Paul Graham's 'How to Do Great Work' Essay
And some personal commentary
I’ve recently been reading Paul Graham’s essays and one that stood out to me was his essay ‘How to Do Great Work’. As always, I recommend reading it from the horse’s mouth but I found it very similar to an article I did back in Feb concerning Richard Hamming’s great talk on ‘How to Do Great Work’. If you haven’t read that talk it’s in my resources section or you can read my article about it here.
Anyway, let’s get into how Paul Graham thinks about great work.
First of all, what classifies as great work?
“Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
The above is detailed and vague enough to give you an idea of what great work might mean but also leave you wondering a little. Still, just think about some of the greats such as Einstein or Steve Jobs. Much of Albert Einsteins’ psychics is still taught in classrooms today and people have and will have devices in their pockets and bags for years to come created by Jobs. But, it can be daunting to sit there and try to think of something of that scope and Graham offers more insight.
“The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
How well it could be done. Maybe the best 6 words in the essay. Naturally, when we think of great work we think of the likes of Einstein and Jobs, Turing or Musk because thinking about what they did beforehand is hard to conceptualise. If it wasn’t we’d be able to do what they do or did. Elon Musk has created 4, or 5 billion dollar companies. He’s probably somebody who knows how to do great work.
“Prestige is a trailing indicator,” I think this is very true because many times I’ve heard people say ‘I wish I could have thought that’ or ‘That seems too easy to be that good’. You hear people say it all the time but only in retrospect. The people who think of it first are the likes that do great work.
Therefore, why make it harder for yourself at the beginning? Just ask yourself how well something can be done and if you think that you could do it pretty well then that’s a great start and leads us on to our next important point.
“Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
As adults curiosity is almost smacked out of us by life and commitments. On hearing older people speak about their life’s regrets you seldom hear them say ‘I wish I wouldn’t have tried as many things as I did.’ That’s just not what they say. By 21/22 years old we’re supposed to have been to university and be on our merry way into a professional career. Nothing like bags full of debt to blunt all curiosity and bring you back to reality. Next comes a partner and family.
“I wear the chain I forged in life”.
How to do great work
“The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
Graham outlines here 4 key components for doing great work;
ability
interest
effort
luck
He discounts luck and assumes effort as a given but the most memorable thing I remembered from Hamming’s talk on how to do great work was that “Drive, misapplied will get you nowhere,” or it’ll at least get you somewhere, but almost certainly farther away from where you actually want to be.
They say you should do what you’re good at but so many times I have, or have seen people try to win at something when they have no advantage. We’d do well to remember some sage advice from Charlie Munger “Only play games when you have an edge and bet heavily when you do”.
It can seem rather mundane trying to be great at something you do or have already done. It kind of makes you think that you’ve been taking the piss a little because if it was that easy you’d have done it already. Again to paraphrase from Poor Charlie’s Almanack “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”.
Therefore, I think it’s equally important to find something that interests you and where you have the ability. How many things can you think of where they both crossover? That has to be somewhere you rummage.
If you could get paid a fortune doing the job you’re doing right now, would you take it? That’s a theoretical question I think you’ll need to answer because it’ll give you an indication as to whether what you really want is more money or to do great work. If you’re happy to earn more doing what you already do then why not just try to do it better than anyone else?
“People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new idea is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled about something. Which means that originality consists partly of puzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
A simple question to ask yourself is how can I do it better? How can I make it cheaper or more efficient? More fun? People like having the answers to questions but curiosity precedes questions which in turn precedes answers. Without curiosity seldom will you just stumble across something great. Unless you’re Newton. But even then he had to have some curiosity.
How to select what to focus on
“Don't divide your attention *evenly* between many topics though, or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
When you decide that you want to do great work it’s important to understand exactly what that may look like. Everybody’s definition of this will be different. Perhaps you’re going down the untrodden path or perhaps you’re mentoring somebody else because you believe in what they’re trying to do. Either way, don’t split yourself in half trying to do both or all the things at once. I’ve found this out for the good and the bad.
Again though, curiosity can help. Just start with what you’re most interested in and go from there. Have a rough idea but don’t weigh yourself down with shackles. Allow yourself to move around and switch lanes if you desire. Since starting this newsletter my routine, which you don’t see, is changing all the time yet what you do see is that I publish once a week. You need to know when to be rigid and when to be adaptable.
Another way to learn how to do great work is to look to those who have already done it and because we all love to talk about how great we are it’s never been easier to find. Once again, as Charlie Munger says “There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.” You just have to find the right book! Even better, YouTube is still free.
“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.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
Almost certainly though you’ll never know you’re doing great work until you’re looking back at it. Sports coaches hardly celebrate seasonal success because they’re already thinking about the next season. Once again, they don’t see what they’re achieving until it’s all behind them. That means that you may find yourself wandering around in the dark for quite a while and by the time somebody turns the light on you’re quite a bit on. Besides, it’s often in retrospect we appreciate things ourselves and others have done. Just ask poor Picasso.
“There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.”
- Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
And just like Graham mentioned before regarding interest and ability if you do focus on a few things you genuinely enjoy and are good at then you probably won’t even define it as work. More like a hobby. Now, very few people get paid for their hobbies but it comes down to what you define as great work. Is it something you define by your own standards? Is it defined by other people’s standards? Is it something that benefits somebody else, maybe many people? There are many examples of great work out there. The question is can you find something to add to that list?
Summary
I really enjoyed this essay from Graham and there’s plenty I’ve left out but still hope to have caught the essence of it. From reading Hamming and Graham they both seem to agree that whatever you do you have to have a passion for it and you have to do it diligently. I think I’d have to agree.
A checklist for doing great work;
How well can something be done?
Don’t ignore your curiosity. It knows more than you do about what’s worth pursuing.
The 4 components of great work are; ability, interest, effort & luck. Pay particular attention to interest and ability.
Be picky about what you spend your time on. Focus heavily on a few things and be curious about a few more.
Learn from others who have come before you.
Whatever you do, do it diligently.
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Until next time, The School of Knowledge.
*Photo by Mat Brown: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-wind-vane-552600/