How to Do Great Work
Paul Graham's attempt to distill the common substrate of great work across all fields — and what he finds isn't discipline or talent, but the kind of curiosity you can't fake.
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There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work.
Curiosity is named as both the motivating force and the steering mechanism behind great work simultaneously.
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When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.
Novelty and obviousness together serve as a practical filter for recognizing genuinely promising ideas.
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Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.
The line draws a hard boundary between authentic distinctiveness and conscious imitation, calling the latter affectation.
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Per-project procrastination camouflages itself as work — you're not sitting around doing nothing, you're industriously working on something else, which is why it never sets off the alarm.
Busyness on secondary tasks masks avoidance of the primary one, which is why self-deception goes undetected.
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A good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it.
Majority skepticism is reframed as a necessary condition for an idea's value rather than a warning sign.
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