Great Work
http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.
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.
The second step is long and tedious though, full of uncertainty. Although curiosity as a heuristic is good. PG adds that desire and delight are also powerful motivators.
An interesting point in terms of making yourself a target for look is reading a lot, trying to dip your toes in many things that catch your interest. Theres no key to finding what you really like. This seems like a good method.
A field should become more interesting as you learn more about it
Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. 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
What do you genuinely find interesting? Because there’s so many forces that can lead you astray this has to be the internal heuristic.
Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You’ll often have to coevolve with the problem. That’s why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The search space is huge. It’s the cartesian product of all possible types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible future versions of you.
There’s no way you could search this whole space, so you have to rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be; different types of work have been collected together as much by accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.
Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.
Theres a focus in the post too about working on projecs. That you can have project level procrasination and daily procrasination, the former harder to see than the latter. Finishing projects as important. I have to say in my experience this is good advice. Finishing things makes the work not go to waste, often times the best stuff is at the end and also fortifies what commmitment to a project means internally.