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Founders: #314 Paul Graham (How To Do Great Work)

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What I learned from reading How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham. --- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book --- (2:00) All you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. (2:10) Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. (4:15) How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. —How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham (5:10) Always preserve excitingness. (Let what you are excited about guide you) (8:15) 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. (9:15) How To Work Hard by Paul Graham (10:05) When you follow what you are intensely interested in this strange convergence happens where you're working all the time and it feels like you're never working. (10:20) You can't tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. You may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. (13:00) When it comes to figuri

[00:00:00] How to do great work. If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out. The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities. [00:00:19] Number one, it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for. Number two, you have to have a deep interest in it. And number three, it offers the scope to do great work. In practice, you don't have to worry much about the third criteria. All you…

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