How to Do Great Work?

Paul Graham’s new post, How to Do Great Work, is currently very famous among our friend group, so we decide to host a blog reading session to (1) Understand how to do great work, and also the nuances/ complexity that might not be covered in the blog post. (2) Devise potential strategies & take concrete actions toward doing great work.

Before the meeting, my friend, Ha, put together study guide questions for us. Here are the questions.

1. Paul Graham said there are 4 steps to working on something great: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, and explore promising ones. Where are you right now?
2. Are you working on what you most want to work on?
3. What are “bad habits” that you have acquired that might have prevented you from doing great work? What about “bad morale”? What stops us from doing great work?
4. This article is long, but might not be comprehensive. If you were to disagree with the article on something, what would it be?
5. Esther & I did an interesting challenge — we follow this advice: “If you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good.” And ask ourselves, what would we want to be the best at. Esther’s answer: I want to be the best LLM/ AI engineer. Ha’s answer: I want to create the best climate tech company. What would you want to be the best at?

We debated and discussed the blog, and here are the myths we debunk ourselves in the group.

Myth 1: We need to do great work, and great work means a large-scale impact, like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.

The statement “We need to do great work” is debatable as people have different priorities in life, such as exercise, relationships, and exploration. Self-awareness and personal choice are essential factors for striving toward their own definition of great work (So we are all making our own work manifesto). Capitalistic societies have led us to value measurable and external factors, which is why individuals like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk’s work are considered great work. However, small impacts, such as taking care of family and friends, are equally important. We need individuals with various skills and backgrounds in society.

Myth 2: Great work shouldn’t be a selfish goal.

We can identify three reasons why people strive to do great work: passion for the problem, reputation, and ego. My friend told me that she hates some arrogant people in San Francisco because they only work to become famous. However, she feels fine about being deeply interested in her problem because of the intellectual stimulation it provides. Humans have many self-motivations, so we should accept that many of our goals are often selfish. Even if our main driver is self-interest, it can still be okay as long as we are on the way to creating a positive impact.

Myth 3: Ambitions and direction are a must for great work.

Ambition and direction help, but they’re not the only ways. I really love Yueh Han’s simple thoughts on thinking of work as creation: doing your hobbies and interests that make you feel internally fulfilled. It will make it feel so much easier to try and achieve. Lots of great work spins up from small personal projects and interests. As Paul Graham says, curiosity is a better guide to sustain someone in the long term and provides better intuition to find “the gap” in society too. Why not start something easy and fun?

Myth 4: We need to be good enough to do great work.

This is the biggest hurdle that most people face in our blog reading group is self-confidence. We realize there are many many toxic negative thoughts in ourselves about who we are and what we can or cannot do. We are always just not sure if we are good enough or if the things we want to do might be too difficult for us. To unblock this, we break down the problem into two parts.

(1) How can we change our self-image of not being good enough? I’ve tried to break this down question through self-manifestation and deepening and expanding my own competitive advantages. I wrote a blog post about it: “How to Gain Career Confidence: Strategies and Mindsets for Being the Best.”

(2) How can we still motivate ourselves to do things even when we don’t think we are good enough? For me, it’s about making everything funny. I wrote a blog post about it: “Try to Do Hard Things? Make It Funny.”

Another friend, Svitlana also suggested Tim Ferriss’s fear exercise to tackle our fear.

Myth 5: We need to work crazily to do great work.

A lot of fear I’m afraid of doing great work in my mind because I don’t agree with a life with only work. I still deeply value other dimensions of my life. For instance, my relationship.

However, this discussion reminds me to find the right scope and a niche scope of problems I want to tackle that I feel comfortable with, rather than working crazily 24–7.

At the end of the discussion, we create an action plan. Let me share it with you.

• My current work manifesto: Enable all of us to learn with curiosity through technology.
• Right now, if you were to work on only 1 thing that offers the scope to do great work, what would it be? Write it down: Specifically, I want to learn with my community in a fun or funny way through LLM technology.
• What is your biggest blocker in doing great work in this field? Write it down: I don’t have enough time to do it consistently.
• What are small (<1 week) experiments that you can try to remove that blocker? Brainstorm 3 different ways and write them down:
• I want to try creating a customized learning map through LLM.
• I can start by breaking my projects down, learning React, and tuning LLM in different weeks.
• I can find people interested in AI x Learning to collaborate for 3 hours.
• If nothing works out, I will just continue writing about what I learned in my week.

I think I will review this blog in the future, and please let me know if you are on this path too. We can share and learn together.

This is the 51th post from my 60-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. If you want to get an email notification for my post, feel free to subscribe to my substack: here.