What question do you have about this essay?
(It would be interesting to know, without reading every comment, what questions people have about it.)
How to Do Great Work
301–310 of 464 posts
Re: How to Do Great Work
#302Another thing you need: patience. I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have: - enough experience and context to do great work, and - the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE jo…
Sounds about the right time for you to have babies and ruin all that readiness for great work.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#303What question do you have about this essay? (It would be interesting to know, without reading every comment, what questions people have about it.)
Question: how could comments on the essay be structured, so as to give them maximum value for readers?
Re: How to Do Great Work
#304My 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 abo…
I think they're related, but it doesn't go both ways. Self-made financial success almost always takes great work, although great work does not necessarily lead to financial success even when the work is clearly great.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#305[deleted]
Re: How to Do Great Work
#306As 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…
If great people didn't exist we are all doomed
Re: How to Do Great Work
#307Another thing you need: patience. I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have: - enough experience and context to do great work, and - the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE jo…
Sounds about the right time for you to have babies and ruin all that readiness for great work.
My experience having a child is that it made me more ambitious, not less. And not for the child's sake, necessarily
Re: How to Do Great Work
#308What typos or formatting issues did you notice, that should maybe be fixed?
* Footnotes would ideally have backlinks, for those who read them all at once.
* "ballon bursting"
Re: How to Do Great Work
#309Does anyone have a TLDR of this? My attention span isn't what it used to be.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#310PG tends to revisit the same topics from different angles in multiple essays as he's figuring something out. You can hear resonances of this essay in a previous essay he had a long time ago about cultivating taste for makers. http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Ansel Adams tended to visit the same sites and take slightly different photographs over time, refining his vision of a place. I think it's a modality of most work, refinement and improvement over time as new perspectives are incorporated.
I revisit my favorite recipes and while each experiment isn't always better over a long enough time span they do seem to taste better