Every now and then I like to read about the advice of others who’ve succeeded in their field. Here’s a few that I personally found to be enlightening and practical.
Patrick Collison:
Go deep on things. Become an expert. In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won’t change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.
Don’t stress out too much about how valuable the things you’re going deep on are… but don’t ignore it either. It should be a factor you weigh but not by itself dispositive.
To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it’s not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially. If you’re lucky enough to enjoy it a lot, be grateful and take full advantage!
Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you’re interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.
Aim to read a lot.
If you think something is important but people older than you don’t hold it in high regard, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re right and they’re wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.
Above all else, don’t make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.
But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don’t write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible… this author still working on it…), speaking publicly.
Make things. Operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty is a very different experience to learning something.
More broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you shouldn’t be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions.
If you’re in the US and go to a good school, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following traintracks laid by others rather than charting a course yourself. Make sure that the things you’re pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it’s too normal.
Figure out a way to travel to San Francisco and to meet other people who’ve moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ. Take advantage of opportunities to travel to other places too, of course.
Find vivid examples of success in the domains you care about. If you want to become a great scientist, try to find ways to spend time with good (or, ideally, great) scientists in person. Watch YouTube videos of interviews. Follow some on Twitter.
People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages. (They were grayhaired when they became famous… not when they did the work.) So, hurry up! You can do great things.
Paul Graham - How to do Great Work
I found Paul Graham’s “How to Do Great Work” compelling because it tackles something most career advice glosses over: how do you actually figure out what to work on when you’re young and have no idea what’s good?
“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 learn by doing, not by endless planning.
The work needs 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.” The tricky part is most people focus only on the first two and ignore scope entirely.
Don’t get trapped by educational systems. “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.” I see this constantly - people picking majors at 18 and feeling locked into paths they’ve barely explored.
Project-level procrastination is way more dangerous than daily procrastination. “You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn’t quite right.”
The “staying upwind” approach: “At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future.” This feels much more sustainable than trying to optimize for some distant goal you’re not even sure you want.
Great work emerges through iteration, not grand planning. “Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.”
Consistency beats intensity. “People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.” The key insight: “Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem.”
Questions are underrated. “Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.” This connects to something I’ve noticed - the best conversations often start with someone asking an obvious question that nobody had bothered to ask.
Originality comes from genuine curiosity, not trying to be different. “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.”
Be comfortable with intellectual confusion. “You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you’re willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don’t want to solve them.”
What struck me most was his point about broken models: “Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality.” The idea that you can find opportunities by being stricter about truth than other people is something I want to think about more. Be authentic and driven by truth.
Diego Berdakin
Resilience, Intense Curiosity, and Deep Customer Empathy