Saved by Omar Rizk and
How to Do Great Work
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.
How to Do Great Work
I experienced a flip in my approach to work when I started with RevolutionEHR in 2013. In start-up world, it is encouraged to treat the business like you own it. I did this and the feeling I got at work aligned with this well. They were my projects. I loved the work! It was my baby. The downside is eventually with corporations, this goes away, because we, in reality, do not own the company. It does help, though to have agency and work on problems that I find interesting rather than a list of todos handed to me.
One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't. Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let their skepticism deter you.
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Don’t assume old, interesting problems have been solved. Often, they haven’t and there are rich opportunities to explore them.
Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exc
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The right-kind-of-crazy. I like that. Crazy is not bad; bad is bad.
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 things aren't like that.
How to Do Great Work
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
How to Do Great Work
It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. 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.
How to Do Great Work
But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it.
How to Do Great Work
Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.
How to Do Great Work
Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small.
How to Do Great Work
This has become so clear to me lately. The amount of people that will do even little things for self-improvement, self-advancement, or anything, really, is infinitely small. Even reading a chapter of the Bible and jotting down notes is a big ask. Or reading a chapter of any book and taking notes, exercise, or other similar activities.