Why is this post so long?
How to Do Great Work
341–350 of 464 posts
Re: How to Do Great Work
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he addresses that. Get a day job. Then do your project on nights and weekends, or else manage your manager into making it part of your job.
The problem with moonlighting a meaningful side project is that any marketing you do will alert HR to the fact you are moonlighting (HR in large corps pay to have employees' social media scanned). In most cases you'll either be told to stop or in the worst case your employer will claim they own it.
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Re: How to Do Great Work
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with moonlighting a meaningful side project is that any marketing you do will alert HR to the fact you are moonlighting (HR in large corps pay to have employees' social media scanned). In most cases you'll either be told to stop or in the worst case your employer will claim they own it.
This isn't the norm in Silicon Valley. Most companies will agree to exceptions to their Assignment of Inventions agreement if you ask, as long as it's not directly competitive.
If you work for a large company anything you do in software is directly competitive.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#344Earlier 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'm not talking about Musk, it may be hard to believe, but I genuinely don't care about him. He is the current guy with too much money, fame and ego.
I'm talking about his fans and their perceptions of Musk. They hear "he is the real life Tony Stark" and they think "WOW" instead of Tony Stark is a character of fiction that can't possibly exist in reality".
Absurdity is fascinating to me.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 doin…
I'm talking about the fan perception of Musk.
For example Jordan Peterson went on stage to say somethink (not exact quote) like: "Elon Musk wow. He wanted to built an electric car which is basically impossible and yet he went on, nobody thought he would be possible and he went on to fouund Tesla and now it works".
In real life though the first electric car was invented in 1881, because electricity and fossil fuels have always been the two obvious sources of energy for making a car.
Elon Musk wasn't the founder of Tesla, he bought it. He played a role sure. But obviously, painfully so, he didn't do the Tesla engineering alone. Tesla in fact pays shitloads of engineers to do the engineering. And Tesla is just one company making electric cars. Elon Musk brought the hype, the money, sometimes the right decisions, sometimes the wrong decisions, sometimes the toxic workplace. And he got lots of money from big government.
And sociology taught us you don't have to be rich when you start your career. But that it sure helps a lot when you have no shortage of money, good education, you are a dude, your mother tongue is english, you know the right people, you are an illegal alien but that's okay because you come from a white supremacist country, and you happen to be here during the california gold rush, I mean the silicon valley in the 90s.
When you check all those boxes, you are much more likely to become a "self made man"
Re: How to Do Great Work
#346As 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've been studying a lot of Buddhism as of late. One thing it has taught me in the Middle Way. In short, it means do nothing in excess, which includes doing nothing at all. This balanced view leads to me to believe you, Paul, and "hustle culture" that's all over YouTube are both right and wrong. I've come to live by a simple system... Try to do fulfilling work that's meaningful to future generations, whilst also putt…
I agree with the sentiment and that of grandparent. But I take issue with the notion of fulfillment. I think we ought to strive to do things that drain us. You can't fulfill yourself continuously. You can't learn if your head is full. We have this 'my heart if full' turn of phrase that makes the next sentence confusing, but you can't love if your heart is full (of things you hold on to).
Same thing with trying to leave a legacy, or trying to make an impact. If you decide some thing or another is a goal, with the best altruistic reasoning, you're still first choosing something to hold on to, and then putting effort into attaching more and more to that.
We need to perform life because we are living beings. We go through the acts of nourishment and socialization because we are at that stage, being people on Earth. But seeking any personally chosen result or goal is self delusion. Letting go of what I think is the right thing, and pouring myself into my life, as I interact with others and gain opportunities to listen to them, work alongside them, decide together what to do and do it. I am alive because the universe pours into me. I need to pour forth. That's how things flow through their natural progression.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
And he died at 40 and this was his personal life: > Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire … his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure".[64] Kafka visited brothels for most of his adult life[65][66][67] and was interested in pornography.[63] In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On…
OK… neither here nor there for my point that nobody remembers him as a clerk.
Isn’t that the point though? Do you think on his death bed when he looked back at his relatively short life he took solace in the fact that years in the future some random people admired his “greatness” even though his personal life was a mess?
Re: How to Do Great Work
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG did not use the term moonlighting for the fact that you don’t have to. That is unless you agreed to a contract that forbids from holding multiple jobs. 40h/week paying the bills leaves plenty of free time to do something on the side when you don’t have kids / a family to take care of
> 40h/week paying the bills leaves plenty of free time to do something on the side when you don’t have kids / a family to take care of Show of hands: How many others feel this way? Personally, I can barely muster the energy to do much hacking after a normal job. The only way I've found to do work I've been known for is by blowing off my other responsibilities (sometimes to the annoyance of various people).
I have also become known for what I do, in the last minutes of odd hours, to the neglect of my responsabilities. While I do "make time", and could probably do so more effectively[1], I certainly do not have "plenty" after 40 hours.
1: One needs downtime, and can't expect perfect utilization even after planning for rest.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#349> There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray. Money is an insurmountable objective barrier for most people, and seems it's just slipped int…
No, he addresses that. Get a day job. Then do your project on nights and weekends, or else manage your manager into making it part of your job.
This is terrible advice imo. It entirely hinges on being able to work ridiculous hours, which most people just can't do either due to burnout, family, or both.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#350You 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.
I think your comment is an underappreciated one.
The article, to me, seems exceedingly preferential to the "tortured/overworked genius" method of innovation, and by now I'm personally tired of seeing that trope fall on its face.
The best... anything gets built by many people. Of course it takes a VC to try and tell us about the "exceptional" people at the top who make it all possible, but the number of times PG points out how instrumental Jessica was to the early days of YC disproves the very trope he's trying to puff up here.