How to Do Great Work

Genuinely not sure what you mean — it seems like the standard definition of ambition.

How would you define it?

> It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works.

It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well:

> The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside.

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. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other.

Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.

As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty.

Then there’s this:

> Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.

> [18] The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken. Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else.

First, anything can be either literally or metaphorically described as a religion, so that makes this an empty principle, since it either covers nothing or everything or both. (“Cheesecake is my religion.” Etc.)

Second, the footnote is literally impenetrable to me. Honestly. I can discern no coherent meaning. That everyone could adopt a principle or belief does not mean it must be false just because everyone uniformly and indistinguishably believes it and therefore nobody disbelieves it. Whether people can be distinguished from one another with respect to some belief (say, that in base 10 arithmetic that 1+1=2) has nothing to do with the truth vel non of that belief.

And honestly, I am genuinely struggling to fathom a mind that could not only believe that statement but believe it so deeply that they breezily announce it as obviously true. So it’s funny that this is the next paragraph:

> What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think?

The only, and I mean, literally only, interpretation that I can come up with is that PG is using “religion” and “religious” in enough different ways that when he mixes them, as it seems to do here, he doesn’t notice. Or he means them ONLY in the sense of “too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think.” But I have a very strong suspicion that he is definitely not using them only in that way.

After staying at a job for too long by 2008 and barely surviving the recession at a startup until 2012 and also getting married the same year and (gladly) becoming the father to my then 9 and 14 year old stepsons, I changed jobs six times and pushed myself to get ahead until 2020 and falling into a mid level position at BigTech (cloud consulting department).

I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”.

I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely.

I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966

I’ve never been happier not trying to be “great” and being “content”

It’s Paul Graham. He’s a poster child for essays about how there’s one way to do things.

If you want to have a successful internet business, code in lisp.