- Decide what to work on. It has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. 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. Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. But always preserve excitedness.
When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. A field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.
One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening. - Learn enough about it to get you into one of the frontiers of knowledge.
- Notice gaps.Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted
- Explore promising ones.
The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.
Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.
People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
If you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good.
The full length article by Paul Graham: How to do great work
Cal Newport is renowned for his groundbreaking insights into focus and productivity. He is the author of Deep Work, Slow Productivity, So Good They Can't Ignore You and Digital Minimalism. I first heard about him on Ali Abdaal's channel, I remember it was a video of Ali summarizing Deep Work, one of Cal's books which I eventually bought, and even got to review some of the initial chapters. That review is somewhere in this blog I have since read two of his books, and plan to purchase another one before the year ends. Today I focus on So Good They Can't Ignore You. Why do some people end up loving what they do for a living, while so many fail at this goal? It starts with mindset. Do you have a craftsman mindset or a passion mindset? People who love their jobs have a craftsman mindset, not a passion mindset. Let me differentiate the two: A passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you, while a craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world. When you f...
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