Paul Graham just published his latest essay and it is a recipe for "how to do great work." I highly recommend it, but you should know two things: (1) it assumes that you're "very ambitious" and (2) it's quite long. It's possibly his longest essay.
However, this second feature acts as a kind of filter. Because if you do actually make it to the end, his assumption is that it says something about both your level of ambition and your overall commitment to doing great work. You are presumably not the majority.
As I read through it (albeit relatively quickly), I immediately started copying and pasting excerpts that resonated with me. Eventually I stopped this because there were just too many of them. But as a preview, here are some of the ones that I did pull out:
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.
Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.
The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.
To the extent you can, 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.
There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical and pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage to be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a fool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. The Old Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like a fool. But that's advice for seeming smart. If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.
People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
You really should read the entire essay, though. It's worth it.
Four years ago I wrote about a great essay that Paul Graham had published way back in 2009 about two different kinds of schedules: the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. Put differently, the manager's schedule is one of command. It is for bosses to drop in for 15, 30, or 60 minutes at a time, say a bunch of things, and then jump to the next meeting.
The maker's schedule, on the other hand, is one of doing, whether that be programming or working on an excel model. And the reality is that you can't make or do much with only 15, 30, or 60 minutes. To make anything of real substance you need longer uninterrupted blocks of time. You need time to get into the zone.
I'm reminded of this dichotomy now, more than ever, because of video conferencing. It has never been easier to overload a calendar with meetings. Consequently, it has never been easier to screw up a maker's schedule.
Packy McCormick's latest "Not Boring" essay is up and it's about Opendoor. It's a good follow up to last week's announcement.
Maybe that’s why housing is one of the last major categories that technology has left alone. Sure, companies have tried. Tons of them. The startup graveyard is filled with companies led by entrepreneurs who realized that the way we buy and sell homes sucks, but couldn’t ultimately figure out how to change it. They weren’t thinking big or long-term enough. The companies that have made the biggest impact, like Zillow and Redfin, make it easier to search for houses, but then kick buyers over to agents to go through the offline process, the same way it’s always been done.
This is topic/problem that is near and dear to me because I spent a year of my life working on a startup that initially set out to solve this exact problem. But like countless others, we couldn't figure out how exactly to change things. So we pivoted.
Has Opendoor finally cracked the code? I don't know. But they're on to something. It is, however, worth noting that the company was founded in 2013. And so what is happening today is already 7 years in the making -- and probably longer if you consider the founder's past startups.
Tough problems clearly require time. Money doesn't hurt either.
