flâneur

Hanzi Li

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on the atlas — 1

highlights — 15

  • when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert to what I have now?
    How to Do Great Work
  • Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for.
    How to Do Great Work
  • It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short.
    How to Do Great Work
  • When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead.
    How to Do Great Work
  • By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're like.
    How to Do Great Work
  • So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. [2]
    How to Do Great Work
  • Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge
    How to Do Great Work
  • Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.
    How to Do Great Work