Well put. But what the article (and others like it) lacks is the fallback, the plan B, the exception handling, what to do if things don't work out as planned.
There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and eventually you end up competing with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser. It's a dog eat dog world, winners take all and there's no reward for the effort. If you don't win the big prize, you've wasted your life for nothing.
So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99 guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries.
Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".
Honestly I didn't think it was well put at all. A vast number of words for very little content, and what content can be distilled is useful to approximately nobody. I've never known a person who needed this advice.
If you're exceptional in some niche you don't need the advice (if it can be called that). If you aren't, you can be your best and thrive if you are motivated, in which case this is similarly unhelpful. In the final case, if you aren't intrinsically motivated to do 'great work' then you won't.
I think part of the point of it is to assure people working on niche problems that embody some of the qualities of what pg is describing as great work. It’s easy to look at the shiny zeitgeist and feel a lot of self doubt if you’re off working on something few outside the niche seem to understand. I’m not sure if this an advice piece as much as an encouragement piece to those readers going through those trenches.
> It's a dog eat dog world, winners take all and there's no reward for the effort. If you don't win the big prize, you've wasted your life for nothing.
Prizes and rewards are never guaranteed. The only way to be sure you aren't wasting your time is to spend it on something gratifying—in the context of this essay this might be the "excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work." You don't need a fallback if your approach isn't outcome oriented.
I’m not sure we got the same thing from this essay.
Picking problems is one of the first things mentioned in this essay, and neither soccer-playing nor strawberry-picking seem like fields where there are lots of questions folks haven’t answered yet. (This is not to say that there aren’t interesting questions in agriculture or sports in general!)
Picking a field that’s zero-sum, where there are already 100 workaholic geniuses pursuing the only possible positive outcomes (eg, champions league forward) seems like maybe not the right way to go, and the essay is pretty explicit about this.
My cousin tried to become a twitch streamer. He is an incredible gamer and did some competitive gaming in shooter tournaments back in the day. He's also very funny and charismatic.
He became interested in hacking minecraft pushed some of the boundaries of what you could do in the modding/hacking scene.
Despite his efforts, things never really took off and ended up heading off to college like the rest of us.
in tech at least even if you fail, you are developing valuable skills that can be used elsewhere. Plenty of failed startup founders end up at other places in engineering or management roles
not creating a billion dollar startup isn't a failure, tons of people in the tech industry retire as multimillionaires essentially working a 9-5. A lot of people on HN seem to think if you don't make the Forbes list you are a failure
I'm not really sure that their statement is temporal or regional. With failure in general comes lessons that can be applied to other situations, regardless of anything else.
This assumes we can come back from the failure without major consequences, and we'll still be in a position to leverage the learnings from that failure. I think the OP is pointing to one of those scenarios where that's less likely.
It was mentioned, the striving for the best bit, but may have been me reading in between the lines.
The little bits in the article really resonate with me, in particular what I spot in my field (software dev / distributed systems) is that at high level there looks like many great solutions exist, but when you look deeper in you see that many of them are inelegant, and only reason they weren’t done better was because no one actually spent time on that particular minute thing. it likely got implemented as part of a bigger patch and still deemed “good enough”.
I theorise that many fields are similar if you look deep enough
> So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99 guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries.
How does this work in the world of business where 99% fail
> How does this work in the world of business where 99% fail
I used to know this grumpy old guy who had a simple explanation for that statistic:
It doesn't mean that, if you start a business, you have a 99% chance of failure. It means that, out of everyone who starts a business, 99% of founders are guaranteed to fail, and 1% of founders are guaranteed to succeed.
The trick, I think, is to become the kind of person who can succeed at starting a business — and then start a business.
There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So getting good (skilled, educated) does decrease competition and increase one's chances of doing "great work". But from a point on you reach into the territory where there's just too much genius, semi-autistic high IQ workaholics that crowd some niche field and eventually you end up competing with the same 100 hulks for one job. Doesn't matter if it's picking strawberries or playing forward in Champions League, if you're not getting either you're still a loser. It's a dog eat dog world, winners take all and there's no reward for the effort. If you don't win the big prize, you've wasted your life for nothing.
So exception handling: if you invest a lot of effort into something make sure you get to reap some rewards even if you're one of the 99 guys that doesn't get to pick the strawberries.
Otherwise like a great Romanian scholar and philosopher once said: "Decât să lucri de-a pulea mai bine stai de-a pulea (Gigi Becali)". Loosely translated: "Rather than work your ass off for nothing, better sit on your ass for nothing".