RE Paul Graham's Essay, How To Do Great Work

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.

For me, it seems that the the forces that lead me astray -- not just from the pursuit of great work but from every meaningful enterprise I've tried in my life -- is something like "seeking short-term pleasure". Playing video games, eating tasty food, watching TV are less interesting than work, but they're easier and more pleasurable in the moment.

My "vices" are not always more pleasurable than the "main activity". When I played soccer competitively, there was nothing better than attending practices or playing matches. And in my day job as a programmer there are projects (and crises) that are so interesting that I'd rather do them than anything else.

Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could.

I'm more productive now than I was in my mid 20s, and I think it's because I've been able to "turn down the loudness" of other parts of my life. These days I live a somewhat "rigid" and "dull" lifestyle: go to bed on time; don't take drugs, alcohol, caffeine; don't play competitive online video games; exercise; eat well. So I agree that interest is a stronger driver than diligence, it seems to me that diligence or discipline was a prerequisite for me to feel interested enough to pursue meaningful things.

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive.

Sign me up!

Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.

I've tried to make this adjustment. I looked at the half-finished projects piling up on my proverbial shelf ¹ and the books piling up on my real shelf and thought, "It's too easy to fool myself." Starting is easy. Finishing is hard. I want to be someone who finishes what he starts ². Even though it was an interesting read, M. Mitchell Waldrop's book, The Dream Machine took me over a year to get through. For the last two months I'd say, out loud, to my supportive wife, "If I read just two pages every day, I'll be done in two months." And then I'd read two pages.

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead.

Some of my most rewarding periods of work have been like this. I'm thinking about the problems I'm trying to solve, actively, during the day. And they're just latently in the background of my mind in the evening and at night. If there's too much else in there -- especially stimulating stuff like TV dramas or competitive games -- the work problems are pushed out.

...[I]f you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good...

Though it might seem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It's exciting, and also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it's easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.

I have mixed feelings about this part, as did some comments I saw on hackernews about the article. But -- maybe I'll try it on for size. I can relate to the feeling that it's easier to try to be the best, because removes the whiny thought in the back of my mind, "Do I need to learn this?"

I always disliked the kids in class who would ask, "Is this going to be on the test?". I always translated that question to, "I think it's pointless to learn the material we're studying, and am only participating because I'm playing a meta game about grades, which by the way has been thrust on me against my will. Please stop trying to teach me; I am actively trying to avoid learning."³

I don't want to be like kids I dislike, so it's better that I not let myself wonder, "Do I really need to learn this?" and instead just take my time and learn everything in sight on my way to whatever it was I was doing.

One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years.

I quite like this. This attitude is what attracted me to following Jon Blow's work.

I first heard this advice listening to this talk Nassim Taleb gave at google [@ 4 min, 30 sec]:

How do you make your book survive? What's the trick? If you want people to read your book 10 years or 20 years from now? If you want to have any chance of that happening?

[Nassim waits for answers.]

Use old ideas. By the Lindy effect, an old technology has a huge survival advantage over new technology.

I'm not saying that the future will not be technological, but I'm saying that what will be displaced is the newer technology, not the old technology. So if you want to write something that can be read 20 years from now... make sure it could be read by someone 20 years ago.

Moving on. (Now back to quotes from the article.)

...just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

...any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good.

I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool.

I can see myself falling into this trap. I happen to find myself in what seems to be a high position in my company in relatively short amount of time. I've worked on Hubs for 6 years and, in that time, become a Staff Software Engineer, a Manager, and then a Senior Manager.

One of the reasons I'm challenging myself to find a new area to focus on is because of how easily I can see myself getting used to being a "big fish in the little pond" because I've been on the same project for so long and happen to know so much.

This feels very dangerous for my long-term skills, because it's so easy to fool myself. I have to move onto new projects, new tools, new problems and remind myself just how much more there is to do, learn, and build.

The biggest risk I'm facing in my career right now is stagnation due to receiving too much glory and praise.

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

I've found this to be annoyingly true when writing about technical topics. One of my favorite parts of working with teammates is writing good explanations -- of problems, systems, situations, etc. I like choosing the right format, the right order to structure the flow of information, linking relevant details appropriately, etc.

When I'm doing this, I often finish writing the comment / message / email / pull request with a better understanding of the situation than I had when I started because writing has forced me to fill the gaps -- the things that are not quite true or not good explanations.

Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers.

Wow, this is a beautiful idea. I love this.

One way to [turn off your filters] is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.

I'll have to try this out.

So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.

I have a bunch of ideas, right off the bat:

• Real-time pub-sub spatial comms (no auto-inflate).
• Aggressively threaded chat (directed graphs) with graph visualization
• Interactive geometric algebra with handsets and headsets.
• Structured program editor/environment that mirrors the shape of its AST, and where you operate on tokens and structure, not on raw characters (except for identifiers).
• Game where the object of the game is to construct programs solving problems as rapidly as possible, using an APL-inspired language as the base.
• Audio server I can install in my house, where every device capable of generating audio data emits it to the server as if the server were a "dumb speaker", and every device that can emit sound can be piped to from the server.
• A rhythm-based RTS game.
• An RTS game where the simulation speed is inversely proportional with the number of units. (Fast early game, slow enough late game to remain tactically sophisticated.) It could even scale with average APM or EPM of the players so that the "strategic decisions" are more likely to be similar between ranks, but I'm less sure that's a good idea. ⁴

I used to have a specific list of ideas like these, but I seem to have lost them.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This is quote, found in a footnote, is from "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.

Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

This is also what David Deutsch observes in The Beginning of Infinite. He posits that this never ends; That questions beget more questions. He also posits that these questions or "problems" are soluble. That is -- they have a solution, and we can find those solutions.

Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.

Richard Hamming made a similar observation ⁵ :

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go.

Back to the article...

The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.

:thinking_face:

For most people, having previously published opinions has an effect similar to ideology

I mentioned this when I started this blog - I have not really been a "participant" on the internet in that I have not posted things. Perhaps this is an advantage for me (though I am also reading these words as a warning.)

So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you.

I used to keep a "stuff I want to know" file which I basically used to remember stuff like this. I haven't been doing that as much these days -- instead I'm much more likely to ask chatgpt for an explanation to things that would be tedious use search for.

The best teachers don't want to be your bosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.

Ouch, I wish I had studied more while I was in school. Especially in my math classes, where I was often one of less than 10 students in class, with professors who were engaged and who cared.

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter.

From what I've seen, the internet has quite a lot of bitter adults who were "gifted" children.

It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you'd fail.

On the other hand, consider the tools we have at our disposal today that they lacked. Sure, it's hard to be a "modern day" Newton or Shakespeare, if that means to standout from your contemporaries. But it doesn't seem nearly as difficult to know as much or be as productive as people who lived without personal computers, chatgpt, food delivery, modern medicine, etc. The advantages we have today are staggering, it's a wonder why we haven't all out-produced Shakespeare in fiction.

Bonus / Parting Shot

Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.

My friend Dom sent me a clip of something Jon Blow said about javascript:

[Guy in chat] "Javascript pays your bills for now"

Yes but it doesn't pay for the sadness you'll feel in 20 years when you look back and think, "I could have been a contender."

Footnotes

Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research" (pdf)

Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research" (video)

Hamming (in the same lecture!) also said,

You've got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur's "Luck favors the prepared mind." I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important. I found in the early- days I had believed "this" and yet had spent all week marching in "that" direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched in the direction I thought was important. It's that easy.

And also:

Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Thus, I shifted from numerical analysis, to hardware, tosoftware, and so on, periodically, because you tend to use up your ideas. When you go to a new field, you have to start over as a baby. You are no longer the big mukity muk and you can start back there and you can start planting those acorns which will become the giant oaks.