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How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Do Great Work

#191

Post by rosecross »

htss2013 wrote: post #186

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for." I'm trying to make sense of this question. Usually people think about boredom as a matter of kind, not degree. X subject is either boring or not to most people, to any degree, small or large. Conceiving of boredom as a matter of degree is counter intuitive. Is this meant to be an insightfu…

Everyone likes movies, but that doesn’t mean they want to discuss cinematography all night.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#193

Post by maxibenner »

htss2013 wrote: post #186

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for." I'm trying to make sense of this question. Usually people think about boredom as a matter of kind, not degree. X subject is either boring or not to most people, to any degree, small or large. Conceiving of boredom as a matter of degree is counter intuitive. Is this meant to be an insightfu…

I'd imagine that a lot of people who are interested in taking photographs might zone out once I start talking about content-based interpretation and the renewal of artistic language.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#194

Post by rosecross »

grumpy_coder wrote: post #83

You really shouldn't write a long post on doing great work without mentioning teamwork. He seems to say great work is done in the garage or garden shed, which has been false for centuries at this point.

He mentions that for certain projects you’ll need to be good at managing others, or you shouldn’t attempt them at all.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#195

Post by emmender »

rosecross wrote: post #192
emmender wrote: post #188

As Mark Twain said: "I wrote a long essay because I didn't want to put the effort writing a shorter one" - applies to this piece.

Guess you didn’t read to the end

No, I did not.

The question is ill-posed imo. I would invert the question and ask: "How not to suck at your work" as that would lead to similar conclusions, and is more actionable.

This essay has too many weasel sentences like:

"Boldly chase outlier ideas,"

"Husband your morale"

"Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. "

"Curiosity is the best guide."

This is woolly-feel-good writing that chatgpt and folks like steve pinker, deepak chopra etc specialize in, ie: a bag-of-words about fuzzy feel-good ideas we all want to hear.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#196

Post by stanleydrew »

htss2013 wrote: post #186

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for." I'm trying to make sense of this question. Usually people think about boredom as a matter of kind, not degree. X subject is either boring or not to most people, to any degree, small or large. Conceiving of boredom as a matter of degree is counter intuitive. Is this meant to be an insightfu…

Thinking about boredom as a "matter of kind" is just a special case of "matter of degree." The degree is just zero or not zero.

There are lots of subjects that I have a cursory interest in, but then I'm done exploring once I've read the Wikipedia page.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#197

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bryanmgreen wrote: post #148

I think it's important to note there are two types of "great work" 1) Where you have work expertise that is objectively higher than your peers or in the top percentile of your industry due to natural skills or experience or both. 2) Where you have do not have top-percentile expertise, but are hitting the limits of your capabilities. Maxing out your performance is the only way to know your limits and get better. Somet…

Surely there's another type where your work is good but not, in isolation, truly extraordinary, but either by chance or by understanding the problem space is applied in a place that has a massive impact.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#198

Post by anonyme-honteux »

ftxbro wrote: post #189
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third type is where you just got lucky. For example a one hit wonder musician or writer. Your baseline abilities aren’t that good but you hit the high side of variance.

fourth type is when someone else does the great work and you get the credit

That's so true, why bother doing great work, which is a lot of work, when you can get the credit of many people doing it?

That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means something awesome about you personally. You need to be the one who always announce the news on Twitter, you don't even have to lie, your strongest fan will assume you did all the work. Like they believe he is the founder of Tesla. Like they believe he is the real life Tony Stark. Like they believe that he, not the actual rocket scientists working at Tesla, design all those rockets. Like they believe that he invented the hyperloop when he renamed the vactrain concept from hundred years ago and then couldn't build it because it's bullshit. Like they believe he will save humanity by helping us anytime soon to escape Earth that people like him are destroying.

I don't really care about Elon Musk. The guy is a mix between a Tech Robber Baron and an emotionally immature 14 years old who has read too much science fiction. And remember more the fiction than the science.

OTOH his fan club is a fascinating experiment on how a cult of personality develops in public and in real time.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#199

Post by cdelsolar »

My problem is that I’ve already chosen what to work on long ago - Scrabble. I’ve built a popular (within the community) study tool, I’ve also been working on an open source AI that I believe is finally better than the state of the art one - I’m going to set up a match between them sometime soon (but need a bot interface, etc). This is without ML, too, which I fully intend to explore soon. And finally I’ve been working on a modern lichess-like app (woogles.io) for it, with tournaments, puzzles, etc that recently hosted its 3 millionth game, with a small team of contributors. It will likely be the test bed for the AI matches. And if that isn’t enough, I’ve attempted to achieve mastery at the game, being rated as high as 7th nationally in the last few years. Although I think I’d be better if I didn’t spend so much time building stuff for everyone to play with.

The problem is there’s no money in it. Hasbro is litigious, all of this stuff is open source because I find it curious and deeply interesting, and as a sort of misguided attempt to try to democratize access to it. I’m not going to charge without getting sued, and even if one of the companies like Scopely wanted to hire me, I’m only interested in keeping this open source and free. So I’m not really sure what to do.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#200

Post by n6242 »

ftxbro wrote: post #189
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third type is where you just got lucky. For example a one hit wonder musician or writer. Your baseline abilities aren’t that good but you hit the high side of variance.

fourth type is when someone else does the great work and you get the credit

Fifth type is when do something crappy but then someone else looks at it and for whatever reason they think it's great.
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