October 2020One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great workis the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not anirrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early onwhere they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. Youhave to push through this stage to reach the great work that liesbeyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach thestage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continuepast it. They're too frightened even to start.Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame.Imagine how much more we'd do.Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habitsat work here are not very deeply rooted.Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It hasalways happened, but till the last few centuries it happened soslowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn'tneed customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitiousprojects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we wouldjudge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don'trealize they're a special case.Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can dobetter is that it's already starting to happen. There are alreadya few places that are living in the future in this respect. SiliconValley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-soundingidea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home.In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challengeto your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but toswitch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won'twork to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when Imeet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I'vehad a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means beingpractically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknownpeople. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown atyou and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with apower-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obviousif you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomesurgent.But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can becomewidespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trickused by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrativetrick, and those tend to spread quickly.Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harshon early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seemclever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups,those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Justnot when their predictions are weighted by outcome.But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas.If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope,consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that ifyou try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.In some countries this is not just an individual failing but partof the national culture.I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome theseimpulses because they're morally better. [1]The reason many hopeyou'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investorsthis incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeedbecause they hope you'll make them rich in the process. But manyother people you meet can hope to benefit in some way from yoursuccess. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you'refamous, that they've known you since way back.But even if Silicon Valley's encouraging attitudeis rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into asort of benevolence. Encouraging startups has been practiced forso long that it has become a custom. Now it just seems that that'swhat one does with startups.Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooledby impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that.But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, andplagued with asterisks. [2] If you use revenue as the test, SiliconValley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's.And because it works, it will spread.There's a lot more to new ideas than new startup ideas, of course.The fear of making something lame holds people back in every field.But Silicon Valley shows how quickly customs can evolve to supportnew ideas. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is notso deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.___Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a forcemore powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoidthat?This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completelyeliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steersyou toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily,the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.People have already discovered several techniques that work. Hardymentions two in A Mathematician's Apology: Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it.If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, thatwill compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initialresults. If you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goalworth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even thoughboth components are wrong.It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident.I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people areslightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible.Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate ofone's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken?Because this error compensates for other sources of error in theopposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you againstboth other people's skepticism and your own.Ignorance has a similar effect. It's safe to make the mistake ofjudging early work as finished work if you're a sufficiently laxjudge of finished work. I doubt it's possible to cultivate thiskind of ignorance, but empirically it's a real advantage, especiallyfor the young.Another way to get through the lame phase of ambitious projects isto surround yourself with the right people — to create an eddy inthe social headwind. But it's not enough to collect people who arealways encouraging. You'd learn to discount that. You need colleagueswho can actually tell an ugly duckling from a baby swan. The peoplebest able to do this are those working on similar projects of theirown, which is why university departments and research labs work sowell. You don't need institutions to collect colleagues. Theynaturally coalesce, given the chance. But it's very much worthaccelerating this process by seeking out other people trying to donew things.Teachers are in effect a special case of colleagues. It's a teacher'sjob both to see the promise of early work and to encourage you tocontinue. But teachers who are good at this are unfortunately quiterare, so if you have the opportunity to learn from one, take it.[3]For some it might work to rely on sheer discipline: to tell yourselfthat you just have to press on through the initial crap phase andnot get discouraged. But like a lot of "just tell yourself" advice,this is harder than it sounds. And it gets still harder as you getolder, because your standards rise. The old do have one compensatingadvantage though: they've been through this before.It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rateof change. You won't worry so much about doing bad work if you cansee it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier thisis. So when you start something new, it's good if you can spend alot of time on it. That's another advantage of being young: youtend to have bigger blocks of time.Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be ofa different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying thatit's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it'sjust a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lowerstandard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert itto something more.[4]This will be easier if you use a medium that lets you work fast anddoesn't require too much commitment up front. It's easier to convinceyourself that something is just a sketch when you're drawing in anotebook than when you're carving stone. Plus you get initial resultsfaster. [5][6]It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it asa way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then evenif the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it.If the problem is sharply enough defined, failure itself isknowledge: if the theorem you're trying to prove turns out tobe false, or you use a structural member of a certain size andit fails under stress, you've learned something, even if itisn't what you wanted to learn.[7]One motivation that works particularly well for me is curiosity.I like to try new things just to see how they'll turn out. We startedY Combinator in this spirit, and it was one of main things thatkept me going while I was working on Bel. Having worked for so longwith various dialects of Lisp, I was very curious to see what itsinherent shape was: what you'd end up with if you followed theaxiomatic approach all the way.But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourselfto avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts. The thingyou're trying to trick yourself into believing is in fact the truth.A lame-looking early version of an ambitious project truly is morevaluable than it seems. So the ultimate solution may be to teachyourself that.One way to do it is to study the histories of people who'vedone great work. What were they thinking early on? What was thevery first thing they did? It can sometimes be hard to get anaccurate answer to this question, because people are often embarrassedby their earliest work and make little effort to publish it. (Theytoo misjudge it.) But when you can get an accurate picture of thefirst steps someone made on the path to some great work, they'reoften pretty feeble.[8]Perhaps if you study enough such cases, you can teach yourself tobe a better judge of early work. Then you'll be immune both to otherpeople's skepticism and your own fear of making something lame.You'll see early work for what it is.Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early worktoo harshly is to realize that our attitudes toward it are themselvesearly work. Holding everything to the same standard is a crudeversion 1. We're already evolving better customs, and we can alreadysee signs of how big the payoff will be.Notes[1]This assumption may be too conservative. There is some evidencethat historically the Bay Area has attracted a different sort of person than, say, New York City.[2]One of their great favorites is Theranos. But the most conspicuousfeature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valleyfirms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valleyinvestors weren't.[3]I made two mistakes about teachers when I was younger. Icared more about professors' research than their reputations asteachers, and I was also wrong about what it meant to be a goodteacher. I thought it simply meant to be good at explaining things.[4]Patrick Collison points out that you can go past treatingsomething as a hack in the sense of a prototype and onward to thesense of the word that means something closer to a practical joke: I think there may be something related to being a hack that can be powerful — the idea of making the tenuousness and implausibility a feature. "Yes, it's a bit ridiculous, right? I'm just trying to see how far such a naive approach can get." YC seemed to me to have this characteristic.[5]Much of the advantage of switching from physical to digitalmedia is not the software per se but that it lets you start somethingnew with little upfront commitment.[6]John Carmack adds: The value of a medium without a vast gulf between the early work and the final work is exemplified in game mods. The original Quake game was a golden age for mods, because everything was very flexible, but so crude due to technical limitations, that quick hacks to try out a gameplay idea weren't all that far from the official game. Many careers were born from that, but as the commercial game quality improved over the years, it became almost a full time job to make a successful mod that would be appreciated by the community. This was dramatically reversed with Minecraft and later Roblox, where the entire esthetic of the experience was so explicitly crude that innovative gameplay concepts became the overriding value. These "crude" game mods by single authors are now often bigger deals than massive professional teams' work.[7]Lisa Randall suggests that we treat new things as experiments. That way there's no such thing as failing, since you learn something no matter what. You treat it like an experiment in the sense that if it really rules something out, you give up and move on, but if there's some way to vary it to make it work better, go ahead and do that[8]Michael Nielsen points out that the internet has made thiseasier, because you can see programmers' first commits, musicians'first videos, and so on.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, Patrick Collison, JessicaLivingston, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading draftsof this.
