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How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Do Great Work

#221

Post by ftxbro »

hgomersall wrote: post #206
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To flip that on its head, most people who do great work do it explicitly for someone else. Or put another way: you can build equity for yourself, or you can build equity for someone else.

sometimes that depends on circumstance how easy or hard that decision is, for example if you got pocket emeralds as allowance from your parents when you were a teenager it might be easier to have means and agency to build equity for yourself, whereas if you were literally a medieval serf born into a fief then it might be harder to make this decision to build equity for yourself maybe you will have to revolt

Re: How to Do Great Work

#222

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ycomb-acct wrote: post #218
tuukkah wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might say the climate crisis has made it interesting.

[flagged]

Just a self-delusion due to lack of research. It's all due to technology advances, all of it. Against increasing drought and heat.

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...

Re: How to Do Great Work

#223

Post by brailsafe »

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.

Unless you live in any of the houses right outside the Apple campus. The single most shocking thing to me when I visited for the first time was that the entire area including right outside the visitor center is still dominated by these upsetting 60s bungalows. Ironically up in Redmond they're putting them to shame in terms of development.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#224

Post by smokel »

ajkjk wrote: post #159
smokel wrote: post #57

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…

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…

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?

Re: How to Do Great Work

#225

Post by ftxbro »

cdelsolar wrote: post #199

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 workin…

I remember looking this up before, and game rule sets are not protected in USA. You can't make some game rules and say that other people can't make that game. The things that are protected are the things that go along with the game, like if you use any trademark name in the game or if you use any protected media like if it's a card game then you can't use the same card art. My understanding is that you can make a game with the same rules as scrabble and not call it scrabble or use their art and you are allowed to do it.

Edit: this is getting upvoted so maybe at this point I should say I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice lol

Re: How to Do Great Work

#227

Post by ftxbro »

quacked wrote: post #203
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work in the aerospace industry and know several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of them would agree with your assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work. I don't disagree with your read on his lack of maturity, or that he takes credit for work he hasn't done, or that his fans believe he is singularly responsible for the accomplis…

> "I work in the aerospace industry and know several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of them would agree with your assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work."

Could you expand that more? Like what meaningful work did your acquaintances say Musk did for SpaceX and what valuable engineering work did they think he was capable of doing?

Maybe Musk socially engineered a kind of nerd reputational ant mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill where everyone who works in the aerospace industry knows several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX, none of whom agree with the assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work.

I know he had pocket emeralds when he was a teenager and he bought twitter and made a lot of stupid tweets, but those things don't take much time, maybe in his other time he did amazing things.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#228

Post by tough »

xyzelement wrote: post #5
dkqmduems wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another word for this...play?

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.

I mean the guy was going for a shorter trip to the indias and found out the americas

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

Re: How to Do Great Work

#229

Post by einpoklum »

> Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.

So, either be someone who's privileged, or very lucky, or - first get rid of the wage-labor-based economy, and probably Capitalism altogether, then get started :-)

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