This essay was about 39 pages
~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.
How to Do Great Work
431–440 of 464 posts
Re: How to Do Great Work
#432This essay is about 39 pages
~ 11,756 words and the average book page has 300 words.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#433[dead]
Re: How to Do Great Work
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m also amazed how people will take a self-improvement article like this, and take it so personally. Like yes, pg was lucky to have a lot of things work out for them, but that doesn’t mean his advice here (which encompasses more than just “work hard”) is invalid for everyone just because it’s invalid for some people.
It's a post-factum rationalization of personal experience possibly mixed with some anecdata. Fine as a motivational material but that's all this is.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s a survival bias for all winners. But the pendulum swings too far if you believe you can’t learn anything at all from winners.
Can you say that, for all winners of any field, there’s no correlation between the winners and the losers that is not attributable to luck?
Re: How to Do Great Work
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely not sure what you mean — it seems like the standard definition of ambition. How would you define it?
Ambition has a large dynamic range. Shooting for greatness is closer to the extremes.
?
The article says “very” ambitious. So there’s no contradiction here
Re: How to Do Great Work
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s literally a note that says the text assumes you’re very ambitious. If you have no desire to work towards some definition of “greatness”, I assume that you’re not ambitious, and the text doesn’t apply to you. Which is ok! You don’t need to be ambitious, but it also means you shouldn’t take this essay so personally.
Ambition is a pretty ambiguous term for what I think—here—means “A strong yearning for a type of success characterised by western capitalist-individualistic schema of wealth and status.” Cool if you want that I guess. But it’s narrow af.
Can you give me an example of a very ambitious goal that doesn’t fall under the western definition you posted, and yet, can not benefit from the article?
Re: How to Do Great Work
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s literally a note that says the text assumes you’re very ambitious. If you have no desire to work towards some definition of “greatness”, I assume that you’re not ambitious, and the text doesn’t apply to you. Which is ok! You don’t need to be ambitious, but it also means you shouldn’t take this essay so personally.
This is a oddly very narrow view of ambition.
Why
Re: How to Do Great Work
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this while they're discussing a specific object level problem and see how that goes.
I don't really follow. You've quoted a few statements and I also don't know what you mean by a specific object level problem. Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too hungry.
There are certain complexities that only seem (currently) accessible from an abstract state of mind.
For example, people (including right here on HN) will often enthusiastically agree that they are subjective to various cognitive flaws when discussing a psychology paper on the subject, but this fact typically cannot be realized or even considered when discussing specific political matters. Ironically, genuine intelligence and knowledge often seems to make the problem even worse.
And of course, all of this theory is subject to the theory itself!
Re: How to Do Great Work
#439My problem with Paul Graham's work is he keeps pushing on nature over nurture. Most work can actually be learned and you don't need a "natural aptitude" for it. This is especially true of knowledge work like programming, but also true of things like 'musical' or 'acting' or anything else. Most things can be learned. I wish Paul Graham would stop pushing that silly outdated concept of "natural aptitude".
IMO this comment goes too far in the other direction. There is a lot of "natural aptitude" in what we can learn, and more specifically, what we can learn to do well. I can theoretically learn ballet, but I have no "natural aptitude" and so I will never be even OK at it. Similarly, my wife could try to learn programming, but her brain isn't able to make sense of how programming works. The big thing is that just because you don't have "natural aptitude" for something doesn't make you a worse human. It just means your strengths are elsewhere.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#440I 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.…
> 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. Reading the essay I didn't see a reference to "the betterment of a corporate profit". Doing good work doesn't mean starting a startup, if this is what you meant.
I agree. I read most of this as an internally facing focus. I feel like now days we are so cynical. You can't take pride in your work, or want to do a good job because you'll just be "doing it for corporate profit". To me, it's more internally focused, learning and building for your own benefit, because you want to know more or do it a bit better. I think the big thing is that you're not competing against anyone else; rather, you're just trying to do and be a bit better than who you were.