[deleted]
How to Do Great Work
51–60 of 464 posts
Re: How to Do Great Work
#52Mary Helen Immordino Yang has some interesting thoughts about how to change education to make it nudge kids towards doing more interesting work:
Re: How to Do Great Work
#53Hmmm… > At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. I’m 53 and some of my greatest joys still come from well executed Lego builds. Wonder if I’m stuck in a rut :/
I “rediscovered” LEGO in my early 30’s. Turns out when you’re an adult, LEGO isn’t that expensive and you can just buy a set . Walk into a store and walk out with a brand new set! It’s an amazing and dangerous freedom. 3 short years later and I have more sets than space. Now all I need is the time and space I had as a kid to treat LEGO as a tool for invention. Build stuff out of imagination, not a blueprint. Then aga…
[dead]
Re: How to Do Great Work
#54> Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application…
Yes! I've found this approach very useful with my own projects. I might not be out here inventing C++ or Linux, but it's actually not too hard to find projects where you can apply well known computing techniques or technologies to a new domain to do something truly new. I think this is really motivational because doing something new and showing the world is really fun!
> I might not be out here inventing C++
thank you!
Re: How to Do Great Work
#55I haven't finished this yet, will take more than one sitting to digest, but I'm already 90% sure I'm going to disagree with this one a lot.
I like to validate people's advice by playing it out in hypotheticals, so let's take some random fields people may think they want to be great at, and apply this advice: chess, piano, philosophy, quantum physics, soccer. I think it's self-evident that his algorithm isn't suited for the wide set of cases.
Here's my alternative proposal:
- If you're interested in a field, first ask, what % of people who dedicate their life to that field get any kind of fame/wealth/recognition (or whatever greatness means to you). So if we're talking chess, and you're already 14 and can't play, you have a 0% chance of getting to the top 100. Or if it's being a famous writer good to know what your base odds are.
- Look up people who RECENTLY (within 30 years) succeeded in this field and look for patterns. I know 0 famous philosophers of the last 30 years, but the closest ones would probably be youtube philosophers. So maybe that's the current meta.
- Look at the power-structures that determine success in the field (soccer is a fair game, art is judged by a few powerful tastemakers, news may be judged by clicks, some academia is judged by splash), decide if you are okay with the system and think you can excel in this system. Don't become a professional writer because "You have something to say," become a writer because "You have something other people want to hear."
That's all I got for now, it's his blog post not mine.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#56It feels like this takes a very narrow definition of greatness which is more aligned to innovation and "What will make you famous" or "What will be commercially successful". From plant life and human health all the way up to nation states, there are lots of people doing great work just making sure that things keep running smoothly.
There are also lots of innovations in keeping things running smoothly. And the wonks in those fields recognize those innovations and those innovative folks do tend to enjoy _some_ level of fame or notoriety (if not at a general public level).
Re: How to Do Great Work
#57I quite like to read an article like this from time to time, because it can be motivating when your ambitions are low.
However, I also believe that it can be detrimental and even lead to burn-out or depression if you actually believe that putting in the work, and putting it in in a good way, will lead you to success. This seems like a recipe for disaster.
Is it not more likely that most historically successful people just stumbled on the promising gaps almost by accident? The concepts of "thrownness" and "survivorship bias" might be relevant to look up in this context. Is it possible to train curiosity, ambition, intelligence, passion, perseverance, if you did not grow up with it?
Re: How to Do Great Work
#58> Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. I spend eight hours+ a day supporting my addiction to food and shelter. Why would I spend my free time working toward “greatness” instead of doing hobbies I enjoy and spending time with friends and family? Any other time I have I’m spending working out and training for runs - neither of which I will ever be…
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.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#59Hmmm… > At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. I’m 53 and some of my greatest joys still come from well executed Lego builds. Wonder if I’m stuck in a rut :/
I used to be thrilled with big sets because they were… well, big.
Now, I find Lego building relaxing with the occasional delight at a technique the master builders came up with to create some sort of texture or shape using those bricks.
Re: How to Do Great Work
#60I 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.