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How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Do Great Work

#261

Post by tppiotrowski »

> What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.

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

There's a contradiction here. If you work on something that bores other people (small niches) it will not satisfy the desire to do something impressive.

For example: I want to tell my in-laws I work at Google, but I really want to create maps that simulate sunlight and shadow

Re: How to Do Great Work

#262

Post by IAmGraydon »

spoonfeeder006 wrote: post #259

> When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out. That just gave me an idea for a phone app: Something that helps teenagers explore their interests and aptitudes (but not skills of course) Thoughts?

I like the idea, but it’s quite broad. It’s essentially what school is supposed to do.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#263

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

moneywoes wrote: post #180
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, the audio tech/software niche is abuzz with ideas and attempts related to using transformer technology within the field. Music generation, new synthesis techniques, generative DSP and more. According to the field, viewed from some altitude, these the "important (to the world)" things. But for myself, with 25+ years in the field, I couldn't give a rat's arse about any of it. Absolutely not "important (to me…

Curious, do you just think the industry is over hyped

Not the industry, but the rush-to-"AI" is certainly over-hyped and displays a very shallow understanding of the role of art of any form for most human beings.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#264

Post by mindwok »

artisanspam wrote: post #255

As I've gotten older, I believe more and more that having a desire for great work has more negatives than it does positives. This post really demonstrates why I believe this – mainly because PG doesn't touch at all on why someone would want to do great work while romanticizing how great it is to have that desire. I don't think the question that ambitious people should be asking themselves is "what is work that I can…

I have also followed a similar trajectory to you. My early 20's I wanted to do something 'great'. But my ambition was what Paul identified in this post as the type that precedes experience. As a result, I became restless, agitated if I thought I wasn't pursuing the right things, competitive.

That is slowly disappearing from me, for the better. Now I just try to focus on doing things as well as I can. I don't worry about what to do, because really that will flow from your intuition. Just do what you want to do. Maybe it'll be great, maybe not, but you can't force greatness.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#265

Post by phforms »

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 don’t think that great work and financial success are necessarily related; in fact, in many historical cases they were not. For me personally, I always have special and long-term projects on the side (that may or may not lead to “great work”), while doing more boring work in my bread-and-butter job. I guess I need some sort of independence from financial or social pressure when I want to do what I am passionate about, even if it means that I am not able to go “all in”. Otherwise it would only stress me out and in the worst case, I would lose interest or drift away from my original intentions to satisfy a customer or whoever might give me money.

So many very valuable or important things are just not profitable, but that doesn’t mean they should not be pursued.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#266

Post by spoonfeeder006 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #262
spoonfeeder006 wrote: post #259

> When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out. That just gave me an idea for a phone app: Something that helps teenagers explore their interests and aptitudes (but not skills of course) Thoughts?

I like the idea, but it’s quite broad. It’s essentially what school is supposed to do.

Yeah true. I don't know the scene in the schools but I have read a lot about how math education is pretty dismal, at least in the USA, depending on the teacher

Maybe theres a way for an app to help someone who does have a math aptitude to realize that they do and that math is fun and not a bunch of rote memorization of formulas

And repeat for like.... a bunch of other types of thought

But you're right, it is pretty broad, so maybe best to start with a specific field

There are apps like Brilliant that focus on math, so maybe that fills that niche, or maybe theres something that else could be added to it in terms of helping someone explore the raw thought processes involved

Re: How to Do Great Work

#267

Post by jamiek88 »

cdelsolar wrote: post #245
galacticaactual wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly not sure what you want. You want money but also want to keep things open source and free. I think you need to take a hard look at your wants and how they map to the real world.

I just want enough to be able to work on it as a full time thing.

Have you got a Patreon?

Re: How to Do Great Work

#269

Post by mortenjorck »

jacobolus wrote: post #243
ftxbro wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gam…

In theory. In practice, depends what judge you pull, and you'd better have deep pockets for legal fights. My friends made a Tetris-like game (under a different name, with unrelated art, just broadly similar rules) and were sued out of existence by The Tetris Company. Even though they were legally in the clear according to theoretical analysis, the judge took a brief look and decided "this seems like it should be a vi…

An interesting discussion from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19533219

Tetris Holdings, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. held that the tetrominoes are "expression; they are not part of the ideas, rules, or functions of the game," which certainly seems open to dispute, but I could just as easily imagine the same standard being applied to letter tiles with a score value in the corner.

So yeah, unless you have a few spare million to get this precedent overturned, it's probably not worth it.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#270

Post by goodbyesf »

grrdotcloud wrote: post #60
_x5ft wrote: post #26

I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.

Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.

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