Jess's Lab Notebook

How to Do Great Work

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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. (View Highlight)

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] (View Highlight)

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 (View Highlight)

New highlights added August 4, 2023 at 6:56 AM

Try to finish what you start, though, 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. (View Highlight)

The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?" (View Highlight)

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. (View Highlight)

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. (View Highlight)

It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it. (View Highlight)

When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape. (View Highlight)

Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit will be.
Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas. (View Highlight)

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. (View Highlight)

What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it? (View Highlight)

  • Note: Good prompt for thinking about computing.

So try asking yourself: 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? (View Highlight)

  • Note: Good prompt

One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. (View Highlight)

  • Note: This is one of the areas I have to grow in the most - how to formulate questions and the habit of forming them while engaging with the work of others.

It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things. (View Highlight)

So err on the side of starting. (View Highlight)

Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. (View Highlight)

  • Note: SFTTW

Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. (View Highlight)

The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. (View Highlight)

So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. (View Highlight)

New highlights added August 7, 2023 at 6:16 PM

Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. (View Highlight)

Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism. (View Highlight)

Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you're stuck, just so you start to get something done. (View Highlight)

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. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage. (View Highlight)

If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough. (View Highlight)

It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. (View Highlight)

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. (View Highlight)

How to Do Great Work
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How to Do Great Work
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New highlights added August 4, 2023 at 6:56 AM
New highlights added August 7, 2023 at 6:16 PM