Are you ambitious and wondering how to achieve great work? Look no further. In this guide, we'll discuss the recipe for achieving great work in any field.
Choosing What to Work On
The first step in achieving great work is choosing what to work on. You need to find something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. Don't worry too much about the third criterion as ambitious people are often already too conservative with it. So, find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.
Choosing the Right Field
The first step in achieving great work is choosing the right field. To do so, you must find something that you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. While this may sound straightforward, it can be quite difficult, especially when you are young and do not know what you are good at or what different kinds of work are like.
The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you are not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You will 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.
Developing a Habit of Working on Your Own Projects
Developing a habit of working on your own projects is key. 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.
Learning Enough to Get to the Frontier
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. The next step is to notice the gaps in your knowledge. This takes some skill because your brain wants to ignore such gaps to make a simpler model of the world.
Boldly Chasing Outlier Ideas
Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them. 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.
Consistency is Key
The key to achieving great work is consistency. Work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. This approach is called "staying upwind."
Avoiding Distractions
Avoiding distractions is important in achieving great work. 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.
Working on Your Own Projects
Developing a habit of working on your own projects is essential to achieving great work. When you work on your own projects, you are in control of what you are doing, and you can determine what you want to achieve. If you 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 will 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. But always preserve excitingness.
Learning and Noticing
Once you have found something you are excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge. The 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.
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 are not interested in them. If you are excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they are all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you will find.
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who has done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
Cultivating Your Taste in the Work Done in Your Field
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.
Being Earnest
The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact, it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?
Conclusion
Achieving great work is possible if you choose what to work on wisely, develop a habit of working on your own projects, learn enough to get to the frontier, boldly chase outlier ideas, be consistent, avoid distractions, cultivate your taste in the work done in your field, and be earnest. Remember, the road to great work is not easy, but it's worth it.
So, what are you waiting for? Go out there and achieve greatness!