A friend of mine sent me this X post today.

It covers two important life questions: (1) How do you define success? (2) Are your actions aligned with that definition? And included in the post is the author's "ideal end state", which is a list that includes things like "control 80% of my schedule", "be top 0.1% fit for my age group", and "thriving marriage with regular 1-on-1 time."

Some of his list has checkmarks, and some of it -- things like "small, beautifully designed home with an epic view" -- is still a work in progress.

After I got the message, I immediately responded with: "This is great. I'm going to do this for myself." I then sent it to my family.

Now, in some ways, I'm already doing this. I like lists and I have a lot of them. Some of them are "disciplines" that tell me to do things like write every day (that's what this blog is), lift weights, and continuously practice my French. And some of them deal with aspirational goals like, build a creative retreat in the mountains because you love snowboarding.

But I think there's a lot of room for me to be even more intentional, and aspirational, about what success means to me. And so that's what I plan to do. Maybe some of you will want to do the same after reading this post.

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.

I just finished watching the Raptors beat the Boston Celtics and tie up the series in double overtime, and now it's quite possible that I may not be able to sleep for the next three days.

My favorite inbound text of the evening was this one here: "I could run 30km right now. I won't. But you get it." I most certainly do.

There's something so special about seeing Lowry do things like this:

It is about refusing to lose and just making things happen. Skill certainly matters, but at the end of the day: how strong is your will to win?

The Raptors certainly had that tonight.