excited curiosity
2025-04-11 14:09 Note Type: Tags: great-work, curiosity, career-insights
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.
Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could. The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
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.
But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.
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.
But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning. 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.
The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?
Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth.
There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful.
One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years.
So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.
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.
Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.
It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.
I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading. Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind.
Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.
There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded.
Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. 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?
So if you're interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.
People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value.
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. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.
One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don't have to worry about.
But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You can't trick God.
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.
And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work.
Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.
Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested.
Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.
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. But it may be possible to give a more concrete answer than that. Here's an attempt: sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights.
Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you need to.
The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.
Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it.
Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention.
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.
It's ok 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.
In fact, don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder.
Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.
Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.
Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?
Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear.
The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?
There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place.
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.
Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty. Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.
It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're now in a position to do something about some of them.
Building something that enables people to go around intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably a good idea.