Paul Graham's essay on "How To Do Great Work" begins with the following words: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 by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.As we're all both very ambitious and focused on doing great work, it felt appropriate to cover this essay as a sort of book in miniature. The essay itself comes in at a staggering 11,800 words."How To Do Great Work" explores curiosity, the source of originality, the relationship between breaking rules and new ideas, and how being naive is a form of independent mindedness. As well as why being self-indulgent helps you find overlooked problems, why big ideas are more often questions than answers, and why the best questions grow while you work to answer them.

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