#314 Paul Graham (How To Do Great Work)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I just finished listening to this entire episode, and I mentioned in the episode that I 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 actually apply what they learned to whatever it is that you and I are working on. If that is you, I highly recommend that you sign up for the Private Founders AMA feed. I've been making short episodes every week based on questions that I get from other members. If you become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions directly. There's actually a private email address that you get access to in the confirmation email. I read every single one of these emails myself. I do not have an assistant look over them. I read every single one. The questions I get from these emails, I turn into short AMA episodes, so that actually allows other members to learn from the questions of other members. You can also add your name and a link to your website with your question so other members can check out what you're working on. That feature alone is worth the investment. So far, I made 31 episodes. I plan on making several episodes every week. If you consider yourself an enthusiast of Founders Podcast, highly recommend that you become a member, 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 gonna 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 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 gonna 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.