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.
