How to Do Great Work
Ingredients
Hard Work
Richard Hamming says knowledge and productivity are like compound interest: "The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity — it is very much like compound interest." I have no way to test that, but I think it's true.
Patience
It takes time to get good at things. It's hard when your taste is ahead of your skill.
All creatives get into it because we have good taste. But for the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. It's good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
If you're still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap.
Ira Glass
Awareness
Do things thoughtfully and deliberately. I won't say slowly, because sometimes the most thoughtful course of action means quickening the pace. So it's a matter of awareness. The rule is to be aware of what the rule is at any given moment.
Originality
If you just try to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn't help painting like Michelangelo.
Paul Graham, Taste for Makers
Innovation
Yokoi (inventor of the Gameboy) liked to use tech that was cheap or even obselete. So before you go and reinvent the wheel, first see if you can solve your problem with the materials you already have.
Milieu
Henrik Karlsson says you need a milieu. And if you don't have one, you can summon one by reading and reaching out to exceptional people.
How to decide what to work on?
Look at your options now and choose the one that gives the most interesting options for the future.
Paul Graham via David Epstein, Range
How to know when to switch focus?
You know it's time to quit when you aren't learning.
But quitting isn't a great word, because it sounds permanent. Whatever you're "quitting" might come in handy later. So instead, let's call it a change. How do you know when it's time for a change? When you aren't learning anything, especially about yourself and/or how the world works.
Late bloomers
Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young.
These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.
Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.” He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.
Ibid.
The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways.
Ibid.
Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.
This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).
Ibid.
Efficiency
Too often, in web development, I feel like I’m wrestling with incidental complexity that has nothing to do with the actual problem at hand. I’m wrangling npm dependencies, or debugging my state manager, or trying to figure out why my test runner isn’t playing nicely with my linter. Some people really enjoy this kind of stuff, and I find myself getting sucked into it sometimes too. But I think ultimately it’s a kind of fake-work that feels good but doesn’t accomplish much, because your end-user doesn’t care if your bundler is up-to-date with your TypeScript transpiler.
Some work is easier
Some types is easier. For example, when I'm coding, it's not that the work is easy, but it's easy to do the work. Putting in the hours isn't the hard part.
I cant say the same for writing fiction. Writing nonfiction falls somewhere in between.