Riley Vasquez

I was first exposed to @PaulGraham’s essay “How To Do Great Work”, while listening to @DavidSenra1’s podcast @FoundersPodcast. Since then, I’ve read it a few times and shared it with countless friends and colleagues. I encourage you to read it for yourself. As a way to continue to process the content, I’ve pulled out some of the most interesting ideas and thoughts and detailed them below. - - - - - Great Work: Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. 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. The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. One way to tell whether you’re wasting time is to ask if you are producing or consuming. - - - - - Taste, Style & Elegance: The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you’ll be productive. Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation. Mathematical elegance may sounds like mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That’s what I thought when I first heard the term ‘elegant’ applied to a proof. But now I suspect it’s conceptually prior – that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. Some of the best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. Unfashionable problems are undervalued. - - - - - Planning & Productivity: I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. 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. It’s OK to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example. Lots of great things began with someone saying “How hard could it be?”. Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Planning per se isn’t good. It’s sometimes necessary, but it’s a necessary evil. - - - - - Curiosity, Originality, Optimism & Creativity: You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. I never liked the term ‘creative process’. It seems misleading. Originality isn’t a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can’t help it. Original ideas don’t come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. You’ll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. 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. If you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good. The Advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on “curiosity”. Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity. Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. When and idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it’s probably a good one. A good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that mightn’t be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it? People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Be self-indulgent – by letting your curiosity have its way, and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head that says you should only be working “important” problems. If you were going to take a break from “serious” work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems. Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. It’s great to be rich in unanswered questions. It’s better to be promiscuously curious – to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. There’s probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard. The connection between originality and uncertainty causes a strange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certain than the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper hand in disputes, even though they’re generally stupider. - - - - - Morale: Husband your morale. It’s the basis of everything when you’re working on ambitious projects. You have nurture and protect it like a living organism. Morale starts with your view of life. You’re more likely to do great work if you’re an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim. Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. It’s not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it’s a bad sign to be out of breath while running. - - - - - Relationships: Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. Managing well takes aptitude and interest like any other kind of work. If you don’t have them, there is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management as a second language, or avoid such projects. Don’t marry someone who doesn’t understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you’re ambitious, you need to work; it’s almost like a medical condition; so someone who won’t let you work either doesn’t understand you, or does and doesn’t care. People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they’re happier than they’d be if they didn’t. If you’re smart and ambitious, it’s dangerous not to be productive. - - - - - Feel free to retweet and share and I'd encourage you to read they entire essay for yourself at: paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

We wanna make MFM merch. But...@ShaanVP and I ain't exactly fashion people (below is our best take). Someone design us a hoodie/shirt. Has to be cool. Something I'd wanna wear and not look dumb. Post design here. Most likes wins. We'll shout u out.