How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham (Summarized)

Today we talk about the top-notch essay - How to Do Great Work - by Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a highly influential figure in the startup world, renowned for co-founding Y Combinator, an accelerator that has incubated successful companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe. Aside from this, he's also respected for his insightful essays on entrepreneurship, and for his pioneering work in developing the programming language Lisp.

His essays are quite renowned and recently he published one that shines among others and most startup resources on the internet. In other words, it is a must-read. The essay is quite long as it takes an average person about 30-45 minutes to read it. This post is meant to surface what is important from that essay, but to eagerly beckon you to read the essay in its entirety is an understatement. Do read it eventually if you find the time as you won't regret it.

Here are the main takeaways:

The recipe for great work is ability, interest, effort, and luck: Luck we cannot control, and if you are reading this article you are likely motivated enough to put in the effort. This means that ability and interest are the two most important aspects to focus on. PG encourages us to think about finding work where our ability and interest yield an explosion of new ideas.

How to hone in on your ability and interest to find the right field for you? Follow your interests and curiosities, and remember that the only way is by doing. If you want to be a doctor, spend one summer shadowing one and helping out. Taking a course is not going to help you as much. Focus on being curious and trying lots of things, reading lots of books, meeting lots of people, and asking a lot of questions.

Once you've found your field now what? Make incremental progress every day, as small as it might be. Make it a habit to finish what you start, and trick yourself into being incredibly productive by lying to yourself. Lie to yourself and say that you will only do 5 minutes of this task, and only accomplish 1/10th of the work right now. More often than not, once you get started you will get sucked into it, especially if you love what you are doing and are genuinely curious about it. Try to also schedule blocks of uninterrupted time to do focused work. Fragmenting your work into dozens of chunks throughout the day and being distracted will not yield productivity gains as focused work tends to do.

For complex problems, interweave focused parts of problem-solving, and focused parts of rest where you allow your mind to do something else (listen to a song, go for a walk, etc.). Don't worry, your subconscious mind is still working on the problem, so next time you go to your problem-solving session, you will have an edge.

Notice gaps in your field by being comfortable with breaking rules (in life and in general - this is a lifestyle and it translates to your work). Always question the status quo and try to learn as much as you can about your field until you feel like you know almost everything. That's why it helps to focus on something very specific. Once you feel like you know everything, start to question the fundamentals, really question them and see if they make sense. Many scientific and technical discoveries were the result of this.

Be earnest - which means to be intellectually honest with yourself and with the information you consume. Always seek the truth, and always look a layer deeper to question what is being said and the status quo. Being earnest allows you to do great work easier and faster because your guiding compass of truth is well aligned.

Do not be afraid to fail. If you seldom fail, then you are being too conservative. The younger you are, the more you can afford to fail because you are time rich. The older you are, maybe you can't fail as much but you will have the wisdom to fail with grace and quickly pivot.

Create solutions and products so quickly, that the first version will be one that you will be embarrassed about and people call a toy. Most great products started that way, and it is only through many iterations of improvement that they turned into the monoliths they are today (e.g. Google, Uber, ChatGPT, etc.)

Remember that the education industrial complex in the world is broken. The real world does not work by studying a rubric to game a score on a test. It is far more complex than this. Instead, focus on critical thinking and being curious. A teacher who sees a curious student that thinks outside the box, and is willing to lead their discovery will consider that student to be far more valuable. This might help your grade, and even if it doesn't, the real world will recognize this in a heartbeat (as long as you don't flunk). And the real world is more important than a test.

Surround yourself with the right people. Pick people that you feel you are always learning from, and avoid pessimistic people who consider themselves victims. People who do great work know that they still have agency and control at the end of the day - of their fate, and are motivated to do so as well.

Remember that you can have multiple fields and interests, so don't be afraid to fold and move on to another field that excites you more if the opportunity presents itself.

In conclusion, focus on ability and interest, be curious and earnest, be consistent and not afraid to fail, create products quickly, and surround yourself with the right people. Do this and you are well on your way to doing great work.