The Invariants of Great Work

Upgrading our behavior patterns to do great work is really hard for most of us, which is probably why so few people manage to do it. For me, there seems to be some sort of gravitational force which pulls me into a rut where I find myself working on stuff that’s not fulfilling, causes me a lot of frustration, and deep down, I know it will never be great.

But, Paul Graham’s essay How to do Great Work, seems to provide some kind of oppositional force which pulls me out of the rut, at least for a moment, and fills me with the emotional energy I need to attack a hard problem again. So I’ve decided to pull out all the bits which I think are the characteristics, behaviors, and mental models, which need to be held constant to be able to do our best work and put them here.

Selfishly, my motivation is to both embed these bits of wisdom in my brain for subconscious retrieval and to serve as a reference for my future self. But, hope you find these “CliffsNotes” helpful as well.

In Paul’s words, these are the "invariants of great work".

• Curiosity is the best guide. Try to do things that you are excessively curious about, to a degree that it would be boring to most other people. This excited curiosity is both an engine and a rudder.

• Make yourself a big target for luck. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

• Work on a lot of different things. There is not much risk of wasting time working on the wrong thing because it is good to have experience in a lot of different things.

• Work on your own projects. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own, or as a result of one of your own projects. Make things because you want them and think they should exist in the world.

• Often stop to ask yourself: If you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do?

• When you’ve found something you're genuinely interested in, work consistently on it. The work will compound over time.

• Start small. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

• Try to finish what you start, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. A lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.

• Feel free to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been an exaggeration after all.

• Stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older.

• Explore undirected thinking. This happens best when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed (put the phone away). Letting your mind wander will help you find and solve problems you otherwise wouldn’t have.

• Look for gaps in the collective knowledge about a field. Other people may take things for granted, or create blind spots by holding things sacred.

• Don’t shy away from work that people think has been fully explored. There may be latent potential there that nobody has realized.

• 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't know what you're aiming for.

• Try to be the best. If you’re not trying to be the best you won’t even be good.

• Don’t pretend to be anyone other than yourself. Your work won’t feel real to you or anyone else. Just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

• Be aggressively willing to admit when you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.

• Be consistent throughout your work. Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself.

• You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily have to, but you have to be willing to.

• Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.

• Try to 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.

• Form a habit of writing. Writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you.

• Frequently change your context: go for a walk, work from a different location, and travel. This will dislodge new questions, new ideas, and new solutions.

• Be comfortable breaking rules. A new model, the type required to do great work, usually breaks at least implicit rules. There are no gatekeepers. There is always a workaround. Be tenacious.

• Carry questions around with you. This is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

• Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value.

• Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of 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.

• You can't trick God. So stop looking for shortcuts. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.

• Don’t be afraid to copy, steal, or follow other ideas. Great work is usually a reaction to previous work. But be careful, because when looking outward for ideas you can copy the wrong things and end up in a “cargo cult” trap.

• Get physically close to people who are on the edge of the domain you’re in. At least stay for a while in the same region, city, workplace, university, or community. If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested.

• Seek out the best colleagues. Colleagues don't just affect your work; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.

• Build a small audience. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough to sustain you. The opinion of people you respect is good signal. Too much fame just adds noise.

• Exercise regularly. Eat and sleep well, and avoid the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking.