Thread by @nurijanian

Paul Graham might be the most important person in the startup world.

He mentored Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe and so many more that went through YC.

I read his latest essay - How to Do Great Work, which takes 45 mins to read - so you don't have to.

Here are the best ideas from PG:

"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."

If you've ever read a book & thought you understood it, then applied it and failed, you know.

"Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted."

How often do we ask ourselves this question? "What does everyone else take for granted here?" Simple, yet powerful.

"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."

Every time you're stuck, go back to this.

"I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind.""

So refreshing. F*ck the roadmap 😂

"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."

Ship it. You'll know.

"Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after all."

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"People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing."

I had coffee, does that count?

"if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good"

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"Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them"

If you don't ship, sorry.

"if you want to do great work it's an advantage to be optimistic"

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"Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort."

My Lonely PM community experiment failed and that's OK.

"the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance"

McKinsey's MECE is an art form

"some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it."

Powerful. Dangerous.

"one exception is the problem of choosing a problem to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case it's more like creating something. In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it."

Choose (create) deliberately.

"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."

Sell shovels

"Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it."

My team calls this "George Idea Diarrheas"

"Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult."

If you tried to understand backpropagation or how a design system should grow, you *probably* know

"When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one."

Depends on how many ideas you have consumed by then. Novelty is a function of how many you have in your cache.

"One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for *someone else* to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you."

Can someone please explore "world peace"?

"Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it."

How did we decide that Docker images is THE WAY to deploy?
Why can't anyone build simple ML applications?
Why do PMs need frameworks?

"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?"

UX and PM folks... Hear me out: Design Thinking is a fraud.

'problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. Unfashionable problems are undervalued."

What exists in the physical world that 100% could be digital?
Why do alcohol and drugs have to be addictive?

"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? The answer is probably more important than it seems"

Have more Hackathons.

I can keep going, but now you can pretend you read the essay.

Thanks PG @paulg!

The essay is here: paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

@paulg That's a wrap!

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