If You Care About Doing Great Work, Read This Essay.

Sharing some key takeaways that resonated with me.

I’ve been heads down building Ponder hence the lack of updates, but this essay was too good not to share with my network.

Whether you're an ambitious founder or not, this essay is worth a read if you care about doing great work.

𝙃𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙤 𝘿𝙤 𝙂𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠 - 𝙋𝙖𝙪𝙡 𝙂𝙧𝙖𝙝𝙖𝙢:
https://lnkd.in/gYiRwi8m

𝙀𝙥𝙞𝙨𝙤𝙙𝙚 𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚:
https://lnkd.in/gTF2vPx4

There's a lot to digest in this essay, but here are some key takeaways I resonated with:

- "The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity."

- "Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high."

- "If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find."

- "One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don't have to worry about. The young know all the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest."

- "In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work.

When you're first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two cases are more similar than they seem."

- "Since there are two senses of starting work - per day and per project, there are also two forms of procrastination.

Per-project procrastination is far more dangerous as it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.

The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?" When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older."

- Those who do great work aren't necessarily happier than others, but they are happier than they would be if they didn't pursue their ambitions.

Hope this essay will remind you why you started your journey in the first place. Just as it did for me.