The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.

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.

Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in.

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.

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... See more

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.

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should

not

do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action.

When in doubt, optimize for interestingness.

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.