Sections:
Overview
Paul Graham's essay on "How To Do Great Work" begins with the following words:
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."
The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
As we're all both very ambitious and focused on doing great work, it felt appropriate to cover this essay as a sort of book in miniature. The essay itself comes in at a staggering 11,800 words or nearly 30 pages when printed.
How To Do Great Work explores curiosity, the source of originality, the relationship between breaking rules and new ideas, and how being naive is a form of independent mindedness. As well as why being self-indulgent helps you find overlooked problems, why big ideas are more often questions than answers, and why the best questions grow while you work to answer them.
A few fascinating bits of background on the essay:
In all, it took nearly 7 months to write. (Source)
It sprung out of a single paragraph in another essay he was writing. It seemed such an important topic that he cut it out and made it into its own essay. (Source)
Reflecting on this last point Paul shared: "It's strange to think that such a huge essay could grow out of one paragraph in another essay. But this has happened before. Beyond Smart began that way too. There's nothing like writing essays to give you ideas for essays." (Source)
It's the best meditation on the conditions and precursors from which Great Work arise. It feels a lot like the modern equivalent to Richard Hamming's talk at Bellcore in 1986 titled You and Your Research.
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The Big Ideas
While nothing beats reading the essay in its entirety, here's an attempt to sum up some of the big ideas:
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