Summary: Discovering new ideas and doing great work involve working on things that genuinely interest you. Being curious, trying different approaches, and focusing on ambitious projects can lead to breakthroughs. It's important to clear away distractions and focus on what excites you to achieve success in your work.
The way to figure out what to work on is by working (View Highlight)
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. (View Highlight)
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] (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
Note: Surely some form of planning fits in here, but you can't plan out things like this completely and need to leave space for serendipity.
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 (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
Note: Lie to yourself about just doing "a small work task for a little bit of time" to get yourself started. Then the rest of the work will flow. Continuing takes less energy than starting.
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. (View Highlight)
Note: My youth/optimism is an advantage. My ignorance from inexperience may even be an advantage too.
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself. (View Highlight)
But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd. (View Highlight)
Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them (View Highlight)
when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it (View Highlight)
Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. (View Highlight)
One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect.
To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter. (View Highlight)
People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. (View Highlight)