July 2023If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lotof different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decidedto find out by making it.Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someoneworking in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of theintersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it doeshave a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you chooseneeds to have three qualities: it has to be something you have anatural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and thatoffers 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 forand great interest in.[1]That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. Whenyou're young you don't know what you're good at or what differentkinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may noteven exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at14, most have to figure it out.The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're notsure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It'sgood to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveriescome from noticing connections between different fields.Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work"mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to dogreat work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving yourpart of it.What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitinglyambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves,exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitinglyambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teachyourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unansweredquestions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and therudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you letit have its way, will also show you what to work on.What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree thatwould bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, thenext step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of thefrontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from adistance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to getclose to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, becauseyour brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simplermodel of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questionsabout things that everyone else took for granted. [2]If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work oftenhas a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math.It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears,embrace it.Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interestedin them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excitedabout some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you haveenough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking,that's as good a bet as you'll find.[3]Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier,notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyonewho's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possibleto prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but theempirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeplyinterested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than merediligence ever could.The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and thedesire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, andthat combination is the most powerful of all.The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crackin the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole worldinside.Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuringout what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can'ttell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Whichmeans the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something foryears before you know how much you like it or how good you are atit. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learningabout, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you chooselate based on very incomplete information.[4]The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes intwo forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one thatgrows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and themore you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide whatto do.The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. Theyexpect you to commit to a field long before you could know whatit's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimaltrajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admittedthat the system not only can't do much to help you figure out whatto work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehowmagically guess as a teenager. They don't tell you, but I will:when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own.Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest willfind themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down onthe assumption that everyone does.What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't knowwhat to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively,assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action.But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you readbiographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable howmuch luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a resultof a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up.So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way todo that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people,read lots of books, ask lots of questions.[5]When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as youlearn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is verydifferent from what you do in high school math classes. So you needto give different types of work a chance to show you what they'relike. But a field should become increasingly interesting as youlearn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things thanother people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, thebetter. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong tastefor work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to findnew things if you're looking where few have looked before.One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you likeeven the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in thecourse of working on one thing you discover another that's moreexciting, don't be afraid to switch.If you're making something for people, make sure it's somethingthey actually want. The best way to do this is to make somethingyou yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the toolyou want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests,this will also get you your initial audience.This should follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the mostexciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reasonI mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong.Instead of making what they want, they try to make what someimaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go downthat route, you're lost.[6]There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you'retrying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion,fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. Butif you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proofagainst all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts ofobstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So itdoes take a good deal of boldness.But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning.In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hardon excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come ofit. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just tryto preserve certain invariants.The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievementsyou can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get richby deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal,but you can't discover natural selection that way.I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategyis not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems mostinteresting and gives you the best options for the future. I callthis approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've donegreat work seem to have done it.Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working onit is not always straightforward. There will be times when some newidea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight towork. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren'tlike that.You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's atechnique to working, just as there is to sailing.For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work toohard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns:fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health.The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on thetype. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do forfour or five hours a day.Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, tryto arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in.You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working.You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initialthreshold. Don't worry about this; it's the nature of work, not aflaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, bothper day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in thesense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it'sok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get overit.It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do greatwork, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'mreluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself bysaying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minuteslater I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, andI'm off.Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's ok to lieto yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example.Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could itbe?"This is one case where the young have an advantage. They're moreoptimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimismis ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to bemore work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercisein tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the bestwork happens in what was meant to be the final stage.Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of whatyou're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps youdiscover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie afterall.[7]Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and perproject — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-projectprocrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off startingthat ambitious project from year to year because the time isn'tquite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you canget a lot not done.[8]One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that itusually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting arounddoing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. Soper-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-dayprocrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am Iworking on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's okif the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerousas you get older.[9]Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most peoplean unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think ofthis time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find thework sufficiently engaging as it's happening.There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for yearsat things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is nothow great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistentlyon something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to takestock, you're surprised how far you've come.The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulativeeffect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, butif you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key:consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done everyday. They get something done, rather than nothing.If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Mostpeople who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping tothink about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon:the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more.Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the morenew fans they'll bring you.The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flatin the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponentialcurve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponentialgrowth in its early stages.Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it'sworth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But sincewe underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly doneunconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phaseof learning something new because they know from experience thatlearning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow theiraudience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do.If people consciously realized they could invest in exponentialgrowth, many more would do it.Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind ofundirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lyingin bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander alittle, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve byfrontal attack.You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from thisphenomenon, though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. Thedaydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feedsit questions.[10]Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also importantto avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let yourmind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at thatmoment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work outof the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking onthe distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field.Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don'tknow what you're aiming for.And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try tobe the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been madeby so many people in so many different fields that it might be worththinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is aphenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — wherealmost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short.Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitativelydifferent thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good issimply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.[11]Fortunately there's a kind of economy of scale here. Though it mightseem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be thebest, in practice you often end up net ahead. It's exciting, andalso strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it'seasier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.One way to aim high is to try to make something that people willcare about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions mattermore than your contemporaries', but because something that stillseems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the bestjob you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctiveway.Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Tryingto is affectation.Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you isdoing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and whileyou're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what showsin the work.[12]The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. Theyoften feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about thatproblem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficientlyambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you'renot a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work andyour identity will take care of itself."Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but howwould you express this idea positively? How would you say what tobe, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you'reearnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similarvices.The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We'retaught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kindof sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see newideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You'retrying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how canyou have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slightpositive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willingto admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistakenabout something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.[13]Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality.Informality is much more important than its grammatically negativename implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It meansfocusing on what matters instead of what doesn't.What formality and affectation have in common is that as well asdoing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doingit. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of beinggood. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work:they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that'sbasically the definition of a nerd.Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you needin doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood.So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather thanthe one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticismsof them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense,and the route to great work is never easy.There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical andpessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage tobe optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like afool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. TheOld Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like afool. But that's advice for seeming smart. If you actually wantto discover new things, it's better to take the risk of tellingpeople your ideas.Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes aconscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice. But Idoubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest.It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough marginfor error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected,intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool.[14]Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself.It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middleof working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarilyhave to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take someeffort; when there's something you need to redo, status quo biasand laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beatthis ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revertto what I have now?Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fitjust because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot ofeffort.Indeed, in some kinds of work it's good to strip whatever you'redoing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'llunderstand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself aboutwhether there's anything real there.Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn fromthe arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant"applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematicalelegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math.Elegance can be a long-term bet, though. Laborious solutions willoften have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot ofeffort and they're hard to understand, both of which impress people,at least temporarily.Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparativelylittle effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn'thave to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hardto say whether you're creating something or discovering it.When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation ordiscovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourselfas a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problemto work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best caseit's more like creating something. In the best case you create thefield in the process of exploring it.)Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make itgratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definitionwill be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side ofeliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefitwill be.Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being somethingothers build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas thatothers could use, or exposing questions that others could answer.The best ideas have implications in many different areas.If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truerthan you intended.True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to betrue and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see newideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiersof knowledge.In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity,and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name,because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possibleto have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a greatdeal of what's often called technical ability — and yet not havemuch of this.I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading.Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkersthrow off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an anglegrinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understandvery well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the mostoriginal thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he gotdivorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to seeoriginality separated from expertise like that made its nature allthe more clear.I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but thereare definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. Forexample, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you'reworking on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to haveoriginal ideas. They come from trying to build or understand somethingslightly too difficult.[15]Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a goodway to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, amissing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you.Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'lloften find you have new ideas there. The journey itself oftendislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit.Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.[16]It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideasif you explore lots of different topics, partly because it givesthe angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly becauseanalogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though,or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute itaccording to something more like a power law.[17]Be professionallycurious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feedsoriginality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationshipis closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality;it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And sincequestions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosityat its best is a creative force.Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists ofseeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen anew idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of thisbefore?When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probablya good one.Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically havingnew ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction?It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change theway you look at the world. We see the world through models thatboth help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideasbecome obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard.That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover:they're easy to see after you do something hard.One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than otherpeople. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues wherethey bash against reality. Most people don't want to see theseclues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attachedto their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tendto ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuousit may seem in retrospect.To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage insteadof looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see thewild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he waslooking for new ideas as because he was stricter.The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxicalas it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helpsto be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. From thepoint of view of the old model, which everyone including you initiallyshares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because newideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seemperfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the worldthey brought with them. But they didn't at the time; it took thegreater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generallyaccepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad tomost people, or someone would have already explored it. So whatyou're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind ofcrazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Oftenideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind ofcrazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereasideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoybreaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two casesbeing aggressively and passively independent-minded.The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rulesdon't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additionalenergy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity ofa project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get itstarted.The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhapseven to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders oftenmake new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions actsas a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspiesalso seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs.Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination.In popular culture they're opposed. But popular culture has a brokenmodel in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivialones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking areopposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakerscan be truly strict.An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You dosee it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconsciousshoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too muchwork, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: ifyou could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someoneelse to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down toprotect you.You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the otherdirection: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherishedbut mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuableideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. Soanything that can be described either literally or metaphoricallyas a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow.Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.[18]What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of beingtoo attached to some principle that might not be as self-evidentas they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?People show much more originality in solving problems than indeciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisinglyconservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dreamof being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working onfashionable problems.One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems thansolutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupyyou for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. Buteven so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merelyresponding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problemsare undervalued.One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is theproblem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't.Great work often takes something that already exists and shows itslatent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you'reinterested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't lettheir skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There'sno hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupiedelsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. Andthere's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas thatwould otherwise be wasted.But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitlyunfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn'tseem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these?By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way,and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your headthat says you should only be working on "important" problems.You do need to work on important problems, but almost everyone istoo conservative about what counts as one. And if there's an importantbut overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it's probably alreadyon your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if youwere going to take a break from "serious" work to work on somethingjust because it would be really interesting, what would you do? Theanswer is probably more important than it seems.Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more thanoriginality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the peoplewho discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely theinitial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the keyto the whole game.Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideasis about the ratio of question to answer in their composition.People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight wasin the question.Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're usedin schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before beinganswered, like unstable particles. But a really good question canbe much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall toearth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? Byeven asking such questions you were already in excitingly novelterritory.Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry aroundwith you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance ofnoticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticingthat two unanswered questions are the same.Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work oftencomes from returning to a question you first noticed years before— in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about.People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthfuldreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthfulquestions alive.[19]This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most fromthe popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts arecertain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so longas (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one elseunderstands them either.Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new ideais discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzledabout something. Which means that originality consists partly ofpuzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough withthe world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them,but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.[20]It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this isone of those situations where the rich get richer, because the bestway to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones.Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a threadprotruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and itjust gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to beobviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predictthat. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone topredict how much will unravel if you pull on it.It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit ona lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. Theinitial versions of big things were often just experiments, or sideprojects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So startlots of small things.Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try,the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand,though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of thingsthat don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without alsohaving a lot of bad ones.[21]Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everythingthat's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun bytrying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when youdo look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier whenstarting means starting small; those two ideas fit together liketwo puzzle pieces.How do you get from starting small to doing something great? Bymaking successive versions. Great things are almost always made insuccessive versions. You start with something small and evolve it,and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious thananything you could have planned.It's particularly useful to make successive versions when you'remaking something for people — to get an initial version in frontof them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work.Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn't, this will at least getyou started.Don't try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. Thereare names for doing this with the first version (taking too longto ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these areboth merely instances of a more general principle.An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as atoy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it haseverything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow.[22]The alternative to starting with something small and evolving itis to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning doesusually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organizedto say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're goingto try x and see what happens." And it is more organized; it justdoesn't work as well.Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's anecessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's somethingyou have to do because you're working with inflexible media, orbecause you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. Ifyou keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have toplan as much, and your designs can evolve instead.Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, riskis proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for abet with high expected value. If you're not failing occasionally,you're probably being too conservative.Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's theyoung who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fearrisk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most.Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of workingon it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, andencountered questions few others have asked. And there's probablyno better source of questions than the ones you encounter in tryingto do something slightly too hard.Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantagesof age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy,time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge,efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some ofthe latter when young and keep some of the former when old.The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages theyhave. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggestis probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time.The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightlyfrivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to knowabout, just out of curiosity, or to try building something justbecause it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.That "slightly" is an important qualification. Spend time lavishlywhen you're young, but don't simply waste it. There's a big differencebetween doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doingsomething you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet,and possibly a better one than you think.[23]The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience,is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brainembraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fittogether perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, butoccasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardlyand jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to theidea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity notto.[24]So when you're learning about something for the first time, payattention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be temptedto ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you.And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keepprogressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten furtherinto the subject, come back and check if they're still there. Ifthey're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, theyprobably represent an undiscovered idea.One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experienceis to know what you don't have to worry about. The young know allthe things that could matter, but not their relative importance.So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry muchmore about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience.The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive atadulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you'veacquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't beable to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense inthe way of whatever type of work you want to do.Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools.We're so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to schoolas identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts ofstrange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child,there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of youwhat you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neitherclasses nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifactsof the way schools are usually designed.The sooner you overcome this passivity, the better. If you're stillin school, try thinking of your education as your project, and yourteachers as working for you rather than vice versa. That may seema stretch, but it's not merely some weird thought experiment. It'sthe truth economically, and in the best case it's the truthintellectually as well. The best teachers don't want to be yourbosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a sourceof advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like.In school they tell you what the problems are, and they're almostalways soluble using no more than you've been taught so far. Inreal life you have to figure out what the problems are, and youoften don't know if they're soluble at all.But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to winby hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. Youcan't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The wayto beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that othershave overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving youa "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it wouldbe to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influentialpeople.And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities thatimpress admissions officers and prize committees are quite differentfrom those required to do great work. The decisions of selectioncommittees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part ofa feedback loop, and very few are.People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothinginherently bad about that. There's no better way to learn howsomething works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor doescopying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is thepresence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.There's a good way to copy and a bad way. If you're going to copysomething, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still,unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributedphrase "Great artists steal." The really dangerous kind of copying,the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that's donewithout realizing it, because you're nothing more than a trainrunning on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the otherextreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination.[25]In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will bein some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in avacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you'refirst starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you'regoing to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Onceyou're established, you can react to your own. But while the formergets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the twocases are more similar than they seem.Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimesmakes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. Newdiscoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations ofexisting things, even by their discoverers, because there isn'tyet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.There are definitely some dangers to copying, though. One is thatyou'll tend to copy old things — things that were in their day atthe frontier of knowledge, but no longer are.And when you do copy something, don't copy every feature of it.Some will make you ridiculous if you do. Don't copy the manner ofan eminent 50 year old professor if you're 18, for example, or theidiom of a Renaissance poem hundreds of years later.Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeededdespite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are themost likely to be the flaws.This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people arejerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced thatbeing a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talentedis merely how they get away with it.One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something fromone field into another. History is so full of chance discoveriesof this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand bydeliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideasfrom quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors.Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact youcan sometimes learn more from things done badly than from thingsdone well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it'smissing.If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in oneplace, it's usually a good idea to visit for a while. It willincrease your ambition, and also, by showing you that these peopleare human, increase your self-confidence.[26]If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than youmight expect. Most people who are very good at something are happyto talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they'rereally good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist'sinterest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about theirhobbies.It may take some effort to find the people who are really good,though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places,particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyoneis engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universitiescan't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done indifferent departments varies immensely. Some departments have peopledoing great work; others have in the past; others never have.Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can'tbe done alone, and even if you're working on one that can be, it'sgood to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affectyou. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's betterto have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty goodones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging fromhistory: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggeststhat one's colleagues often make the difference between doing greatwork and not.How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In myexperience, when you do, you know. Which means if you're unsure,you probably don't. But it may be possible to give a more concreteanswer than that. Here's an attempt: sufficiently good colleaguesoffer surprising insights. They can see and do things that youcan't. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keepyou on your toes in this sense, you're probably over the threshold.Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but someprojects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of thoseis not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you'llhave to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude andinterest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, thereis no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn managementas a second language, or avoid such projects.[27]Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're workingon ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like aliving organism.Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do greatwork if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think ofyourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. Ifyou choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as arefuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism,it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used bysome of the greatest minds in history.Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, whichincreases your morale and helps you do even better work. But thiscycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doinggood work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Sinceit matters so much for this cycle to be running in the rightdirection, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work whenyou're stuck, just so you start to get something done.One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allowsetbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting.You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly consideringsetbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems alwaysinvolves some backtracking.Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is thedesire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn'tquite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, eithertry again, or backtrack and then try again."Never give up" is also not quite right. Obviously there are timeswhen it's the right choice to eject. A more precise version wouldbe: Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than youneed to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node.It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any morethan it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It dependshow fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain frombad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar,your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audiencein the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big.The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly withits size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news ifyou're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicatedaudience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of peoplegenuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come betweenyou and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable,but it's so liberating to escape it that you might be better offswitching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct.[28]The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on yourmorale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy andothers who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not alwayswhat you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy andavoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someoneyou need to take care of, that takes precedence.Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work,or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you'reambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition;so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you,or does and doesn't care.Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it'simportant to take care of it. That means exercising regularly,eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds ofdrugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercisebecause they're good for thinking.[29]People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyoneelse, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact,if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive.People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend tobecome bitter.It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people.The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is theopinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, justadds noise.The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator andsometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough,you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type ofwork is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choosethe problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasingsomething just because others are. In fact, don't let competitorsmake you do anything much more specific than work harder.Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knowsmore than you do about what's worth paying attention to.Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle thesecret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a singleword, my bet would be on "curiosity."That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just tobe curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you cannurture it and let it drive you.Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it willchoose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you tonotice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The wholeprocess is a kind of dance with curiosity.Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could.But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made itthis far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if soyou're already further along than you might realize, because theset of people willing to want to is small.The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal,mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, andluck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we canignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want todo great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest.Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest willcombine to yield an explosion of new ideas?Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many differentways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered.Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suitedfor is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically closematch. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it yourability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that bytrying.Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holdsthem back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuousto try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely ifyou tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculationis rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to dogreat work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shyaway from the question.So I'm going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do greatwork, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that.I wouldn't have done it to a general audience. But we already knowyou're interested.Don't worry about being presumptuous. You don't have to tell anyone.And if it's too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people haveworse problems than that. In fact you'll be lucky if it's the worstproblem you have.Yes, you'll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have towork hard. And if you're working on something you find veryinteresting, which you necessarily will if you're on the right path,the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of yourpeers'.The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?Notes[1]I don't think you could give a precise definition of whatcounts as great work. Doing great work means doing something importantso well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. Butthere's no threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree, andoften hard to judge at the time anyway. So I'd rather people focusedon developing their interests rather than worrying about whetherthey're important or not. Just try to do something amazing, andleave it to future generations to say if you succeeded.[2]A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies ineveryday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doingthis about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people'sreaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha![3]That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited aboutsomething most authorities discount, but you can't give a moreprecise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're startingto drift into the territory of cranks.[4]Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of findinga match between the current version of you and a list of knownproblems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That'swhy it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. Thesearch space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possibletypes of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possiblefuture versions of you.There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have torely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hopethe best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be;different types of work have been collected together as much byaccidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.[5]There are many reasons curious people are more likely to dogreat work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a widenet, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in thefirst place.[6]It can also be dangerous to make things for an audience youfeel is less sophisticated than you, if that causes you to talkdown to them. You can make a lot of money doing that, if you do itin a sufficiently cynical way, but it's not the route to great work.Not that anyone using this m.o. would care.[7]This idea I learned from Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology,which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in anyfield.[8]Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimatewhat we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage doneby procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done byprocrastinating for several years.[9]You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want,especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing workclose to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid fordoing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side.Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach yourwork is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fightto get time to do it.[10]If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relaxcycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in andthat you walk to and from.[11]There may be some very unworldly people who do great workwithout consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule tocover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except thebest.[12]This gets more complicated in work like acting, where thegoal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to beaffected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoidunintentional affectation.[13]It's safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionableif and only if they're also unfalsifiable. For example, it's safeto have the principle that everyone should be treated equally underthe law, because a sentence with a "should" in it isn't really astatement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. Andif there's no evidence that could disprove one of your principles,there can't be any facts you'd need to ignore in order to preserveit.[14]Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty.Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off intime, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.[15]Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact momentyou have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairlyrecently.[16]Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'mskeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.[17]For example you might give the nth most important topic(m-1)/m^n of your attention, for some m > 1. You couldn't allocateyour attention so precisely, of course, but this at least gives anidea of a reasonable distribution.[18]The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken.Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing todistinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else.[19]It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list ofquestions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you'renow in a position to do something about some of them.[20]The connection between originality and uncertainty causes astrange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certainthan the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper handin disputes, even though they're generally stupider. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.[21]Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas,you must have many ideas."[22]Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking astatement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantialcriticism can be made to stick.[23]One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask ifyou're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likelyto be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games whereyou create something is less likely to be a waste of time thanplaying games where you don't.[24]Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anythingpublicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supportsyour earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieveeternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people,having previously published opinions has an effect similar toideology, just in quantity 1.[25]In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of HenriettaMaria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then paintedhis own version to show how much better he was.[26]I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As ofthis writing, being in the same physical place has advantages thatare hard to duplicate, but that could change.[27]This is false when the work the other people have to do isvery constrained, as with SETI@home or Bitcoin. It may be possibleto expand the area in which it's false by defining similarlyrestricted protocols with more freedom of action in the nodes.[28]Corollary: Building something that enables people to go aroundintermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probablya good idea.[29]It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, becausethat frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, andthere is some historical evidence for it.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Pam Graham, Tom Howard,Patrick Hsu, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Henry Lloyd-Baker,Bob Metcalfe, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, CourtenayPipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, GarryTan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts.
