How To Do Great Work

成就卓越之道

July 2023, Paul graham

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

如果将许多不同领域中“成就卓越工作”的技巧列表汇集起来，它们的交集会是怎样的？我决定亲手找出答案。

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it’s not just a point labelled “work hard.”

我的部分目标是创建一个适用于任何领域工作者的指南。但我也好奇这个交集的形态。而这次尝试表明，它确实有一个明确的形状；它不仅仅是一个标着“努力工作”的点。

The following recipe assumes you’re very ambitious.

以下“秘诀”假定你雄心勃勃。

The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.

第一步是决定做什么。你选择的工作需要具备三个特质：你对此有天赋，有浓厚的兴趣，并且有做出卓越成就的空间。

In practice you don’t have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1]

实际上，你无需过多担心第三个标准。雄心勃勃的人在这方面往往过于保守。所以，你只需找到自己有天赋且兴趣浓厚的事情。[1]

That sounds straightforward, but it’s often quite difficult. When you’re young you don’t know what you’re good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out.

这听起来简单，但往往相当困难。年轻时，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不知道各种工作是怎样的。有些你最终会做的工作甚至可能尚未出现。所以，尽管有些人14岁就知道自己想做什么，但大多数人需要自己摸索。

The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you’re not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You’ll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that’s fine. It’s good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.

弄清楚做什么的方法就是去工作。如果你不确定做什么，那就猜。但要选择一件事并开始行动。你可能会猜错几次，但这没关系。了解多方面的事情是好事；一些最重大的发现正是源于注意到不同领域之间的联系。

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don’t let “work” mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you’ll be driving your part of it.

养成做自己项目的习惯。不要让“工作”仅仅意味着别人让你做的事情。如果你有一天真的做出了卓越的成就，那很可能是在你自己的项目上。它可能属于某个更大的项目，但你会是其中你那部分的驱动者。

What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you’re starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.

你的项目应该是什么？任何对你来说激动人心且充满抱负的事情。随着年龄增长和项目品味的演变，激动人心和重要性会趋于一致。7岁时，用乐高搭建巨型建筑可能显得激动人心且充满抱负；14岁时，自学微积分；直到21岁，你开始探索物理学中尚未解决的问题。但永远要保持那种激动人心的感觉。

There’s a kind of excited curiosity that’s both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on.

有一种兴奋的好奇心，它既是卓越工作的引擎，也是方向舵。它不仅会驱动你，如果你任其发展，它还会指引你该做什么。

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.

你对什么事物有着过度的好奇心——好奇到足以让大多数人感到无聊的程度？那就是你正在寻找的。

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. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

一旦你找到了自己极度感兴趣的事物，下一步就是深入学习，直到你抵达知识的某个前沿。知识呈分形扩展，从远处看其边缘平滑，但一旦你学到足够接近某个前沿时，就会发现那里充满了空白。

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]

下一步是注意到这些空白。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑倾向于忽略这些空白，以便构建一个更简单的世界模型。许多发现都源于对那些被所有人视为理所当然的事物提出疑问。[2]

If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears, embrace it.

如果答案显得奇怪，那就更好了。伟大的作品往往带有一丝奇特。从绘画到数学，你都能看到这一点。刻意制造这种奇特会显得做作，但如果它自然出现，就拥抱它。

Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren’t interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren’t. If you’re excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they’re all overlooking, that’s as good a bet as you’ll find. [3]

大胆追逐那些非主流的想法，即使其他人不感兴趣——事实上，尤其当他们不感兴趣时。如果你对某个被所有人忽视的可能性感到兴奋，并且你拥有足够的专业知识来精确指出他们都忽略了什么，那将是你所能找到的最佳选择。[3]

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

四步：选择一个领域，学习足够多以抵达前沿，发现空白，探索有前景的空白。从画家到物理学家，几乎所有做出卓越成就的人都是这样做的。

Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. That’s why it’s essential to work on something you’re deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could.

第二步和第四步需要努力工作。也许无法证明你必须努力才能做出伟大的事情，但经验证据的规模堪比死亡的证据。这就是为什么从事你深感兴趣的事情至关重要。兴趣会驱使你比单纯的勤奋更努力地工作。

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.

最强大的三种动机是好奇心、愉悦感和做出令人印象深刻事情的渴望。有时它们会汇聚，而这种结合是所有动机中最强大的。

The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there’s a whole world inside.

最大的奖赏是发现一个新的分形萌芽。你注意到知识表面的裂缝，撬开它，里面便是一个全新的世界。

Let’s talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. The main reason it’s hard is that you can’t tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. And in the meantime you’re not doing, and thus not learning about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose late based on very incomplete information. [4]

让我们再多谈谈弄清楚做什么这个复杂的问题。主要难点在于，除非亲身实践，否则你无法了解大多数工作是怎样的。这意味着这四个步骤是重叠的：你可能需要从事某项工作多年，才能知道自己有多喜欢它或擅长它。与此同时，你没有从事，因此也无法了解大多数其他类型的工作。所以在最坏的情况下，你是在信息非常不完整的基础上迟迟做出选择的。[4]

The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.

抱负的本质加剧了这个问题。抱负有两种形式：一种先于对主题的兴趣而存在，另一种则从兴趣中滋生。大多数做出卓越成就的人兼而有之，而前者的成分越多，就越难决定做什么。

The educational systems in most countries pretend it’s easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it’s really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.

大多数国家的教育体系都假装这很容易。他们期望你在真正了解一个领域之前就对其做出承诺。结果是，一个处于最佳发展轨迹的雄心勃勃的人，在现有体系看来，往往是一个“异类”。

It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted that the system not only can’t do much to help you figure out what to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow magically guess as a teenager. They don’t tell you, but I will: when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you’re on your own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on the assumption that everyone does.

如果他们至少承认这一点会更好——承认这个系统不仅无法帮助你弄清楚该做什么，而且其设计是基于你会在青少年时期神奇地猜到这一假设。他们不会告诉你，但我会：当涉及到弄清楚该做什么时，你只能靠自己。有些人运气好，确实猜对了，但其余的人会发现自己不得不斜向穿过那些假定每个人都能猜对而铺设的轨道。

What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. 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. [5]

如果你年轻有抱负却不知道该做什么，该怎么办？你不应该做的就是被动地随波逐流，以为问题会自行解决。你需要采取行动。但没有系统的程序可以遵循。当你阅读那些做出卓越成就的人的传记时，会发现其中涉及了多少运气。他们通过一次偶然的相遇，或者读到一本偶然拿起的书，发现了自己该做什么。所以你需要让自己成为运气的“大目标”，而做到这一点的方法就是保持好奇心。尝试很多事情，结识很多人，阅读很多书籍，提出很多问题。[5]

When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. 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. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.

当不确定时，优先选择有趣的事物。随着你对某个领域的了解加深，它会发生变化。例如，数学家所做的事情与你在高中数学课上所做的截然不同。所以你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会，让它们向你展示其真实面貌。但一个领域应该随着你了解的深入而变得越来越有趣。如果不是这样，那它可能不适合你。

Don’t worry if you find you’re interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you’ll be productive. And you’re more likely to find new things if you’re looking where few have looked before.

如果你发现自己对事物的兴趣与众不同，不必担心。你的兴趣越是奇特，就越好。奇特的兴趣往往是强烈的，而对工作有强烈兴趣意味着你会富有成效。而且，如果你在鲜有人涉足的地方寻找，你更有可能发现新事物。

One sign that you’re suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.

一个迹象表明你适合某种工作，那就是你甚至喜欢那些别人觉得枯燥或令人生畏的部分。

But fields aren’t people; you don’t owe them any loyalty. If in the course of working on one thing you discover another that’s more exciting, don’t be afraid to switch.

但领域不是人；你无需对它们忠诚。如果在从事某件事的过程中，你发现了另一件更令人兴奋的事，不要害怕转换。

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.

如果你在为他人创造东西，请确保那是他们真正想要的。最好的方法是创造你自己想要的东西。写你想读的故事；建造你想用的工具。由于你的朋友可能也有相似的兴趣，这也会为你带来最初的受众。

This should follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost. [6]

这应该遵循“激动人心”的原则。显然，最激动人心的故事就是你想读的故事。我之所以明确提及这一点，是因为很多人都搞错了。他们不是创造自己想要的，而是试图创造某个想象中更“高雅”的受众想要的东西。一旦你走上这条路，你就迷失了。[6]

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you’re trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people’s wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.

当你试图弄清楚该做什么时，有很多力量会让你误入歧途。自命不凡、时尚、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、显赫的骗子。但如果你坚持自己真正感兴趣的事物，你就能抵御所有这些干扰。如果你感兴趣，你就不会迷失方向。

Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness.

追随兴趣听起来可能是一种相当被动的策略，但实际上，它通常意味着要克服各种障碍。你通常必须冒着被拒绝和失败的风险。所以，这确实需要相当大的胆量。

But while you need boldness, you don’t usually need much planning. In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.

然而，尽管你需要大胆，但通常不需要太多规划。在大多数情况下，做出卓越成就的秘诀很简单：努力从事激动人心且雄心勃勃的项目，然后就会有好事发生。与其制定计划然后执行，不如努力保持某些不变的原则。

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can’t discover natural selection that way.

规划的问题在于，它只适用于那些你可以提前描述的成就。你可以从小就决定赢得金牌或致富，然后顽强地追求这个目标，但你无法通过这种方式发现自然选择。

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it.

我认为对于大多数想做出卓越成就的人来说，正确的策略是不要过度规划。在每个阶段，做那些看起来最有趣且能为你未来提供最佳选择的事情。我称这种方法为“保持上风”。大多数做出卓越成就的人似乎都是这样做的。

Even when you’ve found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren’t like that.

即使你找到了令人兴奋的工作，实际操作也并非总是一帆风顺。有时，某个新想法会让你早上从床上跳起来，立刻投入工作。但也会有很多时候，情况并非如此。

You don’t just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there’s a technique to working, just as there is to sailing.

你不能仅仅扬帆起航，任由灵感推动前进。有逆风、有暗流、有暗礁。所以，工作也有其技巧，就像航海一样。

For example, while you must work hard, it’s possible to work too hard, and if you do that you’ll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day.

例如，虽然你必须努力工作，但也有可能工作过度，如果那样，你会发现回报递减：疲劳会让你变得迟钝，最终甚至损害你的健康。工作回报递减的临界点取决于工作类型。有些最困难的工作，你可能每天只能做四五个小时。

Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You’ll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.

理想情况下，这些时间应该是连续的。尽可能地安排你的生活，以便有大块的时间投入工作。如果你知道可能会被打断，你就会回避困难的任务。

It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. You’ll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don’t worry about this; it’s the nature of work, not a flaw in your character. 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.

开始工作可能比持续工作更难。你常常需要欺骗自己才能跨过最初的门槛。对此不必担心；这是工作的本质，而非你性格的缺陷。工作有一种“启动能量”，无论是每天还是每个项目。而且，由于这个门槛在某种意义上是虚假的，它高于持续所需的能量，所以你可以对自己说一个相应程度的谎言来克服它。

This is one case where the young have an advantage. They’re more optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.

这是年轻人拥有优势的一个例子。他们更乐观，尽管他们乐观的来源之一是无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时能胜过知识。

Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.

然而，尽量完成你开始的事情，即使它比你预期的工作量更大。完成事情不仅仅是整洁或自律的练习。在许多项目中，许多最好的工作都发生在原本是最后阶段的部分。

Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you’re working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after all. [7]

另一个可以允许的谎言是，至少在你自己的脑海中，夸大你正在做的事情的重要性。如果这有助于你发现新事物，那么它最终可能根本不是谎言。[7]

Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn’t quite right. When you’re procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. [8]

既然“开始工作”有两种含义——每天开始和每个项目开始——那么拖延也有两种形式。项目拖延远比日常拖延更危险。你年复一年地推迟启动那个雄心勃勃的项目，因为时机总是不对。当你以年为单位拖延时，你可能会有很多事情没有完成。[8]

One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You’re not just sitting around doing nothing; you’re working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn’t set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You’re too busy to notice it.

项目拖延如此危险的一个原因是，它通常伪装成工作。你并非无所事事；你正在勤奋地做着别的事情。因此，项目拖延不会像日常拖延那样触发警报。你太忙了，以至于没有注意到它。

The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on? When you’re young it’s ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older. [9]

打败它的方法是偶尔停下来问自己：我正在做我最想做的工作吗？当你年轻时，答案有时是否定的也没关系，但随着年龄增长，这会变得越来越危险。[9]

Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can’t think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it’s happening.

卓越的工作通常意味着在某个问题上投入对大多数人来说似乎不合理的时间。你不能将这段时间视为成本，否则它会显得太高。你必须在工作进行时发现它足够引人入胜。

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you’re genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you’re surprised how far you’ve come.

有些工作你可能需要勤奋地做几年自己讨厌的事情才能进入好的部分，但卓越的工作并非如此。卓越的工作是通过持续专注于你真正感兴趣的事情而实现的。当你停下来审视时，你会惊讶于自己已经走了多远。

The reason we’re surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key: consistency. People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

我们之所以感到惊讶，是因为我们低估了工作的累积效应。每天写一页纸听起来不多，但如果你每天都这样做，一年就能写出一本书。这就是关键：持之以恒。做出伟大成就的人并非每天都完成很多事情。他们是完成了一些事情，而不是一无所获。

If you do work that compounds, you’ll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it’s worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they’ll bring you.

如果你做的工作具有复利效应，你将获得指数级增长。大多数这样做的人都是无意识的，但停下来思考一下是值得的。例如，学习就是这种现象的一个例子：你对某事了解得越多，就越容易学到更多。增加受众也是如此：你拥有的粉丝越多，他们就会为你带来更多新粉丝。

The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn’t; it’s still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can’t grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.

指数级增长的问题在于，曲线在初期感觉是平坦的。但它并非如此；它仍然是一条美妙的指数曲线。然而我们无法直观地理解这一点，因此我们低估了指数级增长的早期阶段。

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it’s worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.

指数级增长的事物可以变得非常有价值，值得付出非凡的努力去启动它。但由于我们早期低估了指数级增长，这同样大多是无意识地完成的：人们之所以能熬过学习新事物的最初无回报阶段，是因为他们从经验中知道学习新事物总是需要一个初始的推动，或者他们一次只增加一个粉丝，因为他们没有更好的事情可做。如果人们有意识地意识到他们可以投资于指数级增长，会有更多人这样做。

Work doesn’t just happen when you’re trying to. There’s a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you’ll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.

工作并非只在你刻意为之的时候发生。当你散步、洗澡或躺在床上时，会有一种无目的的思考，这种思考可能非常强大。通过让你的思绪稍作游荡，你常常能解决那些正面攻克不了的问题。

You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can’t just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions. [10]

然而，你必须以正常方式努力工作才能从这种现象中受益。你不能只是四处游荡做白日梦。白日梦必须与有意识的工作交织进行，后者为前者提供问题。[10]

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it’s also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. 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. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.)

每个人都知道在工作中要避免分心，但在周期的另一半，避免分心也同样重要。当你让思绪游荡时，它会游荡到你当下最关心的事情上。所以，避免那种将你的工作挤出首要位置的分心，否则你就会把这种宝贵的思考浪费在分心的事情上。（例外：不要回避爱情。）

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.

有意识地培养你所在领域作品的品味。在你了解什么是最好的以及它为何如此之前，你不知道自己的目标是什么。

And that is what you’re aiming for, because if you don’t try to be the best, you won’t even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it’s true. 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. Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true. [11]

而那正是你的目标，因为如果你不努力做到最好，你甚至连好都算不上。这个观察结果已被许多不同领域的人反复提及，所以值得思考它为何如此真实。这可能是因为抱负是一种几乎所有错误都朝一个方向发展的现象——几乎所有偏离目标的炮弹都因射程不足而失误。或者，这可能是因为追求最好与追求好是性质截然不同的两件事。又或者，仅仅“好”这个标准本身就过于模糊。可能这三者都兼而有之。[11]

Fortunately there’s a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might seem like you’d be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It’s exciting, and also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it’s easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.

幸运的是，这里存在一种规模经济。尽管努力做到最好可能看起来会给你带来沉重负担，但实际上你往往会最终获得净收益。这令人兴奋，也出奇地解放。它简化了事情。在某些方面，努力做到最好比仅仅做到好更容易。

One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than your contemporaries’, but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.

一个高远的目标是尝试创造出百年后人们依然会珍视的东西。这并非因为他们的意见比你同时代的人更重要，而是因为百年后依然显得优秀的东西，更有可能是真正的好东西。

Don’t try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won’t be able to help doing it in a distinctive way.

不要刻意追求独特的风格。只需尽力做到最好；你自然会以一种独特的方式完成它。

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.

风格是无意中以独特方式做事。刻意为之则是矫揉造作。

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you’re pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. [12]

矫揉造作实际上是假装工作是由你之外的某人完成的。你采纳了一个令人印象深刻但虚假的形象，虽然你对这种印象深刻感到满意，但作品中展现的却是虚假。[12]

The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it’s self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you’re not a nobody; you’re the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

年轻人最容易受到成为他人的诱惑。他们常常觉得自己微不足道。但你永远不必担心这个问题，因为如果你从事足够宏大的项目，这个问题会自行解决。如果你在一个宏大的项目中取得成功，你就不是无名小卒；你就是那个完成它的人。所以，只管去做，你的身份自然会水到渠成。

“Avoid affectation” is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you’re earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices.

“避免矫揉造作”是一个有用的规则，但如何积极地表达这个想法呢？如何说应该成为什么，而不是不应该成为什么？最好的答案是真诚。如果你真诚，你不仅能避免矫揉造作，还能避免一系列类似的恶习。

The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We’re taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it’s a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You’re trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you’re intellectually dishonest?

真诚的核心是思想上的诚实。我们从小被教导诚实是一种无私的美德——一种牺牲。但实际上，它也是力量的源泉。要看到新思想，你需要对真相有异常敏锐的洞察力。你正在努力看到比其他人迄今为止所看到的更多的真相。如果你在思想上不诚实，又怎能对真相有敏锐的洞察力呢？

One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight positive pressure in the opposite direction. 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. [13]

避免思想不诚实的一种方法是，在相反方向上保持轻微的积极压力。积极主动地承认自己犯了错误。一旦你承认自己错了，你就自由了。在那之前，你必须背负着它。[13]

Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality. Informality is much more important than its grammatically negative name implies. It’s not merely the absence of something. It means focusing on what matters instead of what doesn’t.

真诚的另一个更微妙的组成部分是非正式性。非正式性远比其语法上的否定名称所暗示的更为重要。它不仅仅是某种东西的缺失。它意味着专注于重要的事情，而不是不重要的事情。

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you’re trying to seem a certain way as you’re doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That’s one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that’s basically the definition of a nerd.

形式主义和矫揉造作的共同点是，除了做工作之外，你还在努力让自己在做工作时显得某种样子。但任何投入到“显得”上的精力，都会削弱你“做好”的能量。这就是为什么书呆子在做伟大工作时具有优势的原因之一：他们几乎不费力气去显得什么。事实上，这基本上就是书呆子的定义。

Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that’s exactly what you need in doing great work. It’s not learned; it’s preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. “It’s easy to criticize” is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy.

书呆子拥有一种天真的大胆，这正是你在做伟大工作时所需要的。它不是后天习得的；它保留自童年。所以，请抓住它。成为那个敢于提出想法的人，而不是坐享其成、发表听起来高深莫测的批评的人。“批评很容易”在最字面的意义上是真实的，而通往伟大工作的道路从不轻松。

There may be some jobs where it’s an advantage to be cynical and pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it’s an advantage to be optimistic, even though that means you’ll risk looking like a fool sometimes. There’s an old tradition of doing the opposite. The Old Testament says it’s better to keep quiet lest you look like a fool. But that’s advice for seeming smart. If you actually want to discover new things, it’s better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.

有些工作可能愤世嫉俗和悲观是优势，但如果你想做出卓越的成就，乐观是优势，即使这意味着你有时会冒着看起来像个傻瓜的风险。有一种古老的传统是反其道而行之。《旧约》说最好保持沉默，以免显得愚蠢。但那是关于“显得聪明”的建议。如果你真的想发现新事物，最好冒着风险把你的想法告诉别人。

Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes a conscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice. But I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It’s so hard to do even if you are. You don’t have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool. [14]

有些人天生真诚，而另一些人则需要有意识的努力。任何一种真诚都足够了。但我怀疑，不真诚就不可能做出伟大的工作。即使你真诚，做起来也如此艰难。你没有足够的容错空间来容纳因矫揉造作、思想不诚实、墨守成规、追逐时尚或装酷而带来的扭曲。[14]

Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It’s usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.

伟大的作品不仅与创作者保持一致，也与自身保持一致。它通常浑然一体。因此，如果你在工作中面临一个决定，请问自己哪个选择更具一致性。

You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won’t necessarily have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some effort; 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?

你可能需要舍弃一些东西并重做。你不一定非要这样做，但你必须愿意。这可能需要一些努力；当有东西需要重做时，现状偏见和懒惰会共同让你否认这一点。要克服这一点，请问自己：如果我已经做了改变，我还会想回到现在拥有的状态吗？

Have the confidence to cut. Don’t keep something that doesn’t fit just because you’re proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.

要有勇气去删减。不要仅仅因为你为此感到骄傲，或者因为它花费了你大量精力，就保留那些不合适的东西。

Indeed, in some kinds of work it’s good to strip whatever you’re doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you’ll understand it better; and you won’t be able to lie to yourself about whether there’s anything real there.

确实，在某些类型的工作中，将你所做的一切剥离至其本质是件好事。结果会更集中；你会更好地理解它；而且你无法欺骗自己那里是否存在真实的东西。

Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That’s what I thought when I first heard the term “elegant” applied to a proof. But now I suspect it’s conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it’s a useful standard well beyond math.

数学的优雅听起来可能只是一个从艺术中借用的比喻。当我第一次听到“优雅”这个词被用于证明时，我也是这么想的。但现在我怀疑它在概念上是更优先的——艺术优雅的主要成分是数学优雅。无论如何，它是一个远远超出数学领域的有用标准。

Elegance can be a long-term bet, though. Laborious solutions will often have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot of effort and they’re hard to understand, both of which impress people, at least temporarily.

然而，优雅可能是一项长期投资。费力的解决方案在短期内往往更具声望。它们耗费大量精力，难以理解，这两点都能给人留下深刻印象，至少是暂时的。

Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn’t have to be built, just seen. It’s a very good sign when it’s hard to say whether you’re creating something or discovering it.

然而，一些最优秀的作品看起来似乎只花费了相对较少的努力，因为从某种意义上说，它已经存在了。它无需被建造，只需被看见。当你很难说你是在创造还是在发现某物时，这是一个非常好的迹象。

When you’re doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.

当你所做的工作既可以被视为创造也可以被视为发现时，请偏向于发现。试着将自己视为一个纯粹的管道，思想通过你自然成形。

(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case it’s more like creating something. In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it.)

（奇怪的是，一个例外是选择要解决的问题。这通常被视为搜索，但在最好的情况下，它更像是创造。在最好的情况下，你会在探索过程中创造出这个领域。）

Similarly, if you’re trying to build a powerful tool, make it gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition will be used in ways you didn’t expect, so err on the side of eliminating restrictions, even if you don’t know what the benefit will be.

同样，如果你正在尝试构建一个强大的工具，请使其无限制地开放。一个强大的工具几乎根据定义就会以你意想不到的方式被使用，所以宁可消除限制，即使你不知道这样做会有什么好处。

Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it’s a good sign if you’re creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas.

伟大的工作往往具有工具性，即成为他人可以借鉴的基础。因此，如果你正在创造他人可以使用的想法，或者揭示他人可以回答的问题，这是一个好兆头。最好的想法在许多不同领域都有其意义。

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they’ll be truer than you intended.

如果你以最普遍的形式表达你的想法，它们将比你预期的更真实。

True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new ideas even once you’ve learned enough to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge.

当然，仅仅真实是不够的。伟大的想法必须既真实又新颖。即使你已经学到足以抵达知识前沿的程度，也需要一定的能力才能看到新想法。

In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity, and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name, because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It’s possible to have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a great deal of what’s often called technical ability — and yet not have much of this.

在英语中，我们给这种能力起名为原创性、创造力和想象力。给它一个单独的名称似乎是合理的，因为它在某种程度上确实是一种独立的能力。一个人可能在其他方面拥有很强的能力——拥有大量通常被称为技术能力的东西——但在这方面却不突出。

I’ve never liked the term “creative process.” It seems misleading. Originality isn’t a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can’t help it.

我从不喜欢“创作过程”这个词。它似乎具有误导性。原创性不是一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。原创思想家们对他们所关注的任何事物都会迸发出新的想法，就像角磨机迸发火花一样。他们情不自禁。

If the thing they’re focused on is something they don’t understand very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear.

如果他们关注的事物是他们不太了解的，这些新想法可能并不好。我认识的一位最具原创性的思想家，在离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解大概和普通15岁孩子差不多，结果却异常精彩。但看到原创性与专业知识如此分离，反而让其本质更加清晰。

I don’t know if it’s possible to cultivate originality, but there are definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. For example, you’re much more likely to have original ideas when you’re working on something. Original ideas don’t come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. [15]

我不知道是否有可能培养原创性，但肯定有办法最大限度地发挥你所拥有的。例如，当你正在做某事时，你更有可能产生原创想法。原创想法并非源于刻意追求原创想法。它们源于尝试构建或理解一些略微超出你能力范围的事物。[15]

Talking or writing about the things you’re interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

谈论或书写你感兴趣的事物是产生新想法的好方法。当你试图将想法付诸文字时，一个缺失的想法会产生一种真空，将它从你体内吸出来。事实上，有一种思考只能通过写作来完成。

Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you’ll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it’s enough just to go for a walk. [16]

改变你的环境会有帮助。如果你去一个新地方，你常常会发现那里有新的想法。旅程本身常常会把它们“抖落”出来。但你可能不需要走很远就能获得这种益处。有时，仅仅是散步就足够了。[16]

It also helps to travel in topic space. You’ll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

在主题空间中“旅行”也有帮助。如果你探索许多不同的主题，你会产生更多新想法，部分原因在于这为“角磨机”提供了更多可操作的表面积，部分原因在于类比是新想法特别丰富的来源。

Don’t divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you’ll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. [17] Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.

不过，不要将你的注意力平均分配给许多主题，否则你会分散精力。你应该按照更像幂律的方式分配注意力。[17] 对少数几个主题保持专业的好奇心，对更多主题保持闲散的好奇心。

Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it’s roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force.

好奇心与原创性密切相关。好奇心通过提供新的工作对象来滋养原创性。但这种关系比那更紧密。好奇心本身就是一种原创性；它之于问题，大致相当于原创性之于答案。而且，由于最好的问题是答案的重要组成部分，所以最好的好奇心是一种创造力。

Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you’ve seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before?

拥有新想法是一场奇怪的游戏，因为它通常在于看到那些近在眼前的事物。一旦你看到了一个新想法，它往往会显得理所当然。为什么以前没有人想到过这个？

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it’s probably a good one.

当一个想法同时显得新颖又显而易见时，它很可能是一个好想法。

Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What’s the source of this apparent contradiction? It’s that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That’s how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they’re easy to see after you do something hard.

看到显而易见的事物听起来很容易。然而，从经验来看，产生新想法却很难。这种明显的矛盾源于何处？在于看到新想法通常需要你改变看待世界的方式。我们通过模型来看待世界，这些模型既帮助我们也限制我们。当你修复一个破损的模型时，新想法就变得显而易见。但注意到并修复一个破损的模型是困难的。这就是新想法既显而易见又难以发现的原因：在你做了困难的事情之后，它们就很容易被看到。

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don’t want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they’re attached to their current model; it’s what they think in; so they’ll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect.

发现破损模型的一种方法是比其他人更严格。破损的世界模型会在它们与现实碰撞的地方留下线索。大多数人不想看到这些线索。说他们依恋自己当前的模型是轻描淡写；那是他们思考的方式；所以他们会倾向于忽略模型破损留下的线索，无论事后看来这些线索多么显眼。

To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That’s what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell’s equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter.

要找到新想法，你必须抓住破损的迹象，而不是视而不见。爱因斯坦就是这样做的。他之所以能看到麦克斯韦方程组的惊人含义，与其说是因为他在寻找新想法，不如说是因为他更严格。

The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps to be the sort of person who’s comfortable breaking rules. From the point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.

你还需要另一件事：打破规则的意愿。这听起来可能有些矛盾，但如果你想修正你的世界模型，成为一个乐于打破规则的人会有所帮助。从旧模型的角度来看（包括你自己在内，每个人最初都认同旧模型），新模型通常会打破至少是隐含的规则。

Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem perfectly reasonable once you’re using the new model of the world they brought with them. But they didn’t at the time; it took the greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.

很少有人理解所需的打破规则的程度，因为新想法一旦成功，就会显得保守得多。一旦你使用了它们带来的新世界模型，它们就显得完全合理。但当时并非如此；日心说花了近一个世纪才被普遍接受，即使在天文学家中间也是如此，因为它感觉太错了。

Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you’re looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can’t with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they’re rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.

事实上，如果你仔细想想，一个好的新想法必须对大多数人来说显得“不好”，否则早就有人探索过了。所以你寻找的是那些看起来疯狂，但却是“正确”的疯狂想法。你如何识别它们？你无法确定。通常看起来不好的想法确实不好。但那些“正确”的疯狂想法往往令人兴奋；它们蕴含着丰富的意义；而那些仅仅是不好的想法则往往令人沮丧。

There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded.

有两种方式可以让你自在地打破规则：享受打破规则，以及对规则漠不关心。我将这两种情况分别称为积极独立思考和被动独立思考。

The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don’t merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started.

积极独立思考者是那些“淘气”的人。规则不仅未能阻止他们；打破规则反而给了他们额外的能量。对于这类人来说，对项目纯粹的胆大妄为感到愉悦，有时就能提供足够的启动能量来开始它。

The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field’s assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs. Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.

另一种打破规则的方式是不在乎它们，甚至可能不知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和局外人常常能做出新发现；他们对某个领域假设的无知，充当了暂时被动独立思考的来源。阿斯伯格综合征患者似乎也对传统观念有一种免疫力。我认识的几个人说，这有助于他们产生新想法。

Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination. In popular culture they’re opposed. But popular culture has a broken model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking are opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict.

严格加上打破规则听起来像是一种奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，它们是对立的。但流行文化在这方面有一个破损的模型。它隐含地假设问题都是微不足道的，而在微不足道的事情上，严格和打破规则是对立的。但在真正重要的问题上，只有打破规则的人才能真正严格。

An overlooked idea often doesn’t lose till the semifinals. You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.

一个被忽视的想法常常直到半决赛才被淘汰。你确实在潜意识中看到了它，但你潜意识的另一部分会将其否决，因为它可能太奇怪、太冒险、工作量太大、太有争议。这暗示了一个令人兴奋的可能性：如果你能关闭这些过滤器，你就能看到更多新想法。

One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won’t shoot them down to protect you.

做到这一点的一种方法是问自己，对别人来说，探索哪些想法会是好主意。这样你的潜意识就不会为了保护你而否决它们。

You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other direction: by starting from what’s obscuring them. Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.

你也可以通过反向工作来发现被忽视的想法：从那些遮蔽它们的因素入手。每一个被珍视但错误的原则，都被一片有价值的想法的“死区”所包围，这些想法因为与该原则相悖而未被探索。

Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type. [18]

宗教是珍视但错误的原则的集合。因此，任何可以被字面或隐喻地描述为宗教的事物，其阴影下都蕴藏着有价值的、未被探索的思想。哥白尼和达尔文都做出了这类发现。[18]

What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?

在你所在的领域，人们对什么事物“虔诚”，即过于执着于某个可能并非他们想象中那么不言自明的原则？如果你抛弃它，会发生什么？

People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

人们在解决问题上表现出的原创性，远多于在决定解决哪些问题上。即使是最聪明的人，在决定做什么时也可能出奇地保守。那些在其他方面从不梦想追逐时尚的人，却会被卷入时尚问题的研究中。

One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But even so I think most people are too conservative. They’re not merely responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems are undervalued.

人们在选择问题时比选择解决方案更保守的一个原因是，问题是更大的赌注。一个问题可能让你耗费数年，而探索一个解决方案可能只需几天。但即便如此，我认为大多数人还是过于保守了。他们不仅是对风险做出反应，也是对时尚做出反应。不时尚的问题被低估了。

One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn’t. Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you’re interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don’t let their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.

最有趣的一种不时尚问题是，人们认为已经充分探索过但实际上并没有的问题。伟大的工作常常是拿起已有的东西，并展现其潜在的价值。丢勒和瓦特都做到了这一点。所以，如果你对一个别人认为已经枯竭的领域感兴趣，不要让他们的怀疑阻碍你。人们在这方面常常是错的。

Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There’s no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And there’s a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted.

从事一个不时尚的问题可能非常令人愉悦。没有炒作，也没有匆忙。投机者和批评家都忙于别处。现有的工作往往具有一种老派的坚实感。而且，培养那些否则会被浪费的想法，会带来一种令人满足的经济感。

But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn’t seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these? By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way, and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on “important” problems.

但最常见的被忽视的问题并非明确地“不时尚”，即并非过时。它只是看起来没有实际那么重要。你如何找到这些问题？通过放纵自己——让你的好奇心自由发挥，并至少暂时屏蔽掉脑海中那个告诉你只应该做“重要”问题的声音。

You do need to工作 on important problems, but almost everyone is too conservative about what counts as one. And if there’s an important but overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it’s probably already on your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from “serious” work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.

你确实需要从事重要的问题，但几乎每个人对什么才算重要都过于保守。而且，如果你身边有一个重要但被忽视的问题，它很可能已经进入你的潜意识雷达。所以，试着问自己：如果你要从“严肃”的工作中抽身，仅仅因为某个事情真的很有趣而去做，你会做什么？这个答案可能比看起来更重要。

Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That’s what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. 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.

在选择问题上的原创性，似乎比在解决问题上的原创性更为重要。这正是那些开创全新领域的人的独特之处。因此，看似仅仅是最初一步——决定做什么——在某种意义上却是整个游戏的关键。

Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.

很少有人能领会这一点。关于新想法最大的误解之一，在于其构成中问题与答案的比例。人们认为伟大的想法是答案，但往往真正的洞察力在于问题本身。

Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they’re used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.

我们低估问题的一部分原因在于它们在学校中的使用方式。在学校里，问题往往像不稳定粒子一样，短暂存在后就被回答。但一个真正好的问题远不止于此。一个真正好的问题本身就是一种部分发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体落向地球的力与使行星保持轨道运行的力是同一种吗？仅仅提出这样的问题，你已经置身于令人兴奋的新颖领域。

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you’re carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.

未解的问题可能令人不安，但你携带的未解问题越多，就越有可能注意到解决方案——或者更令人兴奋的是，注意到两个未解的问题其实是同一个。

Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn’t stop thinking about. People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it’s just as important to keep your youthful questions alive. [19]

有时你会带着一个问题很久。伟大的工作常常源于你多年前——甚至童年时期——首次注意到并无法停止思考的问题。人们常谈论保持年轻梦想的重要性，但同样重要的是保持你年轻时的疑问。[19]

This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you’re puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either.

这是实际专业知识与大众认知差异最大的地方之一。在大众认知中，专家是确定的。但实际上，你越困惑越好，只要（a）你困惑的事情很重要，并且（b）其他人也都不理解。

Think about what’s happening at the moment just before a new idea is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled about something. Which means that originality consists partly of puzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you’re willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don’t want to solve them. [20]

想想一个新想法被发现前的那一刻发生了什么。通常，一个拥有足够专业知识的人会对某事感到困惑。这意味着原创性部分在于困惑——在于迷茫！你必须足够适应这个充满谜题的世界，愿意去看到它们，但又不能过于安逸以至于不想解决它们。[20]

It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

拥有丰富的未解问题是一件很棒的事情。而这正是“富者愈富”的情况之一，因为获得新问题的最佳方式就是尝试回答现有问题。问题不仅引向答案，也引向更多问题。

The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it just gets longer and longer. So don’t require a question to be obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict that. It’s hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.

最好的问题在回答中成长。你注意到当前范式中突出的一条线索，试着拉动它，它就变得越来越长。所以，不要要求一个问题在尝试回答之前就显得明显宏大。你很少能预测到这一点。即使是注意到这条线索也足够困难了，更不用说预测如果你拉动它会解开多少。

It’s better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.

最好是“滥情”地好奇——对很多线索都稍微拉一下，看看会发生什么。大事始于微小。大事情的最初版本往往只是实验、副项目或讲座，然后才发展壮大。所以，多开始一些小事情。

Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don’t work. You can’t have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones. [21]

多产被低估了。你尝试的不同事物越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。然而，要明白，尝试很多事情也意味着尝试很多不成功的事情。你不可能在没有大量坏想法的同时拥有大量好想法。[21]

Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything that’s been done before, you’ll learn faster and have more fun by trying stuff. And you’ll understand previous work better when you do look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like two puzzle pieces.

尽管听起来先研究所有前人的工作更负责任，但通过尝试，你会学得更快，乐趣更多。而且，当你真正审视前人的工作时，你会理解得更好。所以，宁可偏向于开始。当开始意味着从小处着手时，这会更容易；这两个想法就像两块拼图一样契合。

How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

如何从从小处着手到做出伟大的事情？通过迭代版本。伟大的事物几乎总是通过迭代版本来完成的。你从一个小的东西开始，然后不断发展它，最终的版本会比你计划的任何东西都更巧妙、更宏大。

It’s particularly useful to make successive versions when you’re making something for people — to get an initial version in front of them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.

当你为人们创造东西时，迭代版本尤其有用——快速将初始版本呈现给他们，然后根据他们的反馈进行改进。

Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn’t, this will at least get you started.

从尝试最简单、可能奏效的事情开始。令人惊讶的是，它常常奏效。如果不行，这至少能让你开始。

Don’t try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. There are names for doing this with the first version (taking too long to ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these are both merely instances of a more general principle.

不要试图在任何一个版本中塞入太多新东西。对于第一个版本（发布时间过长）和第二个版本（第二系统效应）都有相应的名称，但这些都只是一个更普遍原则的实例。

An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a toy. It’s a good sign when people do this. That means it has everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow. [22]

一个新项目的早期版本有时会被人轻蔑地称为“玩具”。当人们这样做时，这是一个好兆头。这意味着它拥有一个新想法所需的一切，除了规模，而规模往往会随之而来。[22]

The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it is to plan in advance what you’re going to do. And planning does usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized to say “we’re going to do x and then y and then z” than “we’re going to try x and see what happens.” And it is more organized; it just doesn’t work as well.

从小处着手并逐步发展它的替代方案是提前规划你要做什么。而规划通常看起来是更负责任的选择。说“我们要先做X，然后做Y，再做Z”听起来比说“我们要尝试X，看看会发生什么”更有条理。它确实更有条理；只是效果没那么好。

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.

规划本身并非好事。它有时是必要的，但却是一种必要的恶——是对严苛条件的反应。你之所以不得不这样做，是因为你正在使用不灵活的媒介，或者你需要协调大量人的努力。如果你保持项目规模小并使用灵活的媒介，你就不必过多规划，你的设计反而可以演进。

Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don’t look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably being too conservative.

承担你能承受的尽可能多的风险。在一个高效的市场中，风险与回报成正比，所以不要寻求确定性，而要寻找预期价值高的赌注。如果你不偶尔失败，你可能过于保守了。

Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it’s the young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear risk, but it’s when you’re young that you can afford the most.

尽管保守主义通常与老年人联系在一起，但犯这种错误的往往是年轻人。缺乏经验使他们害怕风险，但恰恰是年轻时，你才能承受最大的风险。

Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you’ll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked. And there’s probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard.

即使一个失败的项目也可能很有价值。在从事它的过程中，你将穿越鲜有人涉足的领域，遇到鲜有人提出的问题。而且，可能没有比你在尝试做一些略微超出能力范围的事情时遇到的问题更好的问题来源了。

Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.

拥有青春的优势时就利用它们，拥有年龄的优势时也利用它们。青春的优势是精力、时间、乐观和自由。年龄的优势是知识、效率、金钱和权力。通过努力，你可以在年轻时获得一些后者的优势，并在年老时保留一些前者的优势。

The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they have. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don’t need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.

老年人也有优势，他们知道自己拥有哪些优势。年轻人常常拥有这些优势却不自知。其中最大的可能就是时间。年轻人根本不知道自己在时间上有多么富有。将这段时间转化为优势的最佳方式是将其用于一些略显“轻浮”的用途：仅仅出于好奇去了解一些你不需要知道的事情，或者仅仅因为觉得酷而尝试建造一些东西，或者变得对某事异常精通。

That “slightly” is an important qualification. Spend time lavishly when you’re young, but don’t simply waste it. There’s a big difference between doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doing something you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet, and possibly a better one than you think. [23]

那个“略微”是一个重要的限定词。年轻时要慷慨地花费时间，但不要简单地浪费它。做一件你担心可能浪费时间的事情，和做一件你确定会浪费时间的事情，有很大的区别。前者至少是一场赌博，而且可能比你想象的要好。[23]

The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience, is that you’re seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don’t fit together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but occasionally it’s with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not to. [24]

青春最微妙的优势，或者更准确地说，是缺乏经验的优势，在于你用全新的眼光看待一切。当你的大脑第一次接受一个想法时，有时两者并不能完美契合。通常问题出在你的大脑，但偶尔也出在想法本身。它的一部分会笨拙地突出，在你思考时刺痛你。习惯了这个想法的人已经学会了忽略它，但你却有机会不这样做。[24]

So when you’re learning about something for the first time, pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You’ll be tempted to ignore them, since there’s a 99% chance the problem is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don’t forget about them. When you’ve gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they’re still there. If they’re still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they probably represent an undiscovered idea.

所以，当你第一次学习某事时，要注意那些看起来错误或缺失的地方。你会被诱惑去忽略它们，因为有99%的可能问题出在你身上。你可能需要暂时放下疑虑以继续前进。但不要忘记它们。当你对该主题有了更深入的了解后，再回来检查它们是否仍然存在。如果它们在你现有知识的光照下仍然成立，它们可能代表着一个未被发现的想法。

One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don’t have to worry about. The young know all the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.

从经验中获得的最有价值的知识之一，就是知道你无需担心什么。年轻人知道所有可能重要的事情，但不知道它们的相对重要性。所以他们对所有事情都同样担心，而实际上他们应该更担心少数几件事，而对其他事情几乎不必担心。

But what you don’t know is only half the problem with inexperience. The other half is what you do know that ain’t so. You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you’ve acquired and false things you’ve been taught — and you won’t be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do.

但你不知道的，只是经验不足问题的一半。另一半是你所知道的“并非如此”的事情。你成年时，脑子里充满了胡说八道——你养成的坏习惯和被教导的错误观念——在你清除至少阻碍你所想从事的任何类型工作的那些胡说八道之前，你将无法做出伟大的工作。

Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools. We’re so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to school as identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts of strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.

你脑中残留的许多无稽之谈都是学校留下的。我们太习惯于学校，以至于无意识地将上学等同于学习，但实际上，学校有各种奇怪的特质，扭曲了我们对学习和思考的看法。

For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child, there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they’re just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed.

例如，学校会诱导被动性。从小时候起，教室前面就有一个权威人物，告诉你们所有人必须学习什么，然后衡量你们是否做到了。但无论是课堂还是考试，都不是学习的内在组成部分；它们只是学校通常设计方式的产物。

The sooner you overcome this passivity, the better. If you’re still in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. That may seem a stretch, but it’s not merely some weird thought experiment. It’s the truth economically, and in the best case it’s the truth intellectually as well. The best teachers don’t want to be your bosses. They’d prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.

你越早克服这种被动性越好。如果你还在学校，试着把你的教育看作是你的项目，而你的老师是为你工作，而不是反过来。这可能听起来有些牵强，但这不仅仅是一个奇怪的思想实验。它在经济上是真实的，在最好的情况下，在智力上也是真实的。最好的老师不想成为你的老板。他们更希望你主动前进，把他们当作建议的来源，而不是被他们牵着走过教材。

Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school they tell you what the problems are, and they’re almost always soluble using no more than you’ve been taught so far. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don’t know if they’re soluble at all.

学校还会给你一种关于工作性质的误导性印象。在学校里，他们告诉你问题是什么，而且这些问题几乎总能用你目前所学到的知识解决。在现实生活中，你必须自己找出问题是什么，而且你常常不知道它们是否能被解决。

But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. You can’t do great work by doing that. You can’t trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.

但也许学校对你做的最糟糕的事情是训练你通过“作弊”来赢得考试。你无法通过这种方式做出伟大的工作。你无法欺骗上帝。所以，停止寻找那种捷径。打败系统的方法是专注于他人忽视的问题和解决方案，而不是在工作本身上偷工减料。

Don’t think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a “big break.” Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people.

不要认为自己依赖于某个“守门人”给你一个“大好机会”。即使这是真的，获得它的最佳方式也是专注于做好工作，而不是追逐有影响力的人。

And don’t take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they’re part of a feedback loop, and very few are.

不要把委员会的拒绝放在心上。打动招生官和评奖委员会的特质，与做出卓越成就所需的特质截然不同。选拔委员会的决定只有在它们是反馈循环的一部分时才有意义，而这样的情况非常少。

People new to a field will often copy existing work. There’s nothing inherently bad about that. There’s no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor does copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.

刚进入一个领域的人常常会模仿现有的作品。这本身并没有什么不好。学习事物如何运作，没有比尝试复制它更好的方法了。复制也未必会使你的作品缺乏原创性。原创性是新思想的存在，而非旧思想的缺失。

There’s a good way to copy and a bad way. If you’re going to copy something, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still, unconsciously. This is what’s meant by the famously misattributed phrase “Great artists steal.” The really dangerous kind of copying, the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that’s done without realizing it, because you’re nothing more than a train running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination. [25]

复制有好的方式，也有坏的方式。如果你要复制某物，请公开地做，而不是偷偷摸摸地，或者更糟的是，无意识地。这就是那句被错误归因的名言“伟大的艺术家窃取”的含义。真正危险的复制，那种给复制带来坏名声的复制，是那种在不知不觉中进行的复制，因为你不过是一辆在别人铺设的轨道上行驶的火车。但另一方面，复制也可以是优越而非从属的标志。[25]

In many fields it’s almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people’s. Projects rarely arise in a vacuum. They’re usually a reaction to previous work. When you’re first starting out, you don’t have any previous work; if you’re going to react to something, it has to be someone else’s. Once you’re established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative and the latter doesn’t, structurally the two cases are more similar than they seem.

在许多领域，你的早期工作在某种意义上几乎不可避免地会基于他人的成果。项目很少凭空产生。它们通常是对先前工作的反应。当你刚开始时，你没有任何先前的作品；如果你要对某事做出反应，那必须是别人的。一旦你站稳脚跟，你就可以对自己的作品做出反应。但尽管前者被称为“衍生”，后者则不，从结构上看，这两种情况比看起来更相似。

Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimes makes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things, even by their discoverers, because there isn’t yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.

奇怪的是，最创新想法的这种新颖性，有时反而让它们最初看起来比实际更具衍生性。新发现常常不得不最初被构想为现有事物的变体，即使是发现者本人也是如此，因为当时还没有表达它们的概念词汇。

There are definitely some dangers to copying, though. One is that you’ll tend to copy old things — things that were in their day at the frontier of knowledge, but no longer are.

然而，复制确实存在一些危险。其中之一是你倾向于复制旧事物——那些在当时处于知识前沿，但现在已不再是的事物。

And when you do copy something, don’t copy every feature of it. Some will make you ridiculous if you do. Don’t copy the manner of an eminent 50 year old professor if you’re 18, for example, or the idiom of a Renaissance poem hundreds of years later.

当你复制某物时，不要复制它的每一个特征。有些特征如果你复制了，会让你显得荒谬。例如，如果你18岁，不要模仿一位50岁著名教授的举止，或者几百年后模仿文艺复兴时期诗歌的习语。

Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.

你所欣赏的事物的一些特点，是它们尽管有缺陷却依然成功的地方。事实上，最容易模仿的特点，也最可能是其缺陷。

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.

这在行为方面尤其如此。有些有才华的人是混蛋，这有时会让缺乏经验的人觉得，混蛋是才华的一部分。事实并非如此；有才华只是他们得以逍遥法外的方式。

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.

最有力的复制方式之一，是将一个领域的东西复制到另一个领域。历史上充满了这类偶然的发现，所以通过刻意学习其他类型的工作来助偶然一臂之力，可能是值得的。如果你将它们视为隐喻，你可以从相当遥远的领域汲取思想。

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.

反面例子可以像正面例子一样鼓舞人心。事实上，你有时从做得不好的事情中学到的比做得好的事情更多；有时只有当它缺失时，你才清楚地知道需要什么。

If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it’s usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence. [26]

如果你的领域里许多最优秀的人聚集在一个地方，通常去那里待一段时间是个好主意。这会增强你的抱负，而且，通过让你看到这些人也是凡人，会增强你的自信心。[26]

If you’re earnest you’ll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who’s genuinely interested. If they’re really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist’s interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies.

如果你真诚，你可能会得到比预期更热烈的欢迎。大多数在某方面非常出色的人，都乐于与任何真正感兴趣的人谈论它。如果他们真的擅长自己的工作，那么他们可能对此抱有业余爱好者的兴趣，而业余爱好者总是想谈论他们的爱好。

It may take some effort to find the people who are really good, though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places, particularly universities, there’s a polite fiction that everyone is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities can’t say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.

然而，找到真正优秀的人可能需要一些努力。做伟大的工作享有如此高的声望，以至于在某些地方，特别是大学里，存在一种客气的虚构，认为每个人都在从事这项工作。而这远非事实。大学内部的人不能公开说，但不同系科的工作质量差异巨大。有些系有做伟大工作的人；有些过去有；有些则从未有过。

Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can’t be done alone, and even if you’re working on one that can be, it’s good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.

寻找最优秀的同事。有很多项目无法独自完成，即使你正在从事一个可以独自完成的项目，有其他人来鼓励你并与你交流想法也是好的。

Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.

同事不仅影响你的工作；他们也影响你。所以，与你希望成为的那种人一起工作，因为你最终会变成那样。

Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It’s better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. In fact it’s not merely better, but necessary, judging from history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one’s colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.

同事的质量比数量更重要。有一两个优秀的同事胜过一整栋楼的还不错的同事。事实上，从历史来看，这不仅仅是更好，而是必要的：伟大工作往往以集群形式出现，这表明同事常常是决定能否做出伟大工作的关键。

How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my experience, when you do, you know. Which means if you’re unsure, you probably don’t. But it may be possible to give a more concrete answer than that. Here’s an attempt: sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can’t. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep you on your toes in this sense, you’re probably over the threshold.

你如何知道自己是否有足够好的同事？根据我的经验，当你拥有时，你就会知道。这意味着如果你不确定，你可能就没有。但也许可以给出更具体的答案。尝试一下：足够好的同事能提供令人惊讶的见解。他们能看到并做到你做不到的事情。所以，如果你有少数几个能让你保持警觉的优秀同事，你可能已经跨过了那个门槛。

Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but some projects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of those is not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you’ll have to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude and interest like any other kind of work. If you don’t have them, there is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management as a second language, or avoid such projects. [27]

我们大多数人都能从与同事的协作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人员，而启动这类项目并非适合所有人。如果你想运营这样的项目，你将不得不成为一名管理者，而管理得好，就像任何其他类型的工作一样，需要天赋和兴趣。如果你不具备这些，就没有中间道路：你必须要么强迫自己把管理学成第二语言，要么避免这类项目。[27]

Husband your morale. It’s the basis of everything when you’re working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism.

珍惜你的士气。当你从事雄心勃勃的项目时，它是所有一切的基础。你必须像呵护生命体一样培养和保护它。

Morale starts with your view of life. You’re more likely to do great work if you’re an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.

士气始于你的人生观。如果你是一个乐观主义者，你更有可能做出伟大的工作；如果你认为自己是幸运的，而不是受害者，你更有可能做出伟大的工作。

Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If you choose work that’s pure, its very difficulties will serve as a refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism, it’s a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by some of the greatest minds in history.

确实，工作在某种程度上可以保护你免受问题的困扰。如果你选择纯粹的工作，它的困难本身将成为你逃避日常生活中困难的避风港。如果这是一种逃避主义，那它也是一种非常有成效的形式，历史上一些最伟大的思想家都曾使用过它。

Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this cycle also operates in the other direction: if you’re not doing good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you’re stuck, just so you start to get something done.

士气通过工作累积：高昂的士气有助于你做好工作，这反过来又会提升你的士气，帮助你做得更好。但这个循环也反向运作：如果你没有做好工作，那会让你士气低落，使你更难做好。由于这个循环向正确方向运行至关重要，所以当你陷入困境时，转而做一些更容易的工作，仅仅是为了开始完成一些事情，可能是一个好主意。

One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always involves some backtracking.

雄心勃勃的人犯的最大错误之一，就是让挫折一下子摧毁他们的士气，就像气球爆裂一样。你可以通过明确地将挫折视为你过程的一部分来预防这种情况。解决难题总是涉及一些回溯。

Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” isn’t quite right. It should be: If at first you don’t succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.

做伟大的工作是一种深度优先搜索，其根节点是“渴望去做”。所以“如果你初次不成功，就再试再试”并不完全正确。它应该是：如果你初次不成功，要么再试一次，要么回溯后再试一次。

“Never give up” is also not quite right. Obviously there are times when it’s the right choice to eject. A more precise version would be: Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you need to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node.

“永不放弃”也并非完全正确。显然，有时选择退出是正确的。一个更精确的版本是：永远不要让挫折让你恐慌到过度回溯。推论：永远不要放弃根节点。

It’s not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it’s a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you’re running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.

工作是挣扎不一定是个坏兆头，就像跑步时气喘吁吁不一定是坏兆头一样。这取决于你跑得多快。所以要学会区分好的痛苦和坏的痛苦。好的痛苦是努力的标志；坏的痛苦是损伤的标志。

An audience is a critical component of morale. If you’re a scholar, your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn’t need to be big. The value of an audience doesn’t grow anything like linearly with its size. Which is bad news if you’re famous, but good news if you’re just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you’re doing, that’s enough.

受众是士气的一个关键组成部分。如果你是学者，你的受众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，它可能是传统意义上的观众。无论哪种情况，它都不需要很大。受众的价值并非与规模线性增长。如果你有名，这是个坏消息，但如果你刚起步，这是个好消息，因为这意味着一小部分但忠实的受众就足以支撑你。如果少数人真心热爱你所做的事情，那就足够了。

To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable, but it’s so liberating to escape it that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct. [28]

在力所能及的范围内，避免让中间人介入你和你的受众之间。在某些类型的工作中，这是不可避免的，但摆脱它会带来极大的解放，以至于如果你能因此直接接触受众，转而从事相邻类型的工作可能会更好。[28]

The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. You’ll find there are some who increase your energy and others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always what you’d expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there’s someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence.

你花时间相处的人也会对你的士气产生巨大影响。你会发现有些人会增加你的能量，而另一些人则会减少它，而且一个人的影响并不总是你所期望的。寻找那些能增加你能量的人，避开那些会减少你能量的人。当然，如果你需要照顾某人，那则优先。

Don’t marry someone who doesn’t understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you’re ambitious, you need to work; it’s almost like a medical condition; so someone who won’t let you work either doesn’t understand you, or does and doesn’t care.

不要嫁给或娶一个不理解你需要工作，或者将你的工作视为争夺你注意力的人。如果你有抱负，你就需要工作；这几乎就像一种生理需求；所以一个不让你工作的人，要么不理解你，要么理解但不在乎。

Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it’s important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they’re good for thinking. [29]

最终，士气是身体层面的。你用身体思考，所以照顾好它很重要。这意味着定期锻炼，饮食和睡眠良好，并避免更危险的药物。跑步和散步是特别好的锻炼方式，因为它们有助于思考。[29]

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they’re happier than they’d be if they didn’t. In fact, if you’re smart and ambitious, it’s dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don’t achieve much tend to become bitter.

做出卓越成就的人不一定比其他人更快乐，但他们比不这样做时更快乐。事实上，如果你聪明且有抱负，不富有成效是危险的。聪明有抱负但成就甚微的人往往会变得痛苦。

It’s ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise.

想给别人留下深刻印象是可以的，但要选择对的人。你所尊重的人的意见是信号。名声，即你可能尊重也可能不尊重的一大群人的意见，只会增加噪音。

The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.

一种工作的声望充其量只是一个滞后指标，有时甚至完全是错误的。如果你把任何事情做得足够好，你就会让它享有声望。所以，关于一种工作，要问的问题不是它有多少声望，而是它能做得多好。

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don’t let it choose the problem for you; don’t let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don’t let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder.

竞争可以是一种有效的激励因素，但不要让它为你选择问题；不要让自己仅仅因为别人在追逐某物就被卷入其中。事实上，不要让竞争对手让你做任何比更努力工作更具体的事情。

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.

好奇心是最好的向导。你的好奇心从不撒谎，它比你更清楚什么值得关注。

Notice how often that word has come up. 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.”

注意这个词出现了多少次。如果你问一位神谕者做出伟大工作的秘密，而神谕者只回答一个词，我敢打赌会是“好奇心”。

That doesn’t translate directly to advice. It’s not enough just to be curious, and you can’t command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you.

这并不能直接转化为建议。仅仅好奇是不够的，而且你无论如何也无法命令好奇心。但你可以培养它，让它驱动你。

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.

好奇心是完成伟大工作的全部四个步骤的关键：它会为你选择领域，带你抵达前沿，让你注意到其中的空白，并驱使你去探索它们。整个过程就像与好奇心共舞。

Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you’re already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small.

信不信由你，我已尽力将这篇论文写得尽可能短。但它的长度至少意味着它起到了筛选作用。如果你读到这里，你一定对做出伟大工作感兴趣。如果是这样，你已经比你可能意识到的走得更远了，因为愿意去想做这件事的人群很小。

The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can’t do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?

做出伟大工作的因素，是字面意义上、数学意义上的因素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。运气根据定义你无法掌控，所以我们可以忽略它。而努力，如果你确实想做出伟大的工作，我们可以假定它存在。所以问题归结为能力和兴趣。你能找到一种工作，让你的能力和兴趣结合起来，产生新思想的爆发吗？

Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you’re most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It’s just a question of finding it, and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying.

这里有乐观的理由。做出伟大工作的方式如此之多，甚至还有更多尚未被发现。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，最适合你的那一种可能非常契合。可能契合得令人发笑。这只是一个找到它的问题，以及你的能力和兴趣能带你走多远的问题。而你只能通过尝试来回答。

Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you’d fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that’s what’s going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question.

能尝试做伟大工作的人比实际做的要多得多。阻碍他们的是谦逊和恐惧的结合。试图成为牛顿或莎士比亚似乎是自命不凡。这看起来也很困难；如果尝试那样的事情，肯定会失败。这种计算大概很少是明确的。很少有人会有意识地决定不去尝试做伟大的工作。但这正是潜意识中发生的事情；他们回避了这个问题。

So I’m going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that. I wouldn’t have done it to a general audience. But we already know you’re interested.

所以我要对你耍个小花招。你到底想不想做出伟大的工作？现在你必须有意识地做出决定。抱歉。我不会对普通大众这样做。但我们已经知道你感兴趣了。

Don’t worry about being presumptuous. You don’t have to tell anyone. And if it’s too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have worse problems than that. In fact you’ll be lucky if it’s the worst problem you have.

别担心这显得自命不凡。你无需告诉任何人。而且，如果这太难而你失败了，那又怎样？很多人的问题比这严重得多。事实上，如果这是你最糟的问题，那你已经很幸运了。

Yes, you’ll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to work hard. And if you’re working on something you find very interesting, which you necessarily will if you’re on the right path, the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your peers'.

是的，你必须努力工作。但话又说回来，很多人都得努力工作。而且，如果你正在做一件你觉得非常有趣的事情——如果你走在正确的道路上，这必然会发生——那么这项工作给你的负担感，可能会比你许多同龄人所感受到的要轻。

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?

那些发现就在那里，等待着被完成。为什么不能是你呢？