One Line
This guide highlights the importance of selecting the right work, pursuing personal projects, working hard, being dedicated and curious, and recognizing the role of luck.
Slides
Slide Presentation (12 slides)
Key Points
- Great work often comes from pursuing your own projects and being excessively curious about something.
- Hard work, dedication, and interest are essential for achieving great work.
- Luck and curiosity play significant roles in finding opportunities for great work.
- Finishing what you start and avoiding procrastination are important for producing the best work.
- Creating something that will stand the test of time and not focusing on a distinctive style is crucial for great work.
- Discovering new ideas requires changing perspectives and seizing on signs of a broken model.
- Working on unfashionable problems can often lead to solid results.
- Starting small, making successive versions, and collaborating with colleagues who do great work are key to achieving great work.
Summaries
19 word summary
This guide emphasizes choosing the right work, pursuing own projects, hard work, dedication, curiosity, and the role of luck.
44 word summary
This guide on how to do great work emphasizes the importance of choosing the right work and pursuing your own projects. It highlights the need for hard work, dedication, and curiosity. Luck also plays a significant role in achieving great work, so it's important
615 word summary
The excerpt is a guide on how to do great work, with a focus on choosing the right work to pursue. The author conducted research to find the intersection of techniques for doing great work in various fields. The guide assumes that the reader is ambitious and
Choose a project that excites you and start working on it. Don't let others dictate what "work" means for you. Great work often comes from pursuing your own projects. Find something that you are excessively curious about and learn enough to reach the
Practically everyone who has done great work, whether in art or science, has done so through hard work and dedication. It is essential to work on something that deeply interests you, as interest will drive you to work harder. The three most powerful
When looking at biographies of people who have achieved great work, it becomes clear that luck plays a significant role. They stumble upon their work through chance encounters or random reading. To increase your chances of luck, curiosity is key. Try new things,
Great work often begins with the mentality of "How hard could it be?" and the optimism of the young. It is important to finish what you start, as the best work often happens in the final stages. Procrastination, especially on a project
When doing great work, it's important to focus on creating something that will still be good in the long run. Trying to work in a distinctive style is unnecessary, as your work will naturally have its own unique qualities. Affectation, or pretending
The concept of elegance is important in both art and mathematics. Laborious solutions may impress people in the short term, but the best work often appears effortless because it was already there to be discovered. When creating something, it is beneficial to think of yourself
Discovering new ideas requires changing the way you look at the world, which can be challenging. Most people are attached to their current models of the world and ignore clues that indicate a broken model. To find new ideas, you must seize on signs of
Don't let skepticism deter you from working on a field that others think is tapped out, as people are often wrong about this. Working on an unfashionable problem can be pleasing with no hype or hurry, and the existing work often has a solid
Starting small and making successive versions is the key to doing great work. It's important to try the simplest thing that could possibly work and not cram too much new stuff into one version. Early versions may be dismissed as toys, but that means they have
Schools have qualities that distort our understanding of learning and thinking. They promote passivity and create a false impression of work. Schools also train students to focus on hacking tests rather than doing great work. However, copying can be a valuable learning tool if
When seeking colleagues to work with, choose those who are doing great work or have a history of doing so. Collaborating with others can provide encouragement and fresh ideas. The quality of colleagues is more important than quantity; it's better to have a few
People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. The opinion of people you respect is more important than fame. The prestige of a type of work doesn't matter as much as how well it can be done. Competition can
When considering a new idea, it's important to have a more precise explanation than simply saying people "don't get it." Finding something to work on requires coevolving with the problem and exploring a vast search space of possible work types. Being curious