Short Read: “How To Do Great Work” by Paul Graham | Episode #168
Jan 13, 2024
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Entrepreneur Paul Graham discusses his essay on 'How To Do Great Work,' exploring curiosity, originality, breaking rules, and being self-indulgent. He emphasizes the importance of asking big questions, iterative progress, and surrounding oneself with talented individuals for growth.
Achieving great work requires a unique blend of ambition, curiosity, and consistency.
Selecting projects aligned with deep interest and challenging potential fosters genuine, impactful work.
Originality flourishes through engaging with challenges just beyond immediate capabilities and exploring topics widely.
Authenticity is crucial in creativity, emphasizing earnestness, substance over appearance, and expressing ideas truthfully.
Deep dives
Honing Excellence in Work
Excellent work is defined not just by hard work but by a distinct shape of efforts. Ambition and curiosity drive great work, emphasizing the need for a balance between ability and interest. The effort required for exceptional work is a harmonious blend of focusing on high-interest projects, seeking frontier knowledge, identifying gaps, and exploiting promising opportunities. Consistency is a linchpin in producing remarkable work, providing a steady trajectory towards achieving singular, influential outcomes.
Choosing Meaningful Work
Selecting work that aligns with aptitude, deep interest, and challenging potential is crucial. Paul Graham suggests that making your own projects a priority fosters genuine, impactful work. Embarking on projects that evoke excessive curiosity unveils unexplored territory, propelling individuals towards explosive ideation. Discovering the frontier of knowledge and honing in on gaps pave the way for creative breakthroughs.
Nurturing Originality
The essence of originality blooms from engaging with challenges slightly above immediate capabilities, prompting innovative thinking. Cultivating a habit of exploring topics widely, albeit with directed curiosity, amplifies the surface area for novel ideas to germinate. Originality emerges naturally when attempting to unravel complexities rather than directly aspiring for uniqueness. Traveling through diverse topic spaces fuels the fire of creativity, fostering the intersection of curiosity and distinctiveness.
Authenticity in Creativity
Paul Graham accentuates the essence of authenticity as a pivotal ingredient in producing great work. Genuine endeavors devoid of affectation and informality often pave the path to intellectual honesty and creativity. Approaching work with earnestness dismantles the facade of superficiality, engendering a focus on substance over appearance. Endeavoring to express ideas in their most fundamental and meaningful forms exudes truthfulness, underpinning a reliable framework for integrity in creativity.
Importance of Being Problem-Oriented
Emphasizes the value of focusing on problems rather than solutions. Curiosity leads to asking great questions, which are essential for originality and innovation.
Novelty and Obviousness of Ideas
Highlights the importance of ideas being both novel and obvious. Novelty is about presenting new twists or fresh perspectives while ensuring that ideas logically fit into place.
Discovering Broken Models for Innovation
Encourages identifying and challenging existing paradigms to uncover new ideas. By being stricter and noticing clues of broken models, individuals can innovate by offering new solutions.
Choosing Unfashionable Problems
Urges individuals to tackle unorthodox or undervalued problems for greater impact. Being original involves questioning common beliefs and pursuing challenges not pursued by others.
Paul Graham's essay on "How To Do Great Work" begins with the following words:
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
As we're all both very ambitious and focused on doing great work, it felt appropriate to cover this essay as a sort of book in miniature. The essay itself comes in at a staggering 11,800 words or nearly 30 pages when printed.
"How To Do Great Work" explores curiosity, the source of originality, the relationship between breaking rules and new ideas, and how being naive is a form of independent mindedness. As well as why being self-indulgent helps you find overlooked problems, why big ideas are more often questions than answers, and why the best questions grow while you work to answer them.
Explore the episode notes.
Search and down a transcript and find links to related books, interviews, lectures, and more: outlieracademy.com/168.
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