• How to do great work, by Paul Graham

How to do great work, by Paul Graham

这周偶然看到了朋友圈 张轩铭 同学分享了(译文, 配有非常棒的题图) Paul Graham’s recent blog How to do great work ¹. 赶紧找到原文, 没想到这一看, 竟用了大半周的闲暇时光才完成通读.

坦白说, 通读之后我的情绪很激动, 情感也很复杂. 情绪比较个体化, 暂且不表(如有机会日后详述); 最主要的感觉可能有两点:

1. 这是一篇带有极其浓烈的 Paul Graham 个人风格的惊天鸿文, 且它将产生的影响恐怕不会逊于 say.html (What you can’t say, 阮一峰老师译为 不能说的话 ²).
2. 这个话题已经被 Paul Graham 说尽了, 我感觉自己已经无话可说(锦上添花自不用想, 连狗尾续貂感觉也不太可能).

因此, 这里我只引用几段原文, 希望大家能从这些片段中感受到原文力量之万一:

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don’t let “work” mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you’ll be driving your part of it.

For example, while you must work hard, it’s possible to work too hard, and if you do that you’ll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day.

Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you’re already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small.

So I’m going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that. I wouldn’t have done it to a general audience. But we already know you’re interested.

Don’t worry about being presumptuous. You don’t have to tell anyone. And if it’s too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have worse problems than that. In fact you’ll be lucky if it’s the worst problem you have.

Great points even in footnotes (I finished reading footnotes this morning):

Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You’ll often have to coevolve with the problem. That’s why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The search space is huge. It’s the cartesian product of all possible types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible future versions of you.

You can’t usually get paid for doing exactly what you want, especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side. Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight to get time to do it.

希望更多人能从这篇文章中得到收获. Please remember, (when you are trying to do great work,) you don't have to tell anyone. And if it's too hard and you fail, so what?

gl, hf! ³