If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in many different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly because I wanted to create a guide that could be used by someone in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it’s not just a point labeled “work hard.”
The following steps assume you are very ambitious.
The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.
In practice you don’t have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything too conservative about it. So all you need is to find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1]
That sounds straightforward, but it’s often quite difficult. When you’re young, you don’t know what you’re good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even have existed when you were young. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out.
The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you’re not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You’ll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that’s fine. It’s good to know about multiple things; some of the most important discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.
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.
What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may be exciting to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, at 21 to start tackling physics problems that weren’t solved until the 20th century. But always preserve exciting.
There’s a kind of excited curiosity that’s both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on.
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.
Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.
The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. [2]
If it seems to others that the answer is obvious, it’s even better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You can see this from painting to math. It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears, embrace it.
Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren’t interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren’t. If you’re excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they’re all overlooking, that’s as good a bet as you’ll find. [3]
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.
Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the same scale as the evidence that death is real. That’s why it’s essential to work on something you’re deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could.
The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there’s a whole world inside.
Let’s talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. It’s complicated because it’s usually a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Which means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. And meanwhile you’re not doing something else, and you don’t know how much you’d like that. So in the worst case you end up working on something you don’t like and aren’t good at. [4]
The nature of ambition complicates this problem. There are two forms of ambition, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.
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. As a result, an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breaking bad.
It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted that the system not only can’t help you figure out what to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow magically guess as a teenager. They won’t tell you, but I will: when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you’re on your own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on the assumption that everyone does.
What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? You shouldn’t passively drift, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. [5]
When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different kinds of work a chance to show you what they’re like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.
Don’t worry if you find you’re interested in different things than other people. 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. And you’re more likely to find new things if you’re looking where few have looked before.
One sign that you’re suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening. But fields aren’t people; you don’t owe them any loyalty. If in the course of working on one thing you discover another that’s more exciting, don’t be afraid to switch.
If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience.
This should follow from the interestingness rule. Obviously the most interesting story to write will be the one you want to read. I mention this case because so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost.
There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you’re trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people’s wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray. [6]
Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it often means jumping from one stepping stone to another, and that can be dangerous. You often have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of courage.
But though you need courage, you don’t need much planning. In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.
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.
I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it. [7]
Even when you’ve found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will also be plenty of times when that doesn’t happen.
You can’t just spread your sails and be blown along by the winds of inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So working has a technique just like sailing does.
For example, though you have to work hard, it’s possible to work too hard, and if you do that you’ll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. For the hardest types you may only be able to work four or five hours a day. [8]
Ideally those hours should be contiguous. 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 can be harder to start work than to continue it. You often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don’t worry about this; it’s the nature of work, not a flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it’s higher than the energy required to keep going, it’s ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to overcome it. [9]
If you want to do great work, it’s usually a mistake to lie to yourself, but this is one of the rare cases where it’s ok. When I’m reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying “I’ll just read over what I’ve got so far.” Five minutes later I’ve found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I’m off.
A similar trick works for starting new projects. It’s ok to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example. Many great things began with someone saying “How hard could it be?”
This is one case where the young have an advantage. They’re more optimistic, and although one reason is that they’re ignorant, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.
Still, do try to finish what you start, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.
Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you’re working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to be a lie after all.
Since there are two senses in which you can start work, there are also two forms of procrastination. Procrastinating per project is the more dangerous one. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn’t quite right. When you procrastinate in units of years, you can get nothing done.
Procrastinating per project is so dangerous because it usually disguises itself as work. You’re not just sitting around doing nothing; you’re working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn’t set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You’re too busy to notice it.
The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on? When you’re young it’s ok if the answer is sometimes no, but as you get older this gets more and more dangerous. [10]
Great work often takes a long time to finish, and that can be daunting. You can’t look this time in the face. You have to trick yourself into ignoring it, the way you trick yourself into ignoring the possibility of death.
It helps if the work becomes interesting enough that you don’t have to trick yourself. So work that starts as a chore can become a habit and then an addiction. In fact, this is how most great work gets done: the initial idea may be a stroke of genius, but what brings it to life is the craftsman’s love of making things.
There may be some jobs where you have to work hard at something you hate for years before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you’re genuinely interested in. When you pause to look back, you’ll find you’ve gone far.
The reason we’re surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key: consistency. People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
If you do work that compounds, you’ll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it’s worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn, the easier it is to learn new things. Building an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they’ll bring you.
The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn’t; it’s still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can’t grasp that intuitively, so we underestimate exponential growth in its early stages.
Exponential growth can become so valuable that it’s worth a significant amount of work to get it started. But since we underestimate early exponential growth, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always requires an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, more would do it.
Work doesn’t just happen when you’re trying to. There’s a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you’ll often solve problems that you were unable to solve by frontal attack.
You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can’t just wander aimlessly. The wandering has to be interleaved with the work that gives your mind its problems.
Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it’s equally important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care most about. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of first place, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.) [11]
Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don’t know what you’re aiming for.
And that is what you’re aiming for, because if you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good. This observation has been made by people in many different fields, so it’s worth thinking about why it’s true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the errors are in one direction — almost all the shells that fail to hit the target are falling short. Or it could be that trying to be the best is a different thing from trying to be good. Or it could be that being good is too vague. All three are probably true. [12]
Fortunately there are economies of scale here. Though trying to be the best may sound like a recipe for stress, in practice it often yields more than it costs. It’s exciting, and also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it’s easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.
One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than those of your contemporaries, but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.
Don’t try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won’t be able to help doing it in a distinctive way.
Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.
Affectation is essentially pretending that someone else is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but false persona, and while you’re pleased by the impressiveness, the falseness will show in the work.
The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because if you’re working on sufficiently ambitious projects, it will solve itself. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you’re