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

I just finished listening to this entire episode and I mentioned in the episode that it was not

expecting to do another Paul Graham episode, especially an episode on a single one of his essays.

A few months ago, I spent three weeks reading and rereading all Paul Graham's essays.

I did three episodes on them. It's episode 275, 276, and 277. But I suspected that this essay,

How to Do Great Work, was something that was really special because the sheer amount of people

that listened to this podcast that sent me this essay. And as soon as I started reading it,

I got excited about it. And that's a good indication that I should be making an episode on it right

now. And just one quick thing before we jump into the episode, I've made something that is

exclusively for enthusiasts of founders, for people that completely understand the benefit of this

kind of crazy intense studying of the great people that came before us and how valuable it is to

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and you can join by using the link that's in the show notes of your podcast player,

or by going to founderspodcast.com. 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. 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 need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and a great

interest in. And right away, we get to one of Paul's first footnotes. He says, doing great work

means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible.

But there's no threshold for importance. That's something he's going to repeat

many times in different ways throughout the essay. So just keep that idea in mind. There's no

threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree and it's often hard to judge at the time anyway.

So I'd rather people focus on developing their interests rather than worrying about whether

they're important or not. Just try to do something amazing and leave it to the future generations

to say if you succeeded. Back to the top of the essay, he left off, he says, all you need to do

is find something you have an aptitude for and a great interest in. That sounds straightforward,

but it is often quite difficult. When you're young, you don't know what you're good at.

And some kinds of work that you end up doing may not even exist yet. It's funny because that's

the same advice I went and I went and talked at career day at my daughter's school when she was

in fourth grade. And I don't think the teachers liked it very much because I started the conversation

with don't worry about what your parents or your teachers think. Just find out what you're

naturally interested in and become a learning machine. And so in my own way, I told a bunch

of nine year olds that because I was like, listen, when I was your age, there was no such thing as

podcasting. It didn't even exist. Back to what Paul said, 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'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that is fine. And this is an idea that you

and I have talked about multiple times. You see it in these biographies over and over again.

The act of finding your life's work for an entrepreneur usually requires that you're going

to have to start more than one business. I'd have to go back to the episodes to see if I

could even find somebody that got it right the first time. Maybe I think the closest example

of this might be Mark Zuckerberg. Back to this. It's good to know about multiple things. Some of

the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. Develop a

habit of working on your own projects. Do not let work mean something that other people tell you

to do. And that is such an important sentence. Don't let work mean something other people tell

you to do. That is the lived experience of most people, alive and dead. In fact, Paul has another

essay called How to Do What You Love, where he says only a few hundred thousand, and his guess,

a few hundred thousand people ever actually figured this out. Let me read, I'm going to just read an

excerpt from that other essay real quick. He says, with such powerful forces leading us astray,

it's not surprising that we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people

are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work equals pain. Those who escape this are

nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love

to work on? A few hundred thousand perhaps out of billions. And so I think that sentence hits even

harder after you read the excerpt from his past essay. Don't let work mean something other people

tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it'll probably be on a project

of your own. What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious,

as you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge,

but always preserve excitingness. I love that maxim, always preserve excitingness.

There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work.

It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on

in a small degree. This is why I wasn't expecting to do this essay as an episode. In fact, I'm

reading two other books right now that I thought I was going to do before this. But so many, first

of all, so many people that listened to Founder sent me this essay and then I started reading it

and this is exactly what happened. I feel like I have goosebumps right now. I get excited and I'm

like, nope. It completely cleared everything off. There's nothing else. So when I, people ask like

how do I pick books or do I have a schedule or something like that for what I'm going to work

on? I just go to a bookshelf where I have tons of unread books. It's like, what am I most excited

to learn about right now? And I start reading Paul's essay and I'm like, oh, there's the answer.

I'm most excited about this essay right now. And so therefore I use that. He just said,

it's the both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you,

but if you let it have its way, it'll also show you what to work on back to Paul's essay.

What are you excessively curious about? Curious to a degree that would bore most other people.

This is what you're looking for. So again, I have another example of this. So people assume

because I read a lot of books that I must have great recommendations on what to read,

but time and time again, I actually recommend a book and then I'll hear back from that person

like, oh, that was how did, how the hell did you read that? Like that book was too boring.

And this happened so many times. I'm like, oh my God, I didn't even understand that my threshold

for quote unquote boring books is so much higher than most other peoples because those books

weren't boring to me. I was reading them because I had to satisfy whatever curiosity I had, right?

So you just said, what are you excessively curious about? Curious to a degree that would bore most

other people. That is what you're looking for. Once you found something you're excessively

interested in how I'm not, I'm a few paragraphs into the essay. Like he's telling you is like,

follow your interest. What Charlie Munger says, follow your natural drift. What are you interested

in? Go do that. Once you found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to

learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. And then once you're

at a frontier of knowledge and whatever field that you're excessively interested in,

that's where you're going to start to learn and you're actually going to start to see,

you'll learn enough so you can actually see gaps. And so this is his point. Many discoveries have

come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. If the answer

seems strange to you, right? So you're working in something that you're excessively interested in,

you're doing the work necessary. Because again, you're not, he said, this essay is not for you

if you're not ambitious. If you're just trying to like skate through life, there's no point in

reading it. But he's assuming, okay, you're following, you're excessively interested,

you're willing to, you want to do great work, which then means you'll do enough work to get

to the frontier of knowledge. And then once you get there, you'll notice the gaps and you're like,

oh wait, other people are taking this for granted. If the answer seems strange to you,

so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. And then he has advice

on what you do next. Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people are not 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 of a bet as you will find. And then this next paragraph, this last sentence in

this next paragraph, which I'll get to in one second, is exactly why, you know, Paul Graham's

essays, all of them are worth reading and rereading. And you've seen this through my own actions.

Go back to what, 275, 276, 277. It's been like three weeks reading and rereading

all of his essays. And like, I've read them a bunch for years. And you do this because he's able to

compare ideas. And in this case, he's focused on great work in different fields. Entrepreneurship,

arts, mathematics, whatever it is. So he says four steps. Well, number one, choose a field.

Number two, learn enough to get to the frontier. Number three, notice the gaps. Number four,

explore promising gaps. And this is the punchline of the paragraph, which I absolutely love.

This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

Step two and four will require hard work. I'll pause there. There's a good thing that Paul has

another great essay called How to Work Hard. So I will leave that link down below if you haven't

read it. I'd obviously read this essay first and then follow all the links for his other essays,

but how to work hard. It's like, should be in the footnote of this essay.

So it says that steps two and four require hard work. It may not be possible to prove

that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale

of the evidence for mortality. So he's essentially, it's like a short bet is what he's telling us.

That is why it's essential to work on something you're deeply interested in.

Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could. And we've seen this over

and over again, go back to Neval Ravakan, go back to Michael Jordan, Edwin Landle, Steve Jobs,

he'll say the same thing, the fine work that feels like play. They're so intensely and deeply

interested in it that they have no choice. And you just wanted to spot where this strange

convergence happens, where you're working all the time and it feels like you're never working.

And then he brings up the fact that you can't learn this without doing it. Let's talk a little

bit more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. The main reason it's hard

is that 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.

And in the meantime, you're not doing and that's not learning about most other kinds of work.

And I love just sitting there reading and rereading that paragraph because the sole point,

you know, it's like, listen, we're going to try to do great work. We're going to try to find our

life's work. This, you can't expect this to be easy because if it was easy, billions and billions

of people in the past and currently wouldn't have failed to do it. And he hits at one of the most

important part because you don't know what it's like until you start doing it. And that means

you might be working at something for several years before you know how much you like it or how

good you are at it. And in the meantime, you're not learning or doing other kinds of work. So

you could go down a path and multiple paths even that are just a dead end all the way until you're

in the grave. And I think this is why I think the essay is so important that I would dedicate an

entire essay to it to like really stop and think and read and reread because this is not easy.

And we only get one shot at life. So then he goes into some of the things like why is this so

complicated? Like there's certain structures and institutions that society has created that

doesn't make this easier. And if you read, I think I have notes on this later, but

Paul's essay is a lot. We'll just kind of like, he's like constantly poking at the way we like

our educational systems are set up. You can tell he's just not a fan and he's not hiding the fact

that he's not a fan. So he says, educational systems in most countries expect you to commit to

a field long before you could know what it's really like, which is madness. This doesn't make

any sense. It would be better if they at least admitted, if they admitted that the system not

only can't do much to help you figure out what to work on, but it is designed on the this is so

crazy. This is the great thing about his writing because it's so like refined. Like he talks about

his editing process all the time. I think he spent like half a year writing this essay, if I'm not

mistaken. And so these ideas just get right into your brain. But listen to this. This is madness.

But it is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager.

If I go back and think what I was like as a teenager, and if you do the same, like how many

ideas did you believe are true? And you thought were valuable when you were teenagers, you still

believe. I was thinking about this earlier. I was like, maybe one that reading books is

probably a good use of my time, right? And reading the right books is probably a good use of my time.

The idea is like, hey, we're going to pick what we're going to do. And we're going to figure it

out and not even figure out guess, the magically guess is a great way to put it as a teenager.

And then this is what I was alluring to like, why spend so much time thinking about like,

don't glaze over this essay, read it, think about it. They don't tell you, but I will.

When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. And so then he gets into the

importance of the only going to figure this out, you have to take actions, do not be passive.

What should you do if you're young and ambitious, but don't know what to work on?

What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself.

You need to take action. When you read biographies of people who've done great work,

it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result

of a chance meeting or by reading a book that they happen to pick up. I need to pause here.

This has been on my mind a ton. First of all, obviously, what Paul said there is completely

right. You can read a lot of biographies, you just read people who've done great work,

which is this entire podcast. It's remarkable how much luck is involved. Just look at the last

few weeks. We don't have to go into the last seven years. How is it possible that both James

Cameron and Christopher Nolan both watched the movie 2001 and Space Odyssey when they were kids

and both arrived at the same conclusion that I can do that, that I can make movies?

Maybe even the best example recently, you got to go back and listen to the Mark Twain episode.

I think it's like episode 312 or something. This is the whole thing because it's about

his young life. It's really about this essay. He's a young, ambitious person, doesn't know what

to work on. He literally turns from Samuel Cummins to Mark Twain. Towards the end of the episode,

in fact, I'll tell you, I think it's like 50-minute mark because I have the transcript in front of

me. I'm going to read from this. The series of events that had to happen for Mark Twain to finally

find his path, listen to the whole episode, but in case you haven't heard it, I'm just going to give

you this like two paragraphs. This is me reading from transcript from the Mark Twain episode.

And so I say, let's look back at what is taking place. First, he thinks he's going to be a cocaine

dealer. He travels down the river, stumbles upon the best job that he thought he would have forever,

which is the Mississippi Riverboat Steamboat pilot, which is kind of crazy that Mark Twain wasn't

planning on being a writer and a lecturer. It's like, no, the best job ever is the Steamboat

captains or Steamboat pilots. Then something completely out of his control, the Civil War,

comes and causes him to flee to go out west and have all these series of adventures.

He turns from Sam Clemens into Mark Twain along the way. He meets a bunch of people along the

way that give him fantastic advice and change the trajectory of his life. He experiences

unbelievable highs and then at the very bottom, unbelievable lows where he literally has a gun

to his head. He is contemplating suicide. Then right after that, he does something smart,

puts down the pistol, picks up the pen, right? He finds the opportunity of his life,

writes what he thinks is just a silly story. That story goes viral. That story then creates all

these other fans and people that love Twain and want to help him. He turns that into a trip to

Hawaii. He meets another one of his fans who happens to be a very influential diplomat who

leads him to the greatest journalistic scoop he has of all time. That scoop leads him to his

lecture career, which further enhances his public profile, which then leads him to this 23 week trip

in Europe, which in turn is going to lead to the source material for his first great book,

the first publishing success that he ever has, which then in turn changes his life forever.

That example from Mark Twain is a microcosm of exactly what Paul Graham is talking about here.

What you should do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on. Mark Twain was

young and ambitious. He had no idea what to work on. He put pen to paper. He took action as another

way to think about that, right? When you read biographies of people who've done great work,

it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance

meeting or by reading a book that they happen to pick up. At the end of that paragraph, Paul has

a fantastic footnote. There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work,

but one of the most subtle is that by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the

right thing to work on in the first place. Back up top, when in doubt, optimize for

interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. A field should become increasingly

interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you. Do not worry

if you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes are in

interestingness, the better. Strange tastes often are strong ones and a strong taste for work means

you'll be productive and you'll be more likely to find new things if you're looking where few

others have looked before. 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. So that's another,

he's reintroducing that idea, right? Find work that feels like play. If you're interesting,

the work will pull you in. Fields are not people. You do not owe them any loyalty.

If in the course of working on one thing, you discover another that's more exciting, do not

be afraid to switch. 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 that you want to use. This should follow from the excitingness rule. So what

is he saying there? Make what you are most excited about. That's the main message of what he's trying

to teach us. He also has this, I think I talked about this before, but in other essays, he couldn't

figure out, like he would notice a pattern when he's doing like office hours with founders at Y

Combinator, that the ones that were kind of lost or like kind of not doing well, they weren't even

using their own product. They were building a product that they thought other people might want

or trying to solve a problem that they didn't really understand. And that's a big problem. If

you're not, if you don't love your own product, if you're not using your own product, there's

nothing like to orient yourself around. So it's like, why don't you just write the story that you

want to read? Build a tool that you want to use. I mentioned this case explicitly because so many

people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary,

more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you're lost. So I kind of just

ran over the point that he was making there. There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray

when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics,

other people's interests. In other words, like distractions that get you off your true authentic

path. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them.

If you're interested, you're not astray. And so when I read that the first time, I said,

that may be my favorite paragraph so far. And really, because that line, if you stick to what

you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested,

you're not astray. This idea will be very familiar to you and I. It's why my number one recommendation

is still James Dyson's first autobiography against the odds. Following your interests usually means

following them past rejection and failure. It does take a good deal of boldness. While you'll

need boldness, you usually don't need much planning. In most cases, the recipe for doing

great work is simply work hard on excitingly ambitious projects and something good will come

of it. 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 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. Let me pause. I need to repeat

that. At each stage, do whatever seems most interesting. He's repeated that to us, what,

15 times maybe so far in different ways. 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. Even when you found something exciting

to work on, working on it is not always going to be straightforward. There will be times when

some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will

also be plenty of times when things are not like that. 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. 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 four or five hours a day.

Ideally, those hours will be continued continuous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life

so you have big blocks of time to work in. Edwin Land said it best. I'll never stop repeating this

quote because it's one of my favorites. My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that

intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources. They didn't know

they had. Paul Graham says ideally those hours will be continuous. To the extent you can, try to

arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. It is 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, and I found something that seems mistaken or incomplete,

and I'm off and running. So he's talking about tricking himself into working even when you

don't feel like it. And he talks about the similar techniques work for starting new projects.

And he says, it's okay to lie to yourself about how much a project will entail. For example,

lots of great things began with someone saying, how hard could it be? He's absolutely right on that.

How many times? I've lost count of how many times I've read in these biographies.

After this is done, they'd be like, I would have never done this to begin with. I wouldn't

have even tried it if I actually knew going into it how hard or difficult or painful it would wind

up being. So there is some kind of like benefit to, I don't want to call it like blissful, I guess

blissful ignorance, maybe is the way to think about that. 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 self-discipline. In many projects, a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the

final stage. So I got to pause there because I had a weird idea that came to mind that was prompted

by reading that. So it's like, listen, you just try to finish what you start, even if it's more

work than you expected, finishing things is not just an exercise in self-discipline. In many

projects, a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. I would say

that's true for people's lives too. I was trying to figure out when you're reading these stories,

why do so many, you're not going to find many people, I'm talking about in entrepreneurship,

not scientific discovery or something, you're not going to find many people that make their best

business or their best product when they're like 20 or like 25. And this happened so much, I was

like, why do so many people wind up doing their best work many decades into their career? I think

the obvious answer would be like, I was thinking about this is like, okay, well, yeah, it's like

they've had three decades of as an entrepreneur practice, like they started a bunch of businesses,

now they know their industry better, they just understand the shape of the work and what they

want to do. And I think that is true. But one thing that I just can't let go of is, I think a key

to doing truly great work is building a business that's authentic to you, to your true self. And

what I realized is like, oh, yes, they have more experience, but they know themselves better.

This process of self discovery of like really figuring out, okay, who am I truly? Not am I

imitating what's around me? Like, who am I truly? What am I in true interest? And like, what do I

actually want to do with my life? That process is usually take many, many decades. So it's like,

yeah, they had a lot more experience and practice as an entrepreneur, but they also know themselves

way better multiple decades into the career than when they started. And I think there's a

like a relationship between those two things back to this essay. Another permissible lies

exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you

discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie at all. That is a fascinating idea

that it might be a good idea to lie to yourself, exaggerate, right, the importance of what you're

working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out

to not have been a lie at all. And so the footnote on that idea is he says, this is an idea I learned

from this book called a mathematician's apology. And he says, I recommend to anyone ambitious to

do great work in any field. And he follows that interesting idea up with another one. This is

Paul's theory on per project procrastination, per project procrastination. 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 more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year

to year because the time isn't quite right. 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. You're too busy to notice it. And then I love

his simple guide on how to catch if we're actually doing this. The way to beat this is to stop

occasionally and ask yourself, am I working on what I most want to work on? When you're young,

it's okay if the answer sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older.

Just ask yourself, am I working on what I most want to work on? Great work usually entails spending

what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. I have to pause there.

When I read that sentence, immediately becomes the mind when Steve Jobs said that everything great

has a shared ingredient time. Paul says great work usually entails spending what would seem to most

people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. Great work happens by focusing consistently

on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you'll be surprised on

how far you've come. The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of

work. Oh, another great paragraph. This is going to be an essay I'm going to read multiple times

throughout my life. I hope you read the entire thing when you're done listening to this. Writing

a page per day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day, you'll write a book a year.

That is the key consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get

something done rather than nothing. And if you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth.

The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't.

It is still a wonderful exponential curve, but we can't grasp that intuitively. So we underrate

exponential growth in early stages, something that grows exponentially can become so valuable

that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get started. This is so good. Okay. Something

that grows exponentially. Check this out. I'm going to tell you something that I was thinking

about when I was reading this. Something that grows exponentially becomes so valuable that it's

worth making an extraordinary effort to get started. So I listen to podcasts with my daughter.

She's 11. And right now she loves Taylor Swift. So we were listening to the Acquired podcast episode

on Taylor Swift. Acquired is made by my friends Ben and David. And I can't remember if Ben or David

said it, but one of them said that Taylor Swift early in her career, right? She personally responded

to like 25,000 messages from fans on the blogging platform Tumblr that was like popular back in

the day when she was just starting out. So it's like this idea. It's like 25,000 personal responses

to the small fan base that she had. It had to feel at that time to her like the curve is going to

feel flat to her because it's still the beginning. Now you fast forward what 15 years later or maybe

20 years later, she might have been like 15 when she was doing it. So it might be 20 years ago.

And now she's selling out stadiums back to back to back like multiple days.

Like I was just looking her show in LA. I think she's doing the stadium there

like five nights in a row or something like that. But this idea something that grows exponentially

becomes so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get started. This is

something that a young Taylor Swift understood intuitively. It's amazing. Work doesn't just

happen when you're trying. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking

a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a bit,

you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack. And again, this has just

been top of mind. I've heard of this a bunch, but like Christopher, I've been thinking about

what like Christopher Nolan and David Ogilvy, just because it's been top of mind because I've

made episodes about them both recently. It sounds like them. If you read about them like

this is, they think like this. They use this. You have to be working hard

in a normal way to benefit from this phenomenon though. You can't just walk around daydreaming.

The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds its questions.

They would tell you that you need to give your mind time to think,

time to wander. I think is the term that Paul's about to use here, which is fantastic.

When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment.

So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot or you'll waste

this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. There is one exception to this. Do not

avoid love. Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field until you know which

is best and what makes it so. You don't know what you're aiming for. And then on the very extreme

end, taste is actually a moat. And that is what you're aiming for because if you don't try to be

the best, you won't even be good. So I need to back that up. I'm going to read that together

because I interrupted this. He's gonna tell us like you must aim to be the best. 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. And that is what you're aiming for. Because if

you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many

people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it is true.

Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can. And if you do,

you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive way. Style is doing things in a distinctive way

without trying to. Trying to is affectation. So let's define affectation because he's going to

use this word a couple of times. It is behavior, speech, or writing that is artificial and designed

to impress, which is the opposite of what really he's saying. It's like follow your natural drift,

let what you're most interested in be your guide. And now he's saying some people do this and

they're like putting on a show for other people. None of this is going to work if it's inauthentic

to you. You adopt an impressive but fake persona. And while you're pleased with the impressiveness,

the fakeness is what shows in the work. And I think all these ideas feed on each other. Follow

your natural interest, it's authentic to you. And therefore, the work pulls you into it. And then

you do it for a long time. So you get better at it as a byproduct. All these things work very well

together. So again, you adopt an impressive but fake persona. And while you're pleased with the

impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. If you succeed at an ambitious project,

you're not a nobody. You're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will

take care of itself. And so it's like a negative role. You could say, hey, avoid being fake,

whatever the case is. But he's like, well, how do you actually express this idea positively?

How would you say what to be instead of what not to be? And he says the best answer is earnest.

And so we're going to define earnest, resulting from our showing sincere and intense conviction.

I love that definition, intense conviction. The core of being earnest is being intellectually

honest. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far, key to doing great work.

And how can you have a sharp eye for truth if you're intellectually dishonest?

Another subtle component of earnestness is informality. It means focusing on what matters

instead of what doesn't. What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as

doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. That's one reason nerds

have an advantage in doing great work. They expend little effort on seeming anything.

Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness. This is hilarious. Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness

that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It is not learned. 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. And another thing like who cares what the critics say, the loudest booze always

come from the cheapest seats. There's a theme that runs through a lot of the great founders. And

it's the fact that they believe that their opinion on what they're working on, their opinion is greater

than every other person's opinion around them regarding what they're working on. And they're

too busy building their empires and making great products and creating a fortune for themselves

and their family to stick their head up and start talking shit about what other people are doing.

Paul's other essay, Life is Short, which I think you can read in like five or 10 minutes, perfectly

pairs with this essay, because you realize outside of taking care of your health,

working on your mission or being with your tribe, nothing else matters. Stop wasting your time.

Focus on what you want to do. It's so hard. The route to great work is never easy. I doubt it

would be possible to do great work without being earnest. Another sign of people that can do great

work, they are willing to redo things. You may have to throw things away and redo them. You

have to be willing to. When there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will

combine to keep you in denial about it. Have the confidence to cut. Do not keep something that

doesn't fit just because you're proud of it or because it costs you a lot of effort. In some

kinds of work, it's good to strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more

concentrated. You'll understand it better. I don't even know why, but when I got to this section,

I was thinking about this story I read in one of the biographies of Steve Jobs. They had spent

so much time on this concept for the Apple Store. This is before it was like open to the public.

I forgot who the person was, but the guy helping Steve on this. They were working on this for maybe

I don't know, like a year or more than that. They had built this prototype of an Apple Store

in this warehouse somewhere. Steve picks them up to go take a look at it. The guy had realized

the day before, he was like, oh my God, we have this set up the incorrect way. We should have it

set up by what the devices do or whatever the case was. The important part was Steve's reaction.

The guy was like, shit, we put all this time and effort into it. We need to destroy everything we

did and start over because this other way is a better idea. Steve flipped his lid,

started getting upset, yelling. Then he gets silent because he has cancer. He's very sick

when this is happening. He's just like, I don't know if I have the energy to do this from scratch

again. Then it's like complete quiet. They're riding in the car in complete silence. They get to

the prototype where all the rest of the people, the other employees at Apple are waiting for them.

And then Steve quietly says, he's right. Do what he says, start from scratch. We're doing it all over

again. You have to throw things away and redo them. You have to be willing to. Another sign of

somebody that's doing great work. It looks easy. They make it look easy. Some of the best work

will seem like it took comparatively little effort because it was in a sense already there.

It didn't have to be built just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're

creating something or discovering it. When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation

or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit to which

the ideas take their natural shape. Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing

a problem to work on. This is usually seen as a search, but in the best case, it's more like

creating something. In the best case, you create the field in the process of exploring it.

And I love what he says here next because I feel the same way. I never like the term creative

process. It seems misleading. Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers

throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on. And then he ties that idea to the idea he said

earlier. It's like, don't sit there passively, man. You've got to work. Like you're going to learn

what field you're working on and how to do great work by doing it. You're much more likely to have

original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have

original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult.

You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics. Do not divide your attention

evenly between many topics though. It sounds almost like a contradiction, but it's not,

because he's going to explain that. You'll have more new ideas, right? If you explore a lot of

different topics, but do not 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. Oh my goodness. I love how he ties everything together.

Be professionally curious about a few topics and I'd be curious about many more.

Curiosity and originality are closely related. Having new ideas is a strange game,

because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new

idea, it tends to seem obvious. When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a

good one. Then he gets into like, why is this such a strange game? Another way to say it's like,

why is this president such a small percentage of humanity? Seeing the new idea usually requires

you to change the way you look at the world. It's admitting to yourself that you have a

broken model of the world, right? Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they

bash against reality. Most people do not want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to

say that they're attached to their current model. I think underneath all this, the main cause is

because people are terrified of change, which is strange, because we're living in a world

where the only constant thing is change. In fact, I was reading this essay and then going

through a bunch of other quotes that Paul collects on his website that I think are excellent,

and there's a line that came to mind when I got to this section. I said, change breaks the brittle.

Back to the essay. The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. If you want to fix

your model of the world, it helps to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. Few

understand the degree of rule breaking required, because new ideas seem much more conservative

once they succeed. That ties to what he said at the beginning of the section. The fact that

it's fascinating that once we discover a new idea, it tends to seem obvious after the fact.

They seem perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world. They brought with them.

The ideas bring the models, not the other way around. That's fascinating, but they didn't at

the time. It took the greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally accepted,

even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong. If you think about it, a good new idea has to seem

bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. Back to breaking rules. There are

two ways to be comfortable breaking rules. To enjoy breaking them or to be indifferent to them.

I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded. The aggressively

independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don't merely fail to stop them. Breaking rules

gives these people additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of

a project sometimes supplies them enough activation energy to get it started. The other way to break

rules is to not care about them, or perhaps not even know they exist. This is why novices and

outsiders often make new discoveries. Their ignorance of a field's assumptions, or a field's rules,

right, acts as a source of temporary, passive, independent-mindedness. And so it goes back to

his original point that deciding what to work on is so important that a lot of people are getting

distracted because they like working on fashionable problems. So Paul Graham puts this in an even

better way, like the actual value is going to accrue to things that are not top of mind. He says

unfashionable problems are undervalued. Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing.

There's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere. And that's not the

same as doing the opposite of what everybody else wants to do, right? It's the most common

type of overlook problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion.

It just doesn't seem to matter as much as it actually does. And the only way to find this is

you're following your natural interest. Again, everything ties together. How do you find these?

By being self-indulgent, by letting your curiosity have its way and tuning out, at least temporarily,

the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on important problems.

And so it's important to note that the word important in that sentence has quotation marks.

It's just like really, it's the opinion of other people, right? By being self-indulgent,

by letting your curiosity have its way and tuning out that little voice in your head

that says you should only be working on quote unquote important problems. And so I want to pause

there because I think this is so important. So in addition to reading this essay, I saw that Paul's

wife and his partner on Y Combinator, Jessica said that she's going to reread every year.

I think she said every year she wants to reread this essay, how to do great work.

And she also rereads Paul's essay, Life is Short Every Year. And so when you read them back to back,

you realize, oh, wow, that's like really good. They go well together. And what was fascinating is

there is this line in the Life is Short essay where he says the things that matter aren't

necessarily the ones people would call quote unquote important. He uses important in quotation

marks again. So this ability to literally like not care to live an authentic life, ask yourself,

am I following my own interests? Is this what I want to work on? And if the answer is yes,

everybody else's opinion is irrelevant. And I think as you get older and you actually know

yourself, that becomes like easier to do. But it's obviously something that is not common,

right? The ability to do is not common because it comes up in these essays over and over again.

So much so that Paul has to explicitly tell the reader, give advice, hey,

that even if you hear that in like the back of your mind, that's fine, like shut it up.

Because it's taking you off the path that you're meant to be off. That little voice in your head

that says you should only be working on quote unquote important problems. Ignore it. Why?

Because most people that work on important problems and do great work, those problems were

not seen as important to the external world at the time they started working on them. And you

only know that if you go back and you study the creation of all these new industries and read

all these other biographies, it pops up over and over again. The example I use over and over again

is the fact that Henry Ford is sitting in Detroit in 1900 working on an internal combustion engine

in his fucking kitchen. And everybody around him saying, what are you doing? You're wasting

time. Cars are obviously going to be electric or they're going to be steam powered. His boss

tells him because he's working at the electric company as an engineer. If you keep up your

experimentations with your internal combustion engine, you either have to choose between the

engine or your job. And Henry Ford is like, cool, I'm choosing the engine. He followed his natural

interest with the entire outside world was telling him, this isn't important enough, this little stupid

thing that you're doing, focus on the big thing. Obviously electricity is the biggest invention.

Obviously all the cars are going to be electric. Fast forward 19 years from when they're having

that conversation, Henry Ford owns 100% of the Ford Motor Company has created and manufactured

a car that made over 15 million people's lives better. After the 15th million model T rolled

off the assembly line, did that guy's opinion about what Henry Ford should be doing matter?

No, it didn't matter at number 15 and it didn't matter when he said it. And Paul describes this

perfectly says, try asking yourself, if you were going to take a break from quote unquote serious

work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The

answer is probably more important than it seems. What might seem to be merely the initial step

deciding what to work on is in a sense the key to the whole game. I don't even know how far we are

into this essay, but I think it's obvious why so many people that listen to this podcast sent

this to me. This is perfect. Few grasp this, the fact that picking what to work on is the key to

the whole game, right? Few grasp this. People think big ideas are the answers, but often the real

insight was in the question. Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes

from returning to a question you first notice years before and you could not stop thinking about.

It is a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And a way to know that if you have

a good unanswered question, he says the best questions grow in the answering. You'll notice

a thread and then try pulling on it. And it just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question

to be obviously big before you try answering it. It goes back to the Henry Ford just messing around

following his own interest in his kitchen, right? You can rarely predict that. It's hard enough

to even notice the thread, let alone to predict how much it will unravel if you pull on it.

It is just better to be promiscually curious to put 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.

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 do

not work. You cannot have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones. And so I

love the fact that Paul says being prolific is underrated. A few days before I read this,

my friend, Anil, who's the founder of Meter, he actually sent me his post. He, on his personal

website, Anil collects examples, like historical examples of people that he calls outlandishly

prolific. I'll leave the link down below in case you want to look at the list. It's fantastic.

Air on the side of starting, which is easier when starting means starting small. Those two ideas

fit together like two puzzle pieces. So air on the side of starting and then it's easier to start

when it means starting small. How do you get from starting small to doing something great

by making successive versions? Great things are almost always made in successive versions.

You start with something small and evolve it. And the final version is both clever and more

ambitious than anything you could have planned. See what he just did there? We're deep into this

essay now. And now he finds ways to take ideas that he referenced, you know, maybe, I don't know,

5,000 words ago. This idea is like, don't spend too much time planning, get in, you'll start to learn

more, and then he ties everything together. You're following your natural interests, you're

having a bias to action, you're starting small, you're evolving it over time. And as a result,

the final version is both clever and more ambitious than anything you could have planned. Begin by

trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. Surprisingly often, it does. Do not try to cram

too much new stuff into any one version. Evolve instead. And so there's a few times in the essay

where he'll talk about, like, the difference between, like, what would you do if you're young or

are a little bit older? I like how he describes this. Use the advantages of youth when you have

them. And the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time,

optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power.

The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they have. I like that line. The young

often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea

how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in a slightly

frivolous way. To learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity,

or to try building something just because it would be cool or to become freakishly good at

something. So I need to repeat that because he's like, listen, I'm not going to tell you to waste

your time. But listen, if you are young, you have no idea how rich you are in time. The best way to

turn this time into an advantage is to use it in a slightly frivolous way, especially saying, like,

to experiment, to like, what are my true interests? What are the things I want to work on? How am I

going to find a path that I can actually do, like, would turn into me being able to do great work?

And at the root core, it's like, well, just follow your curiosity, follow your interests,

which again, it's the main theme here, right? And so he's going to elaborate on this though,

because I wanted to repeat that because then he goes into what he means. Spend time lavishly

when you're young, but don't simply waste it. There's a big difference between doing something

you worry might be a waste of time, and doing something you know for sure will be. And so the

ability to spend time lavishly is something that only the young have, right? Now he talks about

if you're a little older, you have another advantage. One of the most valuable kinds of

knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don't have to worry about. The young know all

the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally

about everything when they should worry much more about a few things, and hardly at all about the

rest. And a source of this confusion about, okay, well, like, they're worried about everything

equally when it's like, just focus on the really important things and ignore everything else.

So the source of the confusion goes back to this is the problem with school. It just fills your

head with a bunch of nonsense. So everybody almost by default will arrive at adulthood

with a head full of nonsense. And he says much of that nonsense left in your head is left there

by schools. Schools induce passivity. The sooner you overcome this, the better. Schools also give

you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school, they tell you what the problems are,

and they're almost always solvable using no more than what you've been taught so far. In real life,

you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're solvable at all.

But perhaps the worst thing that schools do is they train you to win by hacking the test.

You cannot do great work by doing that. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut.

Do not skimp on the work itself. Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving

you a big break. Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work

rather than chasing influential people. It's that idea that you should try to be so good that people

can't ignore you. People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothing inherently

bad about that. There's no better way to learn how something works than trying to reproduce it.

Nor does copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the presence of new

ideas, not the absence of old ones. And then he goes into why you want to study all the great work

that came before you, not just to work in like your failure industry. 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. I'm going to repeat that. I love that. 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.

And then he goes into something that's repeated through history a lot, especially at the beginning

of industries. They all seem all the super talented people seem to be within close physical

proximity to one another. If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place,

it's usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will increase your ambition and also by showing

you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence. If you are earnest,

you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people, this is so,

I love this idea. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone

who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist

interest in it. And hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies. Seek out the best colleagues.

That is like the one line maximum of this section, right? Seek out the best colleagues.

If you listened to the Mark Twain episode I referenced earlier, the best advice Mark Twain

ever got that he followed for the remaining 44 years of his life was this American diplomat in

Hawaii told him, you have great ability. I believe you have genius. What you need now is refinement

of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. This is like

the punchline for me. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors. Always

climb. Paul Graham's way of saying that is seek out the best colleagues. Colleagues don't just

affect your work though. They also affect you. So work with people you want to become like

because you will. And he's going to go into why. Like great work happens in clusters. We just see

this over and over again. In fact, it's not merely better but necessary. Judging from history,

the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one colleagues often make the

difference between doing great work and not. We got to read that again. The degree to which great

work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between

doing great work and not. That's why you see so many of history's great founders. They repeat

over and over again the importance of recruiting and finding a way to attract the very best people.

Whether it's partners, employees, it doesn't matter. They all repeat this over and over again.

And then Paul has this great way to tell if you've done this or not.

How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my experience, when you do,

you know. Which means if you're unsure, you probably don't. And then the essay takes a

fascinating turn because he talks about maintaining your own inner monologue and your own morale.

Husband, you're morale. It is the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious

projects. You have to nurture and protect it. I've done multiple episodes and read multiple

books about Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he says this over and over again, it's very dangerous

when you start doubting yourself. He would very deliberately get away physically from people

that would try to either tell him, Arnold, don't do that. It's impossible. You can't pot. How can

you be an actor? No one can even understand you or you can't get famous for lifting weights and

becoming a bodybuilder. You can't become the governor of California. What are you talking about?

And so this idea, it's very dangerous. You're going to get enough negative input from the

external world. You can't have any coming from yourself. It's very dangerous when you start

doubting yourself. Paul is saying here, it's like, listen, the basis of everything when you're

working on ambitious projects. He goes back to why managing your inner monologue, your own morale,

is so important. Morale compounds via work. High morale helps you do good work, which increases

your morale and helps you do even better work. If you're not doing work, that can demoralize you

and make it even harder to do good work. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in

the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you're stuck. Just

so you start getting something done. One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow

setbacks to destroy the morale all at once, like a balloon popping. You can inoculate yourself

against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems

will always involve some backtracking. Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than

you need to. It is 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. And so then he turns the essay and ties this all back into

morale. An audience is a critical component of morale. And so this will become obvious, I think,

as you go through this, but he's talking about the people using whatever it is that you're making,

right? What is it, who is, you're making great work. It's not like you're the only person,

it can't be great if you're the only person who sees it. So somebody is using the tool or listening

to what you're doing or whatever, reading it, whatever it is. If you're just starting out,

a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely

love what you're doing, that is enough. Avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your

audience. That point is actually very important. Avoid letting intermediaries come between you

and your audience. When I first thought about that, I thought about Taylor Swift, on Tumblr,

talking directly to her fans, to the people listening to her music. There's nobody in between

her and her audience also can be applied in the more traditional business product sense,

where you study the career of Edwin Land, he's always making innovations because he's creating

new technology, new patents, new science. And he was trying to sell into like, he wasn't connected

to the end user. So he's trying to make headlights, automobile headlights, safer. But he's got to sell

and convince people, like a handful of people, maybe in Detroit. And when he did that for many

years and failed it, it's like, I'm never letting anybody else get in between me and the customer.

So then he starts making consumer goods, right? That he can talk directly to the customer,

which is his cameras. And I think that's a really important observation. Like, okay, well, I failed

when I couldn't communicate directly with the end customer, because I was selling to car companies,

as opposed to the people driving the car. But I succeeded wildly when I had a direct

connection with the customers, the one actually buying my cameras. And so Paul says, avoid letting

intermediaries come between you and your audience, it is so liberating to escape it,

that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type of work, if that work will let you

go direct. And then back to this idea, get away from the naysayers, flee the doubters, like you

don't need them, the people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. Seek

out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Do not marry someone who

doesn't understand that you need to work or seize your work as competition for your attention.

If you're ambitious, you need to work. It's almost like a medical condition. So someone who won't

let you work either doesn't understand you or does and doesn't care. And I think Paul answers

the question, I've been asked this question in the past, like, do I think the people I

cover and study in the podcast are like happier than the average person? And I was like, I don't

know how to really answer that. And like, I kind of waffle. But this idea where it's like, oh, if

you're ambitious, you need to work, it's almost like a medical condition. He says people who do

great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd

be if they didn't. That is a better way to think about it than I've ever come up with. In fact,

if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and

ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. And then he goes back into this reoccurring

theme, do not be guided by prestige. It is okay to want to impress other people, but choose the

right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much

larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise. The prestige of a type of work is at

best a trailing indicator. If you do anything well enough, you will make it prestigious. The

question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be

done. And this might be the best line of the entire essay. Curiosity is the best guide. Your

curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work, and the oracle replied with a single word,

my bet would be on curiosity. This whole process is a dance with curiosity. Believe it or not,

I try 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.

The discoveries are out there waiting to be made. Why not by you?

And that is where I'll leave it. I highly, highly, highly recommend reading the entire essay. It'll

be linked down below. And I will also link to Paul's essay Life is Short, which I think should

be read directly after reading this one. Thanks for listening this far, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.