How to Do Great Work

“Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists. Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.”

Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making

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Four-step universal process for discovery

“Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it. When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying 'I'll just read over what I've got so far.' Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.”

Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Strategic lies overcome activation threshold

“Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.”

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Brain smooths gaps; discoveries require noticing them

“Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else.”

Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Year-scale delay disguised as daily productivity

“The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if 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 every day. They get something done, rather than nothing. If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth.”

Operations & Execution · Economics & Markets

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Small consistent action compounds exponentially

“The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure 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's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.”

Strategy & Decision Making · Creativity & Innovation

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Discovery requires action, not just analysis

“There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. What are you excessively curious about, curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.”

Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Excessive curiosity reveals your edge

“Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction? It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard.”

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Obvious after fixing broken mental model

“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.”

Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

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Two criteria suffice: aptitude plus interest

“The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue, as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?”

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Honesty as advantage, not sacrifice

“Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack. You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.”

Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Diffuse thinking requires focused substrate

“One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect.”

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Strictness reveals model-reality conflicts

“Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned. Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn't, this will at least get you started.”

Operations & Execution · Creativity & Innovation

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Start simple, evolve through versions

“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 things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones.”

Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making

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Volume increases discovery odds