How to Do Great Work (2023)

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Newton, Gauss, Euler. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. Faraday, Darwin, Einstein.

(If you're looking for greatness on their scale, then of course the number will be "not that large" because work that great is very rare. But there are plenty of artists and scientists and whatnot achieving lesser levels of greatness and most of them are not getting large investment returns.)

Maybe you wanted to make a point about some aspects of the authors biography invalidated some claims they make? That would be interesting, then it would be good to be more specific regarding what you are refering to more concretely, though.

>The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.

>In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.

Bull-shit. The set of all things you enjoy and have aptitude for is much larger than the set of things you can make money on. There's a reason why Paul Graham chased coding and making an e-store in the 90s and not becoming a great philosopher, which he seems to have natural interest in (and he probably thinks he has quite a bit of aptitude for it).

That reason is $$$. I've found in my time that the number one rule of making $$$ is that you must chase $$$. It doesn't knock at your door, it doesn't come when you least expect it. $$$ is degrading in that you must submit yourself to it. If the $$$ is in code then you code and there's no room for individuality beyond that. It's genuflect or be poor. That's why all these rich people narrowly chase code or similar cash cows. The number two and three rules is chase it a lot and chase it efficiently. If you chase something else a lot and efficiently you will still be poor.

Charitably maybe the concept of chasing $$$ is so ingrained in these people that it's not a conscious decision to them. That seems to be what he says anyway. You could call that greed and I think a lot of brilliant people don't have it to the same degree that most billionaires do so failing to acknowledge it even by accident leads to gatekeeping money.

Can you go to a poor area and change it with a speech about ambition? Likely not that much. The issue there are not habits, it's an environment that disables dreaming big.

PG's text is for stragglers who were raised in environments that allow them to dream big, but they don't for some reason. That is such a low fraction of the world's potential, that seems like a waste of time.

Changing those environments I mentioned earlier is very hard. Absolutely brutal endeavour. I know hundreds of kids whose biggest dream is getting a high status paying job, because the entire environment shapes them for that. Those who can occasionally notice they can dream bigger ("doing great work") often feel intimidated, not uninspired. They can't afford to risk anything.

To me the greater change is possible on those environments who are intimidated, not the stragglers who feel uninspired.

There's nothing dishonest about what he is saying and if you think you can make money just by making it your optimising function then I suggest following it because that's the most pro-social thing you can do. The literal economy is design in such a way!