Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 464 posts

Re: How to Do Great Work

#401

Post by biztos »

samuellevy wrote: post #378
matwood wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies. As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then figure out…

There's an interview with Bo Burnham where he puts it clearly... > Don't listen to people who just got very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to "follow your dreams" is like a lottery winner saying "liquidise your assets, buy Powerball tickets. It works!" And that's the thing. Skill and talent are important, but there's a certain amount of success that's only achievable through luck, or through starting from _so far ah…

Surely there's some luck involved, but wouldn't the Taylor Swift analogy be more like "develop a product that leverages your talents and is likely to have mass appeal, work your ass off perfecting your ability to deliver that product, take the extreme negative externalities of success in your business without complaining, and once you get traction double down on the working your ass off part?" Oh and also "have sufficient business acumen to stare down Apple and win?"

Re: How to Do Great Work

#402

Post by red_admiral »

matwood wrote: post #370
JohnCurran wrote: post #355

I respect Paul and everything that he writes, even if I don’t agree with it. It takes some serious stones to publish your thoughts on the internet - whether people agree or not. In any case. This seems like a continuation of the never ending quest for people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of a corporate profit they will never see. I’m not interested in eliminating the ceiling - I want to raise the floor.…

> I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies. As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then figure out…

There's a saying from Eastern Europe: first learn a trade, then follow your dreams. If the dreams don't work out, you'll still be able to earn a living.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#404

Post by _x5ft »

the_common_man wrote: post #364
_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.

Next you will say books are out of style

How so?

There is a difference between long-form writing and long-winded writing.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#405

Post by badpun »

red_admiral wrote: post #402
matwood wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am frustrated that the USA’s money advice largely comes from billionaires. One of my big issues with the 'follow your passion' advice is it almost always comes from people who are already rich. And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies. As a young person, don't follow your passion. Instead, figure out the fastest way to economic security and once there, then figure out…

There's a saying from Eastern Europe: first learn a trade, then follow your dreams. If the dreams don't work out, you'll still be able to earn a living.

Andrzej Sapkowski (polish fantasy author, of "The Witcher" fame), when asked about his advice for young people who want to be professional writers like him said: "get into an honest and, if at all possible, profitable profession". We're not dreamers here in EE like people in US, we're not reach enough to afford it :)

Re: How to Do Great Work

#406

Post by nicbou »

_x5ft wrote: post #400
nicbou wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment above was fair criticism. This one is needlessly mean. Pay attention to the community guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for your note, and for all you do to help moderate HN. Moderators like you help keep the site honest. I have reviewed the link you provided. I agree with the guidelines noted therein. I asked some of my peers to give an objective read of my comment and they found it an accurate reflection of how they too responded to the posted essay. I cannot identify anything about it that was contrary to what is observed…

I'm not a moderator, just a fellow user.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#407

Post by badpun »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #395
badpun wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, Ancient Greeks had it figured out already. Aristoteles wrote: "make war to have pace. Do business to enjoy leisure". That's the natural proclivity of 99% human beings. The other 1%, for whatever internal reason, does work for work's sake, and is often pushing civilization forward.

People with high-paying careers rarely choose to radically reduce their work hours after achieving financial security. I don't think the idea of doing great work often enters the equation.

> People with high-paying careers rarely choose to radically reduce their work hours after achieving financial security.

Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually expect them to fully retire in their fourties or fifties, once they no longer need more money.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#408

Post by sanderjd »

yowlingcat wrote: post #304
phforms wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can think of many examples of mediocre work resulting in self made financial success.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#409

Post by sanderjd »

yowlingcat wrote: post #388
jebarker wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we disagree on what constitutes self-made financial success, but it seems to me that most wealthy people have not done great work at all. It's entirely possible, and fairly common, to become financially independent by grinding away at mediocrity or even actively being shitty.

Oh no, I agree with you there. Most wealthy people are not self-made, which supports your point. Maybe that's where the sleight of hand occurs -- many if not all wealthy people will pass it off as being self-made, when only a small fraction of those instances are the case. But I do think you will see hard work playing a large role in that fraction of cases.

No, I really think you're mistaking this. Some of the easiest ways to become wealthy - or let's say "financially independent", because it's a more clear-cut term - are doing useful and well-compensated work, that is definitely not "great work" in the essay's sense. Think dentists and most doctors and lawyers, and also lots of different kinds of "businesspeople", including software engineers at big successful companies. Think about the people you see on a private golf course that they have a house next to; those people are all wealthy, some of them inherited it, sure, but many of them just plugged away at lucrative jobs and saved and invested well. That's not what the essay is talking about. It is a much easier way to achieve financial success than attempting to do "great work" in the essay's sense.

Personally I have had a tendency to waffle back and forth between the ambition to "great work" and the ambition (and at times, necessity) to do lucrative work. And for me, thus far, the two things have been almost entirely negatively correlated; I have given up the lucrative path to seek something I hope will be "great", or given up the "great work" path to seek something I know will be lucrative.

To bring this back into the lens of the article, I do think that for people who are not already financially independent, this can / should / is just one more constraint in the search through this space of "what should I work on". Some "great work" is lucrative while a lot is not. Financially independent people have the privilege to choose freely among the two kinds, while the rest of us have to focus on the lucrative kind to at least some degree.

Re: How to Do Great Work

#410

Post by sanderjd »

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'm inclined to agree with you about whether this is the best path to a good life.

But I also don't think the essay actually does romanticize "great work". I read it as, "if you are the kind of person who naturally has this kind of ambition, this essay will speak to you, and if you aren't that kind of person, it won't". That is, I think it's necessary for you to be that kind of person, in order to read the essay as a romanticism. And clearly you have that in you, as your anecdote about piano demonstrates. And even though you have concluded that this is not a good facet of your personality, it's hard to truly shake it.

Personally, this plight really speaks to me (and I'm sorry if I'm just projecting that onto you...). When I really think about it, the happiest most chill times in my life and career are when I've just been plugging away doing useful and well-compensated work, but definitely not "great work" in the essay's sense. I have told myself many times to just do that and do fun and enriching things with my friends and family and be content with that. But it never fails, I always get the nag eventually, to be more ambitious, to try to do work that is more impactful, more "great". So this essay spoke to me, because of that trait I seem to have, even if I'm totally unconvinced that it is the best path to a good life.

And I don't think this is universal. I think nearly everyone I know would instead read this essay as "that sounds exhausting and terrible" and, as the essay alludes to at the end, would not make it very deep into it.

But yeah, striving to do the kind of "great work" that this essay is talking about is certainly not what I want for my children... The best outcome is succeeding after a huge life-impacting amount of work, and the more likely outcome is constant nagging doubt without any pot of gold at the end.

Post reply on HN