How to Do Great Work - By Paul Graham and My Takeaways based on 7-Year Startup Experience
Paul Graham is a highly respected entrepreneur, programmer, and investor and a co-founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator. As an entrepreneur, I always gain significant insights from reading his articles. Recently, I read his piece titled "How to Do Great Work." It is an exceptionally instructive article, and quite a long one too, spanning 36 pages like a small book. If I had read this article before starting my entrepreneurial journey, I might not have been able to discern the valuable insights within. However, after seven years of entrepreneurial experience, I found myself nodding in agreement almost every time I read a sentence. This is an article worth reading for every entrepreneur.
As the US head of a tech startup company A, I pioneered the US market from scratch and helped develop an app that has become one of the most mainstream apps in the US market. After leaving company A, I founded a user-generated content (UGC) platform that helps women discover good products. Over five years, I grew the company's valuation to $15 million. During this period, I experienced various successes and failures, and summarizing these entrepreneurial lessons will help the other entrepreneurs who just got started and myself to upgrade our perspectives for future ventures. Knowledge shapes behavior, and behavior determines results, so by improving understanding, we can bring about change. Therefore, I have summarized this article into three parts and analyzed and expanded upon them based on my seven years of entrepreneurial experience.
Chapter One: Why Deciding What You "Want to Do" is So Difficult
If you can "find and decide what you really want to do," then you have essentially completed 90% of this great endeavor, with the remaining 10% being merely a matter of execution and time. My experience in a tech startup is that during the initial stage, everyone spends more than 90% of their time determining product-market fit (PMF). However, this severely overlooks a more critical issue: before PMF, you need to determine product-founder fit (PFF), which is the compatibility between the product and the founder. Only when this compatibility reaches 100% can a solid foundation for future development be established; otherwise, it is just a castle in the air, an illusion.
So what might seem to be merely the initial step—deciding what to work on—is in a sense the key to the whole game. - Paul Graham
I am 38 years old this year, and I have never wasted my years but have diligently and continuously cultivated. You can read my previous article summarizing my learning and work experiences titled "How I Lost 15 Pounds in 6-month." It's not just diligence; I also possess rare courage. After graduating from a top university in China, I chose to fly to the US alone and obtain a master's degree. I once voluntarily gave up a "director" position at Disney Interactive Media and a "comfortable life" to pursue entrepreneurship, embarking on a seven-year tumultuous yet exciting entrepreneurial journey, even if it meant "gaining" depression and having to fight it for years. But despite all these attempts and experiences, at 38, I am still continuing to search and decide what I want to do. I have found that humans are constantly evolving. Every year, with the accumulation of external experiences and a deeper understanding of ourselves, the things that make us curious, interested, and can showcase our talents are constantly changing. For example, I have gradually evolved from a woman solely focused on her career into an entrepreneurial mom who needs to balance career, health, and family.
Although deciding what you "want to do" is a challenging issue, it is still essential to find it because it is a prerequisite for doing something great. Realizing that this is a difficult task will help us have enough empathy for ourselves and fully accept that we are still searching for direction even in middle age. We can tell ourselves: "You have worked hard along the way and made a great effort. Finding it is lucky; not finding it is normal. Don't rush; take your time, keep trying, and experiment freely." At the same time, this awareness will help us identify the factors that prevent us from deciding what we want to do. This way, we can consciously focus on "finding our goal" rather than being trapped in various obstacles, constantly distracted, and wasting precious time and life. Understanding these obstacles is an important step in finding "what we want to do."
1) Obstacle One: The "School" Education System
We all have curiosity, especially when we are young. However, the school system does not really care about what you are curious about.
Educational institutions often function as tools for the ruling class to mass-produce taxpayers. At school, various subjects are predetermined, and you need to spend a lot of precious time studying subjects you are not interested in. What's worse, teachers tell you what problems to solve. But once you enter society, you must decide what problems you want to solve. As a result, most people prefer to execute others' dreams rather than determine their own projects because we were taught from a young age to obey the authority of the "teacher."
What you really need to do is to treat learning as your own "project," with teachers serving merely as helpers and advisors for you, nothing more. They should not be your bosses, deciding what problems you should solve, how to solve them, or even judging your worth.
Similarly, as parents, we should guide our children, helping them discover various possibilities and respecting their decisions, allowing them to explore according to their interests. However, if parents intervene too much and hope their children develop according to the parents' own wishes, they are depriving their children of vitality and stifling their "self." Such a family environment produces slaves rather than masters of society.
2) Obstacle Two: Scarcity Driven by Fear
Following your curiosity sounds simple but is quite difficult. It requires you to constantly be aware of your sense of scarcity, including worries about not having enough money, time, health, love, etc. Therefore, most people with entrepreneurial ideas want to wait until they have enough savings and time before considering starting a business. Those already in business often feel they lack resources to achieve their goals, believing they need to raise a significant amount of money before they can execute any project.
In reality, it is not money or time that is scarce, but your focus and persistence in following your curiosity. When we are truly immersed in things we are "interested" in, we do not feel scarcity but rather feel as if we have entered a universe of infinite richness. There, we have no restrictions or shackles, and we forget our own existence. At such times, we are full of creativity and vitality, and great things are created almost unconsciously. The joy of this creation injects us with continuous energy, turning us into a "self-illuminating body" that does not need to obtain energy from external sources. I do not deny the limitations that money, time, and health bring us, but within our controllable range, we should increase the time we spend "following our curiosity" as much as possible.
3) Obstacle Three: High Cost of Exploration
Each of our lives is limited, and the time and opportunities we have to try things in this world are finite, which is undeniable. Exploration and experimentation often require a lot of time. During this process, you do not have time to experience and try other things, which brings significant time and opportunity costs to our exploration.
However, I believe the greater cost does not come from exploration and experimentation but from not daring to follow your curiosity and thus not exploring and discovering. Because our time is already very limited, the various fears and scarcity lead us not to try what we want to do, trapping us in work that does not bring us any growth. This is "procrastination."
Procrastination has a destructive effect on our lives, but most people may not realize its power because everyone seems busy doing various things, often tasks that robots could eventually do. However, the things we are truly interested in get shelved, and it is these things that make us irreplaceable.
Furthermore, in the process of exploring our interests and curiosity, we must constantly ask ourselves: Is this really what I am interested in? What am I truly interested in? This helps us correct our direction in time.
4) Obstacle Four: Over-Planning
Paul, in his article, not only believes that "planning" is unnecessary but even "evil." The core reason is that "planning" makes the work inflexible, while this work needs to rely on "flexibility" for continuous iteration, and only things that are continuously iterated can gradually evolve into great things. Great products or careers are not designed but iterated.
Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something you have to do because you're working with inflexible media, or because you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. If you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to plan as much, and your designs can evolve instead. - Paul Graham
In my past five years of entrepreneurship, I have deeply felt the troubles brought by over-planning. To prevent various potential situations, I would design the product overly complex at the initial stage, and then add too many features at once with each new version, which would make the product's evolution lack flexibility.
Or rather, I was very afraid of "flexibility." I feared the "uncertainty" and "vagueness" that "flexibility" brought, and I wanted the "control" and "certainty" that a "clear plan" provided. Our brains instinctively avoid "chaos" and seek "order." This is a common mistake many entrepreneurs make, driven by human weaknesses.
However, good products are not "designed" but "evolve" from small to large. To allow your projects or products to continuously evolve, you need to overcome the innate human "fear" and "insecurity" anxiety, as these anxieties are the primal motivation behind our constant planning and one of the most significant mental obstacles preventing us from accomplishing something. Only after solving your inner demons can your products begin to evolve. When your mind becomes flexible, so will your products.
5) Obstacle Five: Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy refers to the tendency to continue investing resources (time, money, energy) into a project or decision simply because a lot has already been invested, rather than making a rational decision based on future benefits or costs. This is a very common and highly damaging psychological bias and mental trap.
For example, investors may continue to put more money into a losing project, hoping to turn it around, instead of reassessing the investment decision based on future market prospects. Or, an entrepreneur may have invested several years of time, energy, and money into a project without seeing significant results. But because they don't want to waste all their previous efforts, they continue investing in the project, refusing to switch to a different one, under the guise of "persistence is victory."
Deciding when to "persist" and when to "give up" is a core test of our wisdom. Often, our "curiosity" and "interest" have already given us the answers, but due to the sunk cost fallacy, we are likely unwilling to listen and take action.
From my perspective, there is another invisible but highly damaging sunk cost fallacy, which is "relying on past work experience." For example, I have a friend who decided to start an advertising agency, not out of a love for the advertising industry, but because he had accumulated relevant work experience. After a few years, he decided to shut down the company because he found the work unfulfilling and exhausting, even though he had accumulated a certain amount of wealth through the venture.
I believe that making decisions based on past experience is a significant reason most people find their career paths becoming increasingly narrow. Regardless of your current age, it's likely that you haven't had enough attempts and experiences and still lack sufficient understanding of the external world and yourself. The reality is that society doesn't encourage us to try enough diverse things when we are young because employers typically require several or even dozens of years of experience in a very specific direction. Changing career tracks midway comes with great costs. However, if your sole aim is continuous promotions and salary raises, or simply to show the company that you are a loyal employee who won't frequently switch jobs, then choosing to nvest your precious time in only one specific field is a huge drain because "time" is an irreversible resource.
How did I decide to start my own business in 2018? At that time, I had already accumulated a stellar resume and had received many lucrative job offers from great companies, offering COO positions, generous salaries, and attractive equity packages. However, after careful consideration, I chose to decline these offers and decided to start a zero-salary venture while being pregnant, even investing personal savings into the project. Why? Precisely because I was pregnant, half of my energy was given to the child in my womb, and the remaining half was very limited. I had no time to waste, so I chose to focus wholeheartedly on what I wanted to do most. Ultimately, I gained invaluable entrepreneurial experience and rapid personal growth; I saw my various possibilities and gained more insights into the "way" of entrepreneurship, which is exactly what I wanted.
Chapter Two: How to Find What You Really Want to Do
Although there are many obstacles, there is actually a clear path to finding what you truly "want to do."
1) By judging your "talent" and "interest."
"Effort" and "luck" are also necessary conditions. However, "effort" is something that people who pursue great things can usually achieve, and "luck" is beyond our control. So, the key that truly distinguishes whether you or I can do something great lies in our unique "talents" and "interests."
To decide what to work on, all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. - Paul Graham
In my view, "talent" and "interest" do not come from our minds but from our hearts. Most people can't see their strengths and interests because they are always controlled by various thoughts in their minds, ignoring the voice of their hearts. These so-called logical "thoughts" in their minds mostly do not belong to them but are instilled by the outside world, coming from other people's ideas, such as our parents' beliefs, teachers' lessons, bosses' commands, or societal norms.
"Writing" is one important tool for discovering your interests. When you immerse yourself in the flow experience, forgetting your own existence, without the interference of fame and fortune, only a positive energy flows. At this time, you are full of infinite creativity and are infinitely close to your true self. After completing it, observe the content you have written, and you will see what you are truly interested in.
2) Taking full responsibility for your choices.
Each of us needs to find and decide what we want to do on our own, even though it is quite difficult. You need to understand that this answer cannot be given by the school, your parents, or teachers; society won't give it to you. You can only rely on yourself to find the answer through guessing, continuous trying, constant exploration, feedback, and thinking.
Most people, even very talented ones, prefer to spend time and effort executing a "direction told to them by others." They rely heavily on others (such as teachers, parents, and bosses) to point out the direction and make choices for them rather than deciding for themselves which direction to go. Why so? It requires enormous courage because the stakes are higher in deciding which direction to take.
When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. - Paul Graham
3) How to Observe Your "Talent" and "Interest"? You can follow your "curiosity."
Your "curiosity" is like the lighthouse for a ship at night, the North Star guiding you on the sea, or the radar for a plane flying through clo
uds. You can't truly rely on the seemingly clever "perfect plans" made by your mind; these "plans" often lead us astray because greatness cannot be planned. Why can't greatness be planned? I have detailed this in my previous article "From Planning to Exploration." By following your "curiosity," the answers you get are often more astonishing than any result you could plan.
If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on "curiosity."
Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity. - Paul Graham
How to follow your "curiosity"? Ask the questions you want to ask. At this moment, what problem do you most want to solve? What answers do you most want to know?
Good questions are answers in themselves.
What are you excessively curious about—curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
4) When you are young, under the guidance of curiosity, try as many things as possible, even those that seem "useless."
While you have plenty of time, meet various people, read all kinds of "useful" or "useless" books, and try different jobs. The greatest significance of doing these things, in my opinion, is not only to understand the external world but also to understand who you are, what strengths you have, and what things make you experience a "flow of heart."
For example, in the past five years of founding my own company, through continuous learning and trying, I transformed from a senior person focused on business management into a comprehensive leader capable of recruiting and managing teams of engineers, product managers, designers, data analysts, digital growth marketers, and content creators. Although this process of self-challenge was filled with pain, struggle, and hardship, it broke the various labels society had put on me. I saw my various possibilities and became more certain about which aspects I should focus more on and which aspects I should recruit outstanding team members to complement me. This is the so-called "seeing oneself, seeing all beings."
What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
5) Be a generalist, not a specialist.
Great things often come from the intersection of various fields. Since the Industrial Revolution, society has increasingly tended to cultivate specialists in schools because schools need to supply companies with various specialized talents to efficiently expand production and achieve higher profits for the companies. But when companies face changing demands or new technological challenges and need to downsize, many people who have grown under this system for decades are ruthlessly laid off. With the rapid pace of new technology changing the market, this turbulent trend will only intensify.
If you base your work solely on so-called "stability" and only focus on one field, unwilling or even afraid to try and learn across fields, then once your chosen specialization no longer fits the changing market demands, your career will become extremely fragile. When you become a generalist in different fields, you can flexibly apply the necessary skills in a changing market and make breakthrough creations through innovative combinations of these skills. This way, you can upgrade from a "hired hand," which can be easily replaced, to a unique and unreplaceable "creator."
It's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. - Paul Graham
For example, Steve Jobs combined "technology" with "aesthetic design" and "user experience," completely transforming the personal computing, music, and mobile phone industries with products like the Mac, iPod, and iPhone. Elon Musk's companies, such as Tesla (electric cars) and SpaceX (private space travel), combine engineering and environmental issues, pushing the boundaries of sustainable technology and space exploration. Einstein's work in "theoretical physics," particularly relativity, was influenced by philosophical discussions about space, time, and the nature of reality. You can find such examples in almost any great endeavor.
6) The core principle to follow before creating any product: When choosing a product direction, the product should first solve your own problem, and your proposed solution should indeed help you solve this problem.
You need to believe that many people in the world face similar problems, and your goal is to find these people with similar interests. Even if these people are only a niche market, too small to make you extremely wealthy, respecting and focusing on them is far better than joining the masses who have no relevance to you, as that would be meaningless.
For example, in media entrepreneurship, you only need 1,000 loyal fans willing to pay to sustain a basic livelihood. This also reminds entrepreneurs that in the early stages of a startup, you must have a very clear target user profile and the problems they need to solve. This is not just to gain the most crucial initial users but to confirm whether the founder fits this user profile—whether this is a problem the founder truly cares about. The fickle market always promotes "follow-the-trend entrepreneurship," where people rush to join the latest trends, often leading to misguided paths.
If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience. - Paul Graham
Chapter Three: How to Make "What You Do" Great
1) To become a top player in the field you are interested in, you need to follow your curiosity and engage in a lot of long-term self-study, practice, and experimentation.
For example, I am grateful for my courage and persistence in continuous entrepreneurship over the past seven years. Only through extensive practice and the experience of failure have I truly learned the "way" of entrepreneurship. If I had only stayed at the level of reading books and listening to others' summarized experiences, I would never have truly understood it. "Practice" and "thinking" are worlds apart. Moreover, only by deeply studying the field can you find unresolved problems, and "solving these problems" is your unique contribution.
2) Iterate from small to large.
Every great thing starts small. Many people fear entrepreneurship partly because they lack enough money, experience, or plan to raise enough funds before starting. From my experience of raising five million dollars, I realized that "money" is not a scarce resource. What is truly scarce is product-founder fit (PFF) and product-market fit (PMF). To achieve PFF and PMF, you don't need excessive funds. Often, too much money hinders innovation because large-scale funding aims at solving later-stage scaling growth issues. To achieve PFF and PMF, you often need to use small amounts of money for self-exploration and creating and experimenting with a minimum viable product (MVP).
You start something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you have planned. -Paul Graham
For example, when making a product, you need to launch the initial simplest version as quickly as possible, get market feedback as soon as possible, and then iterate continuously, avoiding adding too many new features in each new version. This theory is easy to say but hard to do. Through my seven years of entrepreneurial practice, I have observed that most product managers, including myself, tend to stack various product features due to human weaknesses, leading to the product's eventual death.
3) Work with A-level colleagues at all costs, and do not compromise by working with B and C-level colleagues.
When working with A-level colleagues, your energy level will be positively influenced and continuously enhanced. Conversely, B and C-level colleagues will endlessly drain your energy. In my entrepreneurial journey, I realized that when you hire A-level colleagues or partners, they will automatically help you recruit like-minded A-level colleagues, giving you true leverage on human resources. If you compromise and hire B and C-level colleagues to "avoid trouble" or "higher cost," not only will your energy be drained, but everyone in the company will be drained by them, and they will recruit people worse than themselves, leading the company into a downward death spiral.
"A players hire A players, B players hire C players." — Steve Jobs
Additionally, choosing a life partner is even more important than choosing work partners—choose someone who enhances your energy. Do not marry someone who doesn't understand your work needs; understanding and supporting your work is crucial.
4) Do not let competitors dictate your actions.
In entrepreneurship, I was often disturbed by competitors. For example, when I was raising funds, I had to avoid VCs who had already invested in my competitors because these investors would forward my pitch deck to my competitors immediately. I also often heard news about this or that competitors raising millions of dollars, which distracted me from focusing on the current work. One of my investors once told me, "Don't worry about this. It doesn't matter how much money your competitors raise. What truly determines a company's value is the market value it creates."
Never let competitors decide what you should do. You need to focus on problems that money cannot solve—product-market fit. When you combine "your uniqueness" and continuously create "real value" for the market, with time and accumulated resources, you will make your own "unique" competitive moat.
5) Protect your "morale" as you would protect your "child."
The first step to gaining morale is to be an optimist. Optimists are more likely to do great work. Believing you are lucky is more inspiring than feeling like a victim. William Wang, the founder of Vizio, once told me that being an optimist is one of the most important reasons for his success. He also chose an optimistic partner to share his life with.
The most important thing is to avoid letting setbacks destroy morale. Do not let failures undermine your morale. The way to do this is to change your perspective on failure, seeing it as part of the process. This is an incredibly important basic principle. Great work is based on deep exploration and experimentation with the work. When encountering setbacks, either keep trying or take a step back and try again, but do not abandon the fundamental goal because of setbacks.
For example, Supercell, a Finnish company known for its successful mobile games such as Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, is famous for its unique company culture and approach to dealing with failure. Supercell motivates its employees to face failure and learn from it in several ways:
Autonomous Teams (Cells): Supercell's name comes from its organizational structure of small, autonomous teams (Cells). Each team has great autonomy, can quickly make decisions, and try new ideas. This structure encourages team members to try boldly, with no major psychological burden if they fail.
Fast Iteration and Validation: Supercell encourages teams to quickly develop and test new game prototypes. Through rapid iteration, teams can quickly understand whether an idea is viable. If a project fails in early testing, the team can quickly adjust direction or abandon the project without wasting many resources.
Learning from Failure: The company culture emphasizes the importance of learning from failure. Supercell encourages employees to review and summarize their failures, learn from them, and apply these lessons to future projects. Failure is not seen as a negative end but as an important learning opportunity.
Celebrating Failure: Sometimes Supercell publicly celebrates failed projects to honor the team's efforts and innovation spirit. For example, when a project is canceled, the company holds a "funeral" where the team shares their lessons and future plans. This practice not only reduces the negative emotions associated with failure but also encourages the team to face problems honestly.
Not Punishing Failure: Supercell does not punish employees for project failures. Instead, the company believes that innovation requires risks, and risks inevitably come with the possibility of failure. By not punishing failure, employees can try new ideas more boldly without worrying about negative consequences.
Open Communication: The company emphasizes transparency and open communication. Employees can freely share their ideas and opinions, whether about successful or failed projects. This open culture helps teams learn and support each other, creating a positive work environment.
Long-Term Perspective: Supercell focuses on long-term success rather than short-term rewards. The company understands that behind every successful product, there may be multiple failed projects as a foundation. By maintaining a long-term perspective, the company encourages employees to continue innovating and trying, ultimately achieving greater success.
Lastly, and most importantly—"you" are "morale" itself. As long as you keep your "body," "mind," and "spirit" in great shape, you can provide endless morale energy for your creation.
The famous Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is a long-time runner who maintains his physical health through running and views it as a means of self-reflection and inner cultivation. In his essay collection "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," he expresses his views on the importance of physical health and exercise.
He says: "The body is a temple, and how you treat it is how you treat a temple."
Our body is the foundation that carries our lives and dreams, just as a sacred temple needs respect and reverence. We need to pay attention to our body's needs, giving it enough rest, nutrition, and exercise. By doing so, we not only maintain physical health on a material level but also respect the value of our existence on a spiritual level.
Just as maintaining the cleanliness and solemnity of a temple requires continuous effort and discipline, treating our bodies well requires persistent self-management. Regular exercise, balanced diet, and good living habits are key to maintaining physical health. This discipline not only enhances our physical strength but also cultivates our perseverance and determination in other areas of life, achieving balance and happiness in all aspects. After all, achieving happiness is the ultimate purpose of doing something great, isn't it?
Those who want to create something great can start by "loving yourself." Love your body, love your soul, love your curiosity, and always trust and follow it, letting it lead you to create a life that is "even if not great, certainly interesting."