took me a few sittings to finish this great read, how to do great work ft. @paulg
"doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to" paulgraham.com/greatwork.html 1/
"some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields" 2/
"as you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge" 3/
"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; the next step is to notice them" 4/
"many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted" 5/
"when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own" 6/
"you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. When in doubt, optimize for interestingness" 7/
"the trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance" 8/
"people who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing. If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth" 9/
"to see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far" 10/
"be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them" 11/
"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" 12/
"broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model" 13/
"every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it" 14/
"great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential ... there's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere" 15/
"in the popular picture, experts are certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either" 16/
"even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked" 17/
"use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power" 18/
"new discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things, even by their discoverers, because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them" 19/
"some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it" 20/
"doing great work has such prestige that in some places, particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyone is engaged in it. And that is far from true" 21/
"the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not ... sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights" 22/
"you're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim" 23/
"can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?"
"questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions" 24/24