Paul Graham：How to Do Great Work, Excerpt 6

This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it. One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing.

Source： https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
Locator：Essay, additional excerpt 6 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

公开随笔；仅摘录并链接作者官网原文，不托管全文。

This text is still in copyright. Only a short excerpt is shown; read the full text at the official link above. Copyright

← Back to the library