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The Graham Guide: 89 Rules for Outstanding Work
11 min readJul 17, 2023
- Choose your work: Select work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Start with guessing, if necessary, and get going.
- Make it personal: Develop a habit of working on your own projects that are exciting and ambitious. As your taste evolves with age, what is exciting and important to you will converge.
- Follow your curiosity: Great work is often driven by an intense curiosity about something that others may find boring. This curiosity will guide you in deciding what to work on.
- Get to the frontier: Learn enough about your field of interest to reach the frontiers of knowledge, which are full of gaps.
- Notice the gaps: Observing the gaps in knowledge is important but requires skill, as the brain tends to ignore them to form simpler models of the world.
- Explore the gaps: If the answers to questions about these gaps seem strange, embrace them. Boldly pursue outlier ideas, especially those others aren’t interested in.
- Work hard: The process of learning and exploring requires hard work. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence could.
- Be driven by motives: The most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. The intersection of these drives is the…
