What You'll Wish You'd Known

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a

paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it

interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes

the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same

world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's

compellingly mysterious.

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid

curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at

random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up

entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always

asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of

drying up, curiosity be... See more

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently

trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having

fun. That's why he's so good.

The word "aptitude" is misleading,

because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of

aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests

are often acquired tastes.

Great questions don't appear

suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes

them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is

not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great

discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd

have made it.

People who've done great things tend

to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only

exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude

biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how

the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems

like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the m... See more

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.

Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.

Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that

something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be

able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard

enough

It's the same with people who

do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work,

and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks

to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over,

and discipline is no longer necessary.