Paul Graham: Use Curiosity to Expand Your Future Options

What You'll Wish You'd Known Paul Graham It is time for the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship again. This piece is basically aimed at high school students: things you should know when you are young. ----- 1. When you are in high school or university, you do not need to know how you want to live or work. People keep asking, and you think you need an answer, but it is not actually that important yet. 2. When you are young, you do not have to rush to choose your life and work. Your most important task is to understand what you like and what options are possible. You just need to discover what you enjoy. If you want to do a job well, you have to do work you like. 3. The world changes fast, and even the rate of change is accelerating. Many jobs today were unimaginable ten or twenty years ago. In a world of accelerating change, setting a fixed plan may not be a good idea. 4. Every year, commencement speeches tell graduates not to give up on their dreams. But that may be a poor way of putting it: it can mean being constrained too early by a plan you made early on. In computing, there is a term, “premature optimization,” which can signal the start of a disaster. There is even the saying “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” 5. Do not underestimate your potential. You can do more than you imagine. Many great figures seem unlike ordinary people, but that may simply reflect oversimplification or exaggeration in biographies. Even if you had been in a class with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs at sixteen, their unusual qualities might have impressed you, but that does not mean they were completely different from you and your friends. 6. Commencement speakers often ask you to decide what you want to achieve twenty years from now, then ask yourself: what should I do now to reach that goal? Graham instead advises making no commitments about the future. Look at the options available now, then choose those that offer the most promising options afterward. What you work on is not so important, provided you are not wasting time. Do things that interest you and expand your options, and worry later about which ones to choose. 7. If you are a first-year university student choosing between economics and mathematics as a major, mathematics gives you more options. You can move into almost any field from mathematics, including graduate study in economics. But if you choose economics, getting into a graduate mathematics program later is not so easy. 8. Stay curious and let curiosity turn work into play. For Einstein, relativity was not difficult material he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. Because he enjoyed it, even the amount of work he put into researching relativity was actually less than other people's workload. 9. One of the most dangerous illusions school gives you is that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught so tediously that only strict discipline lets you struggle through them. Yet Graham read a passage in which Wittgenstein said he had no self-discipline and could never deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee. Graham also knows many people who do excellent work, and they are all like that. They have little discipline, are terrible procrastinators, and can barely make themselves do anything that does not interest them. 10. Graham used to be reluctant to go running, but once he went, he started enjoying it. If he went several days without running, he would feel unwell. People who do great things are similar. They know they will feel bad if they do not work, and have enough discipline to get themselves back to their desks and start. Once they begin, interest takes over and discipline is no longer needed. 11. Let a great idea come to you rather than hunting for one. Put substantial time into work that interests you and keep your mind open enough in the process for a great idea to take root. 12. Do not worry if a project does not seem to lead toward a goal you are supposed to have. Paths can bend much more than you think. So let projects emerge as that path unfolds. What matters most is being excited about it, because you can learn more through that development. 13. What matters is getting out there and doing things. Rather than waiting for someone to teach you, go out and learn.