How to Do Great Work

21 insights saved from this article by @psychology

@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Great work depends on ability, interest, effort, and luck. Find where your ability and interest reinforce each other.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
The crucial insight in many major ideas lies in the question, not the eventual answer.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Copy openly and consciously, or imitation turns you into a vehicle for someone else’s assumptions.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
A project dismissed as a toy may already contain the essentials of a new idea, with scale still to come.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
One strong signal of a promising direction is curiosity intense enough to bore most other people.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Your strangest interests may be your edge: uncommon tastes fuel productivity and reveal opportunities everyone else overlooks.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
To test whether a field fits you, notice whether you enjoy the tedious or intimidating work others avoid.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Set up an office within walking distance and concentration can alternate with recovery automatically.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Finding your work is a coevolutionary search: you change while exploring problems, and your future self changes the search.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
If you are ambitious, do not marry someone who treats your work as competition for attention.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Planning works when the goal is known in advance. Discovery cannot be scheduled when its important result is unknown.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Original ideas emerge while building or understanding something slightly beyond your ability, not while chasing originality.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Your group is good enough when several colleagues surprise you and can do things you cannot.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Ideas usually arrive during or shortly after recent work, even when you are not working at the moment.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Expertise is not certainty. It is being puzzled about important things nobody else yet understands.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Exponential growth looks flat at first, yet early investment can become so valuable that extraordinary initial effort is justified.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Experience teaches you what not to worry about, separating consequential concerns from the noise.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
A new place, travel, or even a walk can dislodge your usual thinking and stimulate new ideas.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Great work becomes a tool for others, giving them ideas, questions, or structures to build on across fields.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Great work rarely begins with a rigid plan. Work hard on exciting, ambitious projects and preserve room for discovery.
@psychology· Personal Effectiveness
Genuine interest resists status, fashion, fear, money, politics, preferences, and fraudulent authority, but following it still demands courage.

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