Overview
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The Four Steps: Choose a field you have aptitude for and deep interest in, learn enough to reach the frontier of knowledge, notice gaps others overlook, and explore promising ones through hard work.
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Finding What to Work On: You can't know what work is like without doing it, so start by guessing and iterate. Develop a habit of working on your own projects driven by excited curiosity rather than external direction.
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The Mechanics of Working: Work hard in focused blocks, but recognize diminishing returns. Use small lies to overcome activation energy for starting. Per-project procrastination is more dangerous than daily procrastination because it disguises itself as productive work.
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Consistency and Compounding: Writing a page a day yields a book a year. Exponential growth feels flat at first but becomes extraordinarily valuable. Let undirected thinking (walks, showers) complement deliberate work.
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Cultivating Originality: Original ideas come from trying to build something slightly too difficult, not from trying to be original. Be stricter than others about broken models of the world, and comfortable breaking implicit rules.
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Earnestness Over Affectation: Be intellectually honest, informal, and willing to admit mistakes. Nerds have an advantage because they expend little effort on seeming impressive.
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Questions Over Answers: A really good question is a partial discovery. Carry unanswered questions with you, sometimes for years. Originality in choosing problems matters more than originality in solving them.
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Starting Small and Iterating: Great things are made in successive versions. Try the simplest thing that could possibly work. Being dismissed as a toy is a good sign—it means you have everything except scale.
Takeaways
Paul Graham wrote this essay synthesizing principles of great work across all fields. The core insight is that genuine curiosity, not planning or prestige-seeking, is both the engine and rudder of exceptional achievement.
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.