A Review of How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham

Top 3 things I learnt about how to do great work:

• Ideas focused on the future are more likely to be good: Try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years, something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good
• Take care of your morale by recognising where it is at and making changes for it: Morale compounds via work, if you think you're doing good work, this will cycle to increase your morale. The converse is true for if you're doing bad work or struggling with work. Even if an exponential curve feels flat at the start, if you are doing good work, the morale should persist and the beautiful curve will come.
• Be Curious: Your curiosity is the best guide on what you should do, it never lies and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. All great ideas and great work are borne out of curiosity, it leads to originality which leads to great ideas.

Favourite quote:

People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight is in the question.

Summary about the entire essay:

Focus on being curious. It will lead to questions, which will lead to original ideas. There will be many questions and many ideas. It may often be hard to know which are good, by framing them in if they will still be good ideas in 100 years, you will ultimately have a higher chance of finding something truly good. To do great work on those good ideas, focus on something you're genuinely interested in, do not put any effort into looking good and finish what you start. The best work in any project often happens in what was meant to be the final stage. Projects that fail are often valuable in that many new questions are answered and found along the way as there's no better source of questions than the ones encountered trying to do something slightly too hard.