If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot
of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided
to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone
working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the
intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does
have a definite shape; it’s not just a point labelled “work hard.”

The following recipe assumes you’re very ambitious.

The first step is to decide what to work on. 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.

In practice you don’t have to worry much about the third criterion.
Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it.
So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for
and great interest in.

[1]

That sounds straightforward, but it’s often quite difficult. When
you’re young you don’t know what you’re good at or what different
kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not
even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at
14, most have to figure it out.

The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you’re not
sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.
You’ll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that’s fine. It’s
good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries
come from noticing connections between different fields.

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.

What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly
ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves,
exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly
ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach
yourself calculus, till at 21 you’re starting to explore unanswered
questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.

There’s a kind of excited curiosity that’s both the engine and the
rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let
it have its way, will also show you what to work on.

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that
would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.

Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the
next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the
frontiers of knowledge. 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.

The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because
your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler
model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions
about things that everyone else took for granted.

[2]

If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often
has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math.
It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears,
embrace it.

Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren’t interested
in them — in fact, especially if they aren’t. If you’re excited
about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have
enough expertise to say precisely what they’re all overlooking,
that’s as good a bet as you’ll find.

[3]

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.

Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible
to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the
empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.
That’s why it’s essential to work on something you’re deeply
interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere
diligence ever could.

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the
desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and
that combination is the most powerful of all.

The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack
in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there’s a whole world
inside.

Let’s talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring
out what to work on. The main reason it’s hard is that you can’t
tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which
means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for
years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at
it. And in the meantime you’re not doing, and thus not learning
about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose
late based on very incomplete information.

[4]

The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in
two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that
grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the
more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what
to do.

The educational systems in most countries pretend it’s easy. They
expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what
it’s really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal
trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.

It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted
that the system not only can’t do much to help you figure out what
to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow
magically guess as a teenager. They don’t tell you, but I will:
when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you’re on your own.
Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will
find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on
the assumption that everyone does.

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.
But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read
biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how
much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result
of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up.
So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to
do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people,
read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

[5]

When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you
learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very
different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need
to give different types of work a chance to show you what they’re
like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you
learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.

Don’t worry if you find you’re interested in different things than
other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the
better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste
for work means you’ll be productive. And you’re more likely to find
new things if you’re looking where few have looked before.

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.

But fields aren’t people; you don’t owe them any loyalty. If in the
course of working on one thing you discover another that’s more
exciting, don’t be afraid to switch.

If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something
they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something
you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool
you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests,
this will also get you your initial audience.

This should follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the most
exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason
I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong.
Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some
imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down
that route, you’re lost.

[6]

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you’re
trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion,
fear, money, politics, other people’s wishes, eminent frauds. But
if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof
against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.

Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,
but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of
obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it
does take a good deal of boldness.

But while you need boldness, you don’t usually need much planning.
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 get rich
by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal,
but you can’t discover natural selection that way.

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.” This is how most people who’ve done
great work seem to have done it.

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.

You don’t just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.
There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there’s a
technique to working, just as there is to sailing.

For example, while you must work hard, it’s possible to work too
hard, and if you do that you’ll find you get diminishing returns:
fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health.
The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the
type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for
four or five hours a day.

Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try
to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in.
You’ll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.

It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working.
You’ll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial
threshold. Don’t worry about this; it’s the nature of work, not a
flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both
per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the
sense that it’s higher than the energy required to keep going, it’s
ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over
it.

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.

Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It’s ok to lie
to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example.
Lots of great things began with someone saying “How hard could it
be?”

This is one case where the young have an advantage. They’re more
optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism
is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.

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.

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.

[7]

Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per
project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project
procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting
that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn’t
quite right. When you’re procrastinating in units of years, you can
get a lot not done.

[8]

One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it
usually camouflages itself as work. You’re not just sitting around
doing nothing; you’re working industriously on something else. So
per-project procrastination doesn’t set off the alarms that per-day
procrastination does. You’re too busy to notice it.

The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I
working on what I most want to work on? When you’re young it’s ok
if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous
as you get older.

[9]

Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people
an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can’t think of
this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the
work sufficiently engaging as it’s happening.

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years
at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not
how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently
on something you’re genuinely interested in. When you pause to take
stock, you’re surprised how far you’ve come.

The reason we’re surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative
effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but
if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key:
consistency. 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. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon:
the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more.
Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more
new fans they’ll bring you.

The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat
in the beginning. It isn’t; it’s still a wonderful exponential
curve. But we can’t grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential
growth in its early stages.

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it’s
worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since
we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done
unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase
of learning something new because they know from experience that
learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their
audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do.
If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential
growth, many more would do it.

Work doesn’t just happen when you’re trying to. There’s a kind of
undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying
in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a
little, you’ll often solve problems you were unable to solve by
frontal attack.

You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this
phenomenon, though. You can’t just walk around daydreaming. The
daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds
it questions.

[10]

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it’s also important
to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your
mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that
moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out
of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on
the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.)

Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field.
Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don’t
know what you’re aiming for.

And that is what you’re aiming for, because if you don’t try to
be the best, you won’t even be good. This observation has been made
by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth
thinking about why it’s true. It could be because ambition is a
phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where
almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short.
Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively
different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is
simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.

[11]

Fortunately there’s a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might
seem like you’d be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the
best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It’s exciting, and
also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it’s
easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.

One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will
care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter
more than your contemporaries’, but because something that still
seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.

Don’t try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best
job you can; you won’t be able to help doing it in a distinctive
way.

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying
to is affectation.

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is
doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while
you’re pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows
in the work.

[12]

The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They
often feel like nobodies. 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. So just do the work and
your identity will take care of itself.

“Avoid affectation” is a useful rule so far as it g