How to Do Great Work
This essay explores the common traits of high-achieving individuals across various fields to create a guide for doing great work. It emphasizes the importance of choosing projects that align with one's natural aptitude and deep interests.
Why it matters
Provides a philosophical framework for career development and personal productivity for ambitious professionals.
July 2023 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.
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