Key takeaways §
Highlights §
- The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have 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. (View Highlight)
- 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. (View Highlight)
- Note: Having your own ideas and projects
- Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren’t interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren’t. 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. (View Highlight)
- Note: Noticing and exploring promising gaps in knowledge that excite you but are overlooked.
- 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. (View Highlight)
- One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening. (View Highlight)
- Note: Finding the joy in scientific writing and analyses!
- If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience. (View Highlight)
- Note: Not trying to impress the entire world, but yourself and your friends.
- 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.
I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it. (View Highlight)
- Ideally those hours will be contiguous. 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)
- Note: Pushing for deep work
- Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. (View Highlight)
- Note: True in research, when faced with the choice to publish a lot of things become clear.
- One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it. (View Highlight)
- Note: Staying busy but not doing the important stuff
- 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)
- Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don’t know what you’re aiming for. (View Highlight)
- Note: Developing taste is faster than developing skill. So the dissonance once you get started is important motivation.
- The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We’re taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it’s a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You’re trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you’re intellectually dishonest? (View Highlight)
- Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that’s exactly what you need in doing great work. It’s not learned; it’s preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. “It’s easy to criticize” is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy. (View Highlight)
- It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. (View Highlight)
- Note: Reading widely, not just within your own sub-field.
- ==Don’t divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you’ll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law.== [17] Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. (View Highlight)
- Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What’s the source of this apparent contradiction? It’s that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That’s how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they’re easy to see after you do something hard. (View Highlight)
- Note: New ideas come from updating your knowledge of the world, gaining a new perspective.
- Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you’re looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can’t with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they’re rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing. (View Highlight)
- What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it? (View Highlight)
- Note: DSM/ICD domination. Network theory to challenge it.
- Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That’s what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game. (View Highlight)
- Note: He urges you to be less conservative in problem selection.
- It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions. (View Highlight)
- It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things. (View Highlight)
- Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don’t work. You can’t have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones. [21] (View Highlight)
- Note: This is why putting in the reps is key. You will learn and discover things along the way.
- Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you’ll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked. And there’s probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard. (View Highlight)
- Note: Stretching yourself just beyond you current level.
- So when you’re learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You’ll be tempted to ignore them, since there’s a 99% chance the problem is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don’t forget about them. When you’ve gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they’re still there. If they’re still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they probably represent an undiscovered idea. (View Highlight)
- Note: Surprise is a strong signal!
- The best teachers don’t want to be your bosses. They’d prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material. (View Highlight)
- Note: This is my best advice for PhD students.
- One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it’s probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. (View Highlight)
- Note: This is my ambition with mental models, distilling the knowledge and ideas from each field.
- It’s not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it’s a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you’re running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage. (View Highlight)
- Note: Elite cyclists talk about this as well. Injury or effort? It feels different.