, in their grandiosity, have perverted them to contain randomass tangents that no one really cares about.
Footnotes are mainly straightforward-enough glosses and references, but there have always been digressions (and quite often sniping) in there too. The C19 has some real specimens.
I like footnotes, or in this case maybe we should call "endnotes". David Foster Wallace was known to use them a lot, sometimes he would put footnotes in footnotes.
Whereas legal opinions use them either as a citation dump (known as “collecting cases”), as a place to bracket issues that are not being decided, or as a place to put a substantive response to a separate opinion in the case (if you’re an appellate court).
> [18] 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.
I think what's going on here is the theory that the purpose of religion is to create a trusted in-group separated from the out-group, with rules that make it difficult to casually join. [1] If you start from that premise, PG's footnote makes sense. But this ignores the fact that the largest religions really want as many members as possible and would be delighted if everyone followed their principles.
This is actually helpful. So, he’s saying, religions really exist for this social function of group formation/identity. Thus, we know that the principles they proclaim, which tend to be universal claims of truth, are wrong, since if those principles were true, they would defeat the real purpose of religion. Therefore, one good way to find ideas to explore is to question the principles or bracket them and see what you can do without them.
That does make what he’s saying there cohere better. Of course, what he’s saying turns entirely on the ambiguity he’s playing on (which I suspected): religion in the sense of concrete historical/social human practices and religion in the sense of identifying strongly with and thus not questioning your principles. Never a good idea to hang your hat on the coatrack of suggestive language games. Or, you know, outrageous bullshit.
I almost think it makes it worse, finding a coherent meaning—-which is so silly.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadI very much agree with this sentiment. That's how you find good problems to solve. In general, we don't teach enough about "problem finding" which is arguably harder and more important than problem solving.
I'd call that mostly luck lmao
Took courage to go to the end of the world, for sure, but still god damn luck too
It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application is about intersections, and the combinatorics brings novelty right to your nose.
Pick a random combination of tech, domain, and theory and it’s unlikely to have been explored. It’s unlikely to be useful, but that’s what makes it exploration and not farming.
I really believe that this is the best time to be a polymath, or at least have a broad spectrum of knowledge and references to look into and pull information from; and that being a true generalist that can dive as deep as needed enables you to build great stuff. But maybe that’s just my experience.
It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well:
> 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.
The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other.
Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.
Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this while they're discussing a specific object level problem and see how that goes.
Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too hungry.
For example, people (including right here on HN) will often enthusiastically agree that they are subjective to various cognitive flaws when discussing a psychology paper on the subject, but this fact typically cannot be realized or even considered when discussing specific political matters. Ironically, genuine intelligence and knowledge often seems to make the problem even worse.
And of course, all of this theory is subject to the theory itself!
If you haven't read this (not LLM related), I highly recommend it: https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.p...
With the very present danger that many feel that a couple youtube videos is as deep as they ever need to go.
Being able to gauge how deep and broad you have to go for each difficulty you encounter has become an important skill. But polymath seems very possible.
I think this is really motivational because doing something new and showing the world is really fun!
thank you!
Sure corn grows in more places now. Because they warmed up - a concern of its own. They'll not stop warming up. Witness https://globalnews.ca/news/9761043/dry-spring-southern-alber...
Build something that's currently painful you know there's a definite need for and people would gladly pay money for. Solving a burning pain is far more compelling than incrementally better with the gotcha of introducing the risk of change.
The biggest mistake people make is not letting things soak in a lean, passive income marketable way. They'll build something, shake the trees for customers for a little while, and then turn it off 3 months later when they're not instant internet billionaires. Not working would be 15 years later <$10k/year net profit. Let it simmer with as little engineering investment as possible. Never waste time on churn for churn's sake, or effort that doesn't add end-user UX value.
I spend eight hours+ a day supporting my addiction to food and shelter. Why would I spend my free time working toward “greatness” instead of doing hobbies I enjoy and spending time with friends and family?
Any other time I have I’m spending working out and training for runs - neither of which I will ever be great at.
Plus family happens now for many of us, and not later. Kids need their parents, not their money. Its a grave mistake that hurts badly your closest ones for life to prioritize excellence in 1 direction over everything else, especially them.
I'll always have endless amount of respect of people raising their kids properly themselves into mature, happy adults who know what they want in life and go for it, even if it means they just worked to live. I don't have even a cubic picometer of respect for folks who end up doing the opposite, regardless of what they achieved professionally. This world needs new generation of balanced adults much much more than some search optimized by 0.1% or some marginally improved social graph monetization.
Of course not everybody wants, needs or can create a family, that's fine but another topic, then I agree with you more.
I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”.
I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely.
I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
I’ve never been happier not trying to be “great” and being “content”
One reason is that I can seek feedback from coworkers and polish the POC. I also can take advantage of infrastructure that may be cost prohibitive to test something at scale based on real world usage.
The other reason is that for my next job, it’s much more impressive to say I spearheaded work for a company than a hobbyist side project.
Yes I know one advantage of your own side project is that you can show your code. But most of the time the hiring manager isn’t going to take time to look at your work anyway.
I have personally been fortunate enough to have unfettered Admin access to an AWS account on someone else’s dime between two jobs for the past five years where I could experiment and learn on the job.
Which is ok! You don’t need to be ambitious, but it also means you shouldn’t take this essay so personally.
How would you define it?
The article says “very” ambitious. So there’s no contradiction here
you don't have to. But then don't wonder why you never achieve greatness. Of course, life isn't about greatness.
> Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire … his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure".[64] Kafka visited brothels for most of his adult life[65][66][67] and was interested in pornography.[63] In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company. A week after the meeting at Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:
No reason why. PG isn't writing to you. If you've got hobbies that make you happy, relationships you love, and runs that keep you healthy, I'm sure PG would tell you not to change anything.
"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."
as for time with family and friends, I'd say you can't have it all. It's a personal decision on whether you want to achieve "greatness" and what you are willing to sacrifice for it
I truly and deeply find my chosen projects interesting and stimulating in a way other things aren't.
I don't view work as a bad thing, with the caveat that it has to be productive and interesting work that goes towards something I think is impactful where the definition of impactful is personal.
I'm not saying your way is incorrect or bad or anything, just providing the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time working and how I feel about it.
You're totally welcome for the sage advice. Have a nice day.
haha.
For example
> 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem
What does it even mean to have a negative impact on the "world"? Do you mean a negative impact on humanity? Also, where does the 99% number come from.
> None of us are the target audience is this article
Do you think humanity would be worse off with more people working hard to create and discover things to improve their own lives and the lives of others?
Anyway, your comment is filled with cliche cynicism. Cynicism is a cheap way to appear smart. I think people learned it from TV when they watched tv shows like House or Sherlock.
- Don't have any chronic diseases or pain that will distract or dull your attention
- Have a stable source of income or enough wealth to let you try and fail at a lot of things
- Have stable family and friends
- Don't have optimism beaten out of you at a young age
etc
Fine as a motivational material but that's all this is.
Can you say that, for all winners of any field, there’s no correlation between the winners and the losers that is not attributable to luck?
Are you saying superachievers can’t teach others to be superachievers, or are you saying that superachievers can’t teach non achievers to be achievers
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here
If all your traffic is TLS then you have a number of benefits, including principally
1) Noone can MITM the traffic. They can't insert anything in stream or do anything else funky that they absolutely can with clear traffic if they own your route somehow.
2) The amount of information leakage is less due to chaffing. Consider a situation where all your sensitive traffic is HTTPS and all your other traffic is HTTP. In that world a bad person monitoring your traffic may not know the details of your sensitive traffic, but they know that the metadata of any HTTPS indicates sensitive traffic. If everything is HTTPS on the other hand literally any of the metadata could be sensitive or non-sensitive and they have no way of telling. The more non-sensitive traffic is encrypted the greater the benefit of this protection.
So given those are pretty significant benefits for visitors to your site it's nice to provide the option of HTTPS. On a seperate note, the amount of CPU cycles consumed by serving HTTPS these days is really trivial especially if you use a EC cert or similar.
I've seen some of that break my pages for some users. It went unnoticed for months until someone complained that "my" Javascript was badly written and breaking something. After a difficult round of conversations where each of us assumed the other was seeing the same page contents, we compared source and found the culprit was injected by the carrier.
So we changed to HTTPS to fix that problem.
I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have:
- enough experience and context to do great work, and
- the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications
It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE job. The choices he made affected where I am now, but he definitely made some sacrifices on my behalf.
And ignoring all self doubt and imposter feelings has made my career way less stressful.
Great work and your craftsmanship/experience/wisdom/capabilities are interrelated.
Being able to do great work is partly a function of your ability to work.
Whss as t does this entail, business context?
It always takes longer than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
This is IMO impossible without experimentation and doing stupid stuff during the 20s.
I just turned 35 and only starting out on the best work of my life in the shape of offering something of value except for just my time at work prior.
Then again Bach had a lot of kids, and look at the body of his work.
Limited time makes it a lot easier to decide what to focus on.
Then I realized that the funny part is that PG has already linked to Hamming's talk on his site (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), and mentioned it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048).
There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely.
In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."
I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it.
Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup…
(Hamming’s talk has been shared countless times here and this feels like PG’s contribution to a similar idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778036)).
From Hamming:
"I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things."
It seems he is talking about the important to the world aspect. He wants to have a big impact on the world, and be where the action is. The goal is to make a name for yourself, or to at least have a hand in the next big transformations.
But there is also the "important to you" aspect. In Hamming's case, those two notions of importance align. But not so for everyone.
Quoting again:
"I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another."
So, he is happiest when working on problems that have big "important" implications for the world. Good for him; I'm glad he discovered that about himself, and followed what made him happy.
So now for my actual point: I'd encourage a person to actually first and foremost focus on what is important to them personally — what makes them happy — rather than what seems "important" from some external perspective.
I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy. But to put that choice on a pedestal as though it is the True Goal — to put "important to society" above "important to oneself" is putting the cart before the horse. It's how you get a bunch of unhappy people chasing after other people's dreams.
It's actually somewhat touched upon in TFA, with:
"The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious."
Indeed — like Hamming was. But not everyone is, and not everyone needs to be to be happy. I am just slightly irked by our somehow reserving the word "great" for ambitious people's accomplishments.
According to the field, viewed from some altitude, these the "important (to the world)" things.
But for myself, with 25+ years in the field, I couldn't give a rat's arse about any of it. Absolutely not "important (to me)".
Am I ambitious (still) ? I think so. But I'm also picky about where I'm willing to put my energy.
Let the young ones expend their energy and drive trying to do all kinds of weird, pointless and occassionally very useful shit while we keep the world running.
In my 37 years of experience: people do want to be where the action is, but many people who are the main examples of 'being at the action' already were at a location where the action happened to end up. I.e., people working for a long time on an 'obscure' problem interesting to them suddenly see that 'obscure' problem become important and fall into success (think of all the CS people working on DL/ANNs in the 90s. I don't think Yann LeCunn was a known name in the 90s).
The tragedy is that it's very hard to predict where the action will be. Literature is full of people who lucked into that position, and obviously ignores the millions who were where the action never ended up.
With some experience you can shift your focus to where you think the action will be: it's probably best not to run after the money, but walk towards it.
> 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.
I’m 53 and some of my greatest joys still come from well executed Lego builds. Wonder if I’m stuck in a rut :/
It’s an amazing and dangerous freedom. 3 short years later and I have more sets than space.
Now all I need is the time and space I had as a kid to treat LEGO as a tool for invention. Build stuff out of imagination, not a blueprint. Then again, as an adult, I could also get a bunch of power tools and “play with LEGOs” without using actual LEGOs … hmmmm
Now, I find Lego building relaxing with the occasional delight at a technique the master builders came up with to create some sort of texture or shape using those bricks.
Do you ever refactor your LEGO builds into new builds? Do you prefer kits or building something of your own design from generic sets?
I scrolled up and down quickly through the essay, and the above was the very first thing I randomly read.
Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find:
Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples.
I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
Let's change this. That's disgusting. Literally.
Sounds like the law of small errors to me:
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_4_00.html
> from article.view
Broken example due to typo.
I'm being facetious but it's actually easy to find them because their are typo PRs open in their GitHub.
Hopefully demonstrates the point though: the law holds.
Hard work needs incentives. Companies want you to light that fire yourself so they don’t have to pay extra. It’s why I’m not curious about anything work-related (plus it’s hard to be interested in CRUD apps after a decade). Even if I was, I’d give the benefits to myself and not my company.
I wonder whether he uses an editor to provide constructive feedback before publishing it or just writes and clicks "publish."
Interestingly, I found that point missing: people who do great work usually have editors/mentors/advisors to help them along the way.
There is a difference between long-form writing and long-winded writing.
Hah, and make sure to be a genius with a workaholic attitude, otherwise the 100 people that are like that will make the groundbreaking discoveries a few years before you.
The more people alive and able to work on research, the higher the bar gets. For most people, implementing existing bleeding edge knowledge is already an achievement.
There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and end up with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser.
So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99th guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries.
Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".
From plant life and human health all the way up to nation states, there are lots of people doing great work just making sure that things keep running smoothly.
I know people who are perfectly content following obscurity with curiosity and the world would not consider them successful by monetary measures.
Sure there’s vast numbers of people doing great work that isn’t innovation and creation.
You’re dismissing the insights here too quickly if you’re just wanting to find fault with the intersection of the term “great work” with all the people in the world doing all sorts of different types of great work.
This is about creation and innovation as great work.
If you want to have a successful internet business, code in lisp.
It's similar to the Rogue Bees: https://www.mrdbourke.com/what-if-you-did-the-exact-opposite...
Although rogue bees (as a small portion of the population) are actually essential to a hive's survival.
If you can dig ditches faster than anyone else, then you're a great ditch digger, and you're doing great work. Similarly, if you're a surgeon who saves much more lives than the average, you're doing great work. Etc.
The guy invests money in and profits from other people doing "great work". So it shouldn't be too shocking his primary focus is on the commercial or the innovative.
However in some societies / economies, it's simply not possible. Where I'm from (India), where a majority of my generation has to lift their families from money problems, there's no option of following passion. There's only "learn/do what makes money". It's not entirely a bad thing though.
For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc).
The other alternative is to spend precious younger years of my time in search of "passion". This happens too, but mostly from folks who already have financial freedom to explore and experiment, who are relatively scarce in some societies.
> For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventually develop a passion for it (setting up a shop, or running a business or producing/distributing boring everyday products, etc).
No one said you first had to sit down, ponder hundreds of life options and then choose your passion. Passion might also come to you as you progress in whatever field you're in. Put differently, you might as well follow your natural inclinations (whatever you find somewhat interesting in the moment) or submit to life/financial constraints (choose a promising career path), and as you become better and better at what you do, develop a passion for it.
(Also, the essay did indicate that if you're taking care of someone then his standard advice needs adjustment.)
https://youtu.be/S8jWFcDGz4Y
I like to validate people's advice by playing it out in hypotheticals, so let's take some random fields people may think they want to be great at, and apply this advice: chess, piano, philosophy, quantum physics, soccer. I think it's self-evident that his algorithm isn't suited for the wide set of cases.
Here's my alternative proposal:
- If you're interested in a field, first ask, what % of people who dedicate their life to that field get any kind of fame/wealth/recognition (or whatever greatness means to you). So if we're talking chess, and you're already 14 and can't play, you have a 0% chance of getting to the top 100. Or if it's being a famous writer good to know what your base odds are.
- Look up people who RECENTLY (within 30 years) succeeded in this field and look for patterns. I know 0 famous philosophers of the last 30 years, but the closest ones would probably be youtube philosophers. So maybe that's the current meta.
- Look at the power-structures that determine success in the field (soccer is a fair game, art is judged by a few powerful tastemakers, news may be judged by clicks, some academia is judged by splash), decide if you are okay with the system and think you can excel in this system. Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear."
That's all I got for now, it's his blog post not mine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
I think this is terrible advice for doing great work, probably good advice for doing shallow work that gets you paid. Great does not (always) mean wealthy, popular or well liked. Plenty of writers went through life with people telling them they sucked and then eventually people got it. Look at Charles Bukowski for example.
If you want to maximize your chances of being a great writer, obviously write. But if you want to maximize your chances of being great period, then you need to decide if writing the next great american novel is the course you want to work toward. IMO you are an order of magnitude more likely to become famous/great from youtube than from writing, even if your best skill is novel-writing.
Sure there are people who persevered at writing at made it work, but also probably more people persevered and wasted their lives on writing than most other pursuits.
However, I also believe that it can be detrimental and even lead to burn-out or depression if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success. This seems like a recipe for disaster.
Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? The concepts of "thrownness" and "survivorship bias" might be relevant to look up in this context. Is it possible to train curiosity, ambition, intelligence, passion, perseverance, if you did not grow up with it?
> Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident?
Yes and no. Yes, they stumbled on a promising gap by accident. No, it's not pure chance. Their odds go way up by being out there stumbling around, looking at things they find interesting.
What's the point of motivation of you don't believe what you do matters? The antitode to these kind of arguments is always to bring it to a closer level. Can you control how clean your house is with work? Would hard work help you tend to a farm better? Where does it stop helping you?
to some degree, but it's not like you can luck your way into writing an app by slapping the keyboard. The degree of success might differ, but generally there's some kind of barrier of entry in terms of the work to learn the base skill needed. Right place at the right time is a thing, but plenty of people miss out because they don't even try at all
I wish some of the people I've worked with knew this
It seems obvious that someone like me, who believes this and is looking and working everywhere, will be the type of person who does the great work, rather than someone who thinks that, ah well, it's probably an accident that others found things and they didn't. Because, seriously.. The gaps are everywhere! in everything! Some of us can scarcely go a day without having an idea that seems to have huge potential and it's a question of deciding what to focus on and how far to go. The problem is never thinking of something that could be great work to do... it's picking which one.
So basically, strong disagree, it's no accident at all.
That said the main reason everyone is writing off all the potential is, yes, lack of ambition, lack of curiosity, lack of perseverance, etc. Can those habits be unlearned? Dunno. Probably. I think most people are 'followers' at heart, and to imagine doing something truly novel is to imagine, ultimately, not trying to do what they're told, not trying to be safe. And the thought gives them intense anxiety so they explain a hundred reasons why they're right, why nothing can be done. Well, from my perspective that's just a matter of perspective.
Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually expect them to fully retire in their fourties or fifties, once they no longer need more money.
Pushing the argument a bit further: When you are so lucky to have what it takes to do great things, would you be able to _not_ do great things?
I enjoy PGs work but I’m not a fanboy.
However in this case it’s uncanny that the path of this work I am doing is precisely as he has described here.
I kinda knew already I was making something special but it’s almost like PG has been leaning over my shoulder watching my thinking and watching my work process over years.
In fact this article is “great work” because actually distilling the essence of, and describing, great work would have been incredibly hard.
The article describes the process it must have taken to write the article. Kinda recursive.
P.S.Why do you feel the need to say you're not a fanboy? Are you assuming that a positive statement about his work implies that you are and that you afraid of that impression ?
There are many fields where this is not true - e.g. neither Apple nor Microsoft were thrilled about the development of the open-source Linux operating system for decades. Similarly, renewable energy technology funding has been actively suppressed at the federal funding level in the USA by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel sector since the 1970s, as even a cursory examination of DOE budgets will reveal. Decentralized robust energy grids not under the control of large investor conglomerates are another touchy subject.
Nevertheless, it's possible to do great work in these fields but only if you understand the forces arrayed against you in great detail. In some cases, making progress might require fairly radical solutions. For renewable energy development, moving to a country whose economy is not based on fossil fuel exports and which already is interested in replacing fossil fuel imports with renewables might be the optimal solution, particularly if the kind of work you have in mind requires expensive technological support. Otherwise, you'll have to accept shoestring budgets and active opposition to your work.
There are a rather large number of fields where these issues arise. Academic institutions have largely been corporatized in the USA, and one side-effect is the gutting of environmental contaminant research programs that measured things like heavy metals, organochlorine contaminants, etc. in water, plants and soil. Similarly, research progams that focused on the potential uses of out-of-patent medicinal compounds were eliminated because the private pharmaceutical partners of universities were only interested in new patentable compounds. Of course, there are fields where you'll get lots of support - development of military drone technology, say.
This kind of situation isn't a new phenomena. Historically, technological stagnation is associated with the rise of autocratic monopoly power in all civilizations. The printing press was a threat to the established order in medieval Europe, the electric lightbulb was a threat to the kerosene lamp and oil business (note it took FDR's New Deal to electrify Rural America), and so on. Therefore, if you plan on doing great work in a disruptive technology field, don't be surprised when you run into headwinds of various sorts. Such forces can often be overcome (Linux eventually succeeded on a large scale), but pretending they don't exist is the worst mistake you can make. Understanding those opposing forces in detail is going to be a necessary first step.
hmm… depends what you consider great. last time i checked companies you helped, one of them was Rappi. they came to Brazil and basically destroyed the bicycle courier scene with anti-competitive practices on other companies just because they were rolling on money. after them, it is pretty rare to see someone working with deliveries and bicycles… and they are more silent and ecological than any motor-cycle or car. and actually smart considering the amount of damage noise and pollution from motor does.
anyway, considering something great is a sensible topic. specially if you taking the amount of money made as a important factor. maybe that is why the world is full of people digging CEOs status on top of zombie-like consumers that can not think for themselves
Then there’s this:
> 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.
> [18] 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.
First, anything can be either literally or metaphorically described as a religion, so that makes this an empty principle, since it either covers nothing or everything or both. (“Cheesecake is my religion.” Etc.)
Second, the footnote is literally impenetrable to me. Honestly. I can discern no coherent meaning. That everyone could adopt a principle or belief does not mean it must be false just because everyone uniformly and indistinguishably believes it and therefore nobody disbelieves it. Whether people can be distinguished from one another with respect to some belief (say, that in base 10 arithmetic that 1+1=2) has nothing to do with the truth vel non of that belief.
And honestly, I am genuinely struggling to fathom a mind that could not only believe that statement but believe it so deeply that they breezily announce it as obviously true. So it’s funny that this is the next paragraph:
> 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?
The only, and I mean, literally only, interpretation that I can come up with is that PG is using “religion” and “religious” in enough different ways that when he mixes them, as it seems to do here, he doesn’t notice. Or he means them ONLY in the sense of “too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think.” But I have a very strong suspicion that he is definitely not using them only in that way.
When you are famous, people give you the benefit of the doubt.
When you are small fries, you are blogspam.
I may have to steal that phrase (:
I think what's going on here is the theory that the purpose of religion is to create a trusted in-group separated from the out-group, with rules that make it difficult to casually join. [1] If you start from that premise, PG's footnote makes sense. But this ignores the fact that the largest religions really want as many members as possible and would be delighted if everyone followed their principles.
[1] See for instance: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/24/there-are-rules-here/
That does make what he’s saying there cohere better. Of course, what he’s saying turns entirely on the ambiguity he’s playing on (which I suspected): religion in the sense of concrete historical/social human practices and religion in the sense of identifying strongly with and thus not questioning your principles. Never a good idea to hang your hat on the coatrack of suggestive language games. Or, you know, outrageous bullshit.
I almost think it makes it worse, finding a coherent meaning—-which is so silly.