 July 2023 2023 年 7 月 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. 如果你收集了在许多不同领域中做出出色工作的技巧清单，那么它们的交集会是什么样子？我决定通过制作它来找出答案。 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." 部分我的目标是创建一个可以被任何领域工作的人使用的指南。但我也对交集的形状感到好奇。这项练习显示出一个事实，那就是它确实有一个明确的形状；它不仅仅是一个标记为“努力工作”的点。 The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. 以下食谱假设你非常有雄心。 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. 第一步是决定要做什么。你选择的工作需要具备三个特质：它必须是你有自然才能的事情，你对它有深厚的兴趣，并且它提供了做出伟大工作的空间。 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] 在实践中，你不必过于担心第三个标准。雄心勃勃的人在这方面往往已经过于保守。因此，你所需要做的就是找到一些你有天赋并且非常感兴趣的事情。 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. 这听起来很简单，但实际上往往相当困难。当你年轻时，你不知道自己擅长什么或不同类型的工作是什么样的。有些工作可能甚至还不存在。因此，虽然有些人在 14 岁时就知道自己想做什么，但大多数人需要去摸索。 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. 确定工作方向的方法就是通过工作。如果你不确定该做什么，那就猜猜。但选择一个方向并开始行动。你可能会有时猜错，但这没关系。了解多种事物是好的；一些重大发现来自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. 培养独立开展自己项目的习惯。不要让“工作”成为别人告诉你该做的事情。如果有一天你确实能做出出色的工作，那很可能是你自己负责的项目。它可能是某个更大项目的一部分，但你将主导你所负责的部分。 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？无论是什么让你感到兴奋和雄心勃勃。随着你年龄的增长和项目品味的演变，令人兴奋和重要将会交汇。在 7 岁时，用乐高搭建巨大物体可能显得非常雄心勃勃；到 14 岁时，自学微积分；再到 21 岁时，你开始探索物理学中的未解之谜。但始终要保持兴奋感。 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，它既是伟大工作的动力，也是方向盘。它不仅会推动你，如果你让它自由发展，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. 你对什么过于好奇——好奇到让大多数人感到无聊的程度？这就是你所寻找的。 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. 一旦你发现了自己过于感兴趣的事物，下一步就是学习足够的知识，以便让你接触到知识的前沿。知识是分形扩展的，从远处看其边缘光滑，但一旦你学到足够的知识接近其中一个，便会发现它们充满了空白。 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] 下一步是注意到它们。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑倾向于忽视这些空白，以便构建一个更简单的世界模型。许多发现来自于对那些其他人视为理所当然的事物提出问题。 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. 如果答案看起来奇怪，那就更好了。伟大的作品常常带有一丝奇异的色彩。从绘画到数学，你都能看到这一点。试图去制造这种奇异感是矫揉造作的，但如果它出现了，就要拥抱它。 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] 大胆追求那些边缘的想法，即使其他人对它们不感兴趣——实际上，尤其是在他们不感兴趣的时候。如果你对某个大家都忽视的可能性感到兴奋，并且你有足够的专业知识来准确指出他们所忽视的内容，那就是你能找到的最佳选择。 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. 四个步骤：选择一个领域，学习足够的知识以达到前沿，注意空白，探索有前景的领域。这几乎是所有做出伟大工作的人的做法，从画家到物理学家。 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. 第二步和第四步将需要艰苦的努力。虽然可能无法证明必须努力工作才能做出伟大的事情，但经验事实的证据与死亡率的证据相当。因此，专注于你深感兴趣的事物至关重要。兴趣将驱使你比单纯的勤奋更加努力。 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. 三种最强大的动机是好奇心、愉悦感和渴望做一些令人印象深刻的事情。有时它们会交汇在一起，这种结合是最强大的。 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. 大奖在于发现一个新的分形芽。你注意到知识表面的一道裂缝，撬开它，里面是一个完整的世界。 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] 让我们再谈谈确定工作内容这一复杂事务。之所以困难的主要原因在于，除了亲自去做，您无法了解大多数工作是什么样的。这意味着这四个步骤是重叠的：您可能需要在某项工作上努力多年，才能知道自己有多喜欢它或多擅长它。而在此期间，您并没有从事其他大多数工作，因此也没有学习到相关知识。因此，在最糟糕的情况下，您可能会基于非常不完整的信息而晚做出选择。 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. 雄心的本质加剧了这个问题。雄心有两种形式，一种是在对某个主题产生兴趣之前就存在的，另一种是从兴趣中发展而来的。大多数做出伟大工作的人的雄心都是这两者的混合，而前者越多，决定该做什么就越困难。 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. 大多数国家的教育系统假装这很简单。他们希望你在真正了解某个领域之前就承诺投入其中。因此，一个有抱负的人在最佳轨道上往往会被系统视为一种失误。 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，那就更好了——如果他们承认这个系统不仅无法帮助你弄清楚该做什么，而且是基于你在青少年时期会以某种方式神奇地猜测的假设而设计的。他们不告诉你，但我会告诉你：在弄清楚该做什么时，你只能靠自己。有些人运气好，猜对了，但其余的人会发现自己在沿着假设每个人都能做到的轨道上斜着奔波。 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] 如果你年轻且有抱负，但不知道该做什么，你应该怎么做？你不应该被动地漂流，假设问题会自行解决。你需要采取行动。但没有系统的程序可以遵循。当你阅读那些做出伟大成就的人的传记时，会发现运气在其中扮演了多么重要的角色。他们发现该做什么，往往是因为一次偶然的相遇，或者是因为阅读了一本他们恰好拿起的书。因此，你需要让自己成为运气的一个大目标，而实现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。 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. 当你感到困惑时，优先考虑趣味性。随着你对某个领域了解得越来越多，领域也会发生变化。例如，数学家所做的事情与你在高中数学课上所做的非常不同。因此，你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会，让它们向你展示它们的特点。但随着你对某个领域了解得越来越多，它应该变得越来越有趣。如果没有，那可能不适合你。 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. 不要担心如果你发现自己对的事物的兴趣与他人不同。你的兴趣越奇特，越好。奇特的兴趣往往是强烈的，而对工作的强烈兴趣意味着你会更有生产力。如果你在很少有人关注的地方寻找新事物，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. 一个你适合某种工作的迹象是，当你喜欢那些其他人觉得乏味或可怕的部分时。 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. 但田野不是人；你不需要对它们忠诚。如果在处理一件事情的过程中你发现了另一件更令人兴奋的事情，不要害怕转变。 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. 如果你为人们制作某样东西，确保这是他们真正想要的。做到这一点的最好方法是制作你自己想要的东西。写下你想阅读的故事；构建你想使用的工具。由于你的朋友们可能有相似的兴趣，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] 这应该遵循兴奋性规则。显然，最令人兴奋的故事就是你想要阅读的故事。我之所以明确提到这个案例，是因为很多人都搞错了。与其制作他们想要的内容，他们却试图制作一些虚构的、更复杂的观众想要的东西。一旦你走上这条路，你就迷失了。 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. 在你试图弄清楚该做什么时，有很多力量会让你迷失方向。虚伪、时尚、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、显赫的欺诈者。但如果你坚持自己真正感兴趣的事情，你就能抵御所有这些。如果你感兴趣，你就不会迷失。 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. 追随你的兴趣听起来可能是一种相对被动的策略，但在实践中，这通常意味着要在各种障碍面前坚持追随。你通常需要冒着被拒绝和失败的风险。因此，这确实需要相当大的勇气。 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. 但虽然你需要大胆，但通常不需要太多的计划。在大多数情况下，做出伟大工作的秘诀就是：在令人兴奋的雄心勃勃的项目上努力工作，最终会有所收获。与其制定一个计划然后执行，不如尝试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. 规划的麻烦在于，它只适用于那些你可以提前描述的成就。你可以通过在儿童时期决定并坚持不懈地追求这个目标来赢得金牌或致富，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，对于大多数想要做出伟大工作的人的来说，正确的策略是不必过于计划。在每个阶段，做那些看起来最有趣的事情，并为未来提供最佳选择。我称这种方法为“顺风而行”。这就是大多数做出伟大工作的人似乎是如何做到的。 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. 即使当你找到了一些令人兴奋的工作时，进行这项工作也并不总是简单明了。有时，一些新想法会让你早上跳下床，立刻投入工作。但也会有很多时候，事情并不是这样的。 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. 你不能仅仅放出帆就被灵感推动前进。会有逆风、潮流和隐藏的浅滩。因此，工作也有技巧，就像航行一样。 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，但工作过度也是可能的，如果你这样做，你会发现回报递减：疲劳会让你变得愚蠢，最终甚至会损害你的健康。工作回报递减的临界点取决于工作类型。有些最艰难的工作类型你可能每天只能做四到五个小时。 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，以便有大块时间可以工作。如果你知道可能会被打断，你会避免困难的任务。 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以克服最初的门槛。不要为此担心；这就是工作的本质，并不是你性格上的缺陷。工作有一种激活能量，无论是每天还是每个项目。而且，由于这个门槛是虚假的，因为它高于继续进行所需的能量，所以告诉自己一个相应大小的谎言以克服它是可以的。 It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off. 通常，如果你想做出伟大的工作，欺骗自己是一个错误，但这是少数几个例外之一。当我早上不愿意开始工作时，我常常通过说“我只是看看我到目前为止的进展”来欺骗自己。五分钟后，我发现了一些似乎有误或不完整的东西，然后我就开始了。 Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's ok to lie to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example. Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it be?" 类似的技巧也适用于启动新项目。比如，欺骗自己关于一个项目需要多少工作是可以的。许多伟大的事情都是从某人说“这会有多难？”开始的。 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. 这是一个年轻人占优势的例子。他们更乐观，尽管他们乐观的一个来源是无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时可以战胜知识。 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. 尽量完成你开始的事情，即使这比你预期的要花更多的时间。完成事情不仅仅是整理或自律的练习。在许多项目中，最好的工作往往发生在原本应该是最后阶段的过程中。 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] 另一个可以接受的谎言是夸大你正在从事的工作的重要性，至少在你自己的心中。如果这能帮助你发现一些新东西，最终可能并不算是谎言。 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] 由于开始工作的方式有两种——按天和按项目——因此也存在两种拖延形式。按项目拖延显然更为危险。你因为时机不太合适而年复一年地推迟开始那个雄心勃勃的项目。当你以年为单位拖延时，很多事情就会被搁置。 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. 项目拖延之所以如此危险的一个原因是，它通常伪装成工作。你并不是在无所事事；你正在努力做其他事情。因此，项目拖延不会像每日拖延那样引发警报。你太忙了，无法注意到它。 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] 击败它的方法是偶尔停下来问自己：我在做我最想做的事情吗？当你年轻时，答案有时是“不是”也没关系，但随着年龄的增长，这变得越来越危险。 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. 伟大的工作通常需要花费大多数人看来不合理的时间来解决一个问题。你不能把这段时间视为成本，否则它会显得过高。你必须在工作进行时找到足够的吸引力。 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. 有些工作可能需要你在讨厌的事情上努力工作多年，才能迎来美好的时刻，但伟大的工作并不是这样产生的。伟大的工作是通过持续专注于你真正感兴趣的事物来实现的。当你停下来审视时，你会惊讶于自己走了多远。 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. 我们感到惊讶的原因在于我们低估了工作的累积效应。每天写一页听起来不算多，但如果你每天都这样做，你一年就能写一本书。这就是关键：一致性。做伟大事情的人并不是每天都完成很多工作。他们完成了一些事情，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. 如果你做的是复利的工作，你将获得指数级的增长。大多数人无意识地这样做，但值得停下来思考一下。例如，学习就是这种现象的一个例子：你对某件事了解得越多，学习更多的难度就越小。扩大受众也是如此：你拥有的粉丝越多，他们就会为你带来更多的新粉丝。 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. 指数增长的问题在于，最开始的曲线看起来是平坦的。其实并不是；它仍然是一条美妙的指数曲线。但我们无法直观地理解这一点，因此在早期阶段我们低估了指数增长。 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. 某种以指数方式增长的事物可能会变得如此有价值，以至于值得付出非凡的努力来启动它。但由于我们在早期低估了指数增长，这种情况大多是无意识的：人们在学习新事物的初始、没有回报的阶段坚持下去，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，或者他们一个一个地增加自己的受众，因为他们没有更好的事情可做。如果人们能够意识到他们可以投资于指数增长，更多的人会这样做。 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. 工作并不仅仅在你努力时发生。当你走路、洗澡或躺在床上时，会有一种无目的的思维，这种思维可能非常强大。通过让你的思绪稍微游离，你常常能解决那些你无法通过直接攻击解决的问题。 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] 不过，你必须以正常的方式努力工作，才能从这一现象中受益。你不能只是漫无目的地游荡。白日梦必须与有意的工作交替进行，这样才能为它提供问题。 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时要避免干扰，但在周期的另一半中避免干扰同样重要。当你让思绪游离时，它会飘向你此刻最关心的事物。因此，要避免那种让你的工作失去首位的干扰，否则你将把这种宝贵的思考浪费在干扰上。（例外：不要避免爱情。） 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. 有意识地培养你在自己领域内工作的品味。在你知道什么是最好的以及是什么使其如此之前，你并不知道自己在追求什么。 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] 这就是你所追求的，因为如果你不努力成为最好，你甚至连优秀都做不到。这个观察已经被许多不同领域的许多人提出，值得思考为什么这是真的。这可能是因为雄心是一种现象，几乎所有的错误都是朝一个方向发生——几乎所有未能命中目标的炮弹都是因为未能达到目标。或者，这也可能是因为追求成为最好与追求优秀在质上是不同的。又或者，优秀这个标准实在是太模糊了。可能这三者都是正确的。 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。尽管看起来努力成为最好的会带来沉重的负担，但实际上你往往会获得更大的收益。这令人兴奋，也奇妙地让人感到解放。它简化了事情。在某种程度上，努力成为最好的比仅仅追求优秀要容易。 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. 一种追求卓越的方法是努力创造一些人们在一百年后仍然关心的事物。这并不是因为他们的观点比你当代人的更重要，而是因为在一百年后仍然看起来好的东西更有可能是真正好的。 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. 不要试图以独特的风格工作。只要尽力做好你能做的事情；你自然会以独特的方式做到这一点。 Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation. 风格是在不刻意的情况下以独特的方式做事。刻意去做则是做作。 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] 做作实际上是指假装除了你以外的其他人在做工作。你采用一种令人印象深刻但虚假的形象，虽然你对这种印象感到满意，但虚假性在工作中显露无遗。 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. 对年轻人来说，成为其他人的诱惑是最大的。他们常常觉得自己毫无价值。但你不必担心这个问题，因为如果你从事足够雄心勃勃的项目，这个问题会自我解决。如果你在一个雄心勃勃的项目中取得成功，你就不再是一个无名小卒；你是那个完成了这个项目的人。所以，尽管去做工作，你的身份自会得到解决。 "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. “避免做作”是一个有用的原则，但你如何积极地表达这个想法呢？你会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，你不仅会避免做作，还会避免一整套类似的恶习。 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? 真诚的核心在于智力上的诚实。我们从小被教导诚实是一种无私的美德——是一种牺牲。但实际上，这也是一种力量的源泉。要看到新的想法，你需要对真相有异常敏锐的洞察力。你试图看到比其他人迄今为止所看到的更多的真相。如果你在智力上不诚实，怎么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] 避免知识不诚实的一种方法是保持轻微的正向压力。要积极地愿意承认自己错了。一旦你承认自己在某件事上是错误的，你就会感到自由。在那之前，你必须承受它。 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。非正式性比其语法上消极的名称所暗示的要重要得多。它不仅仅是缺少某种东西。它意味着关注重要的事物，而不是不重要的事物。 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. 形式主义和做作的共同点在于，在完成工作的同时，你还试图表现出某种样子。但任何投入到你看起来如何的精力，都是从做好工作中抽离出来的。这就是为什么书呆子在做出伟大工作时有优势的原因之一：他们在表现出任何样子上花费的精力很少。实际上，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. 书呆子们拥有一种天真的大胆，这正是你在做出伟大工作时所需要的。这不是后天学来的，而是从童年时期保留下来的。所以要珍惜它。要成为那个勇于表达自己的人，而不是那个坐在一旁对他人提出听起来很高深的批评的人。“批评很简单”在最字面意义上是正确的，而通往伟大工作的道路从来都不是容易的。 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. 有些工作可能会让愤世嫉俗和悲观成为优势，但如果你想做出伟大的工作，乐观会是一个优势，尽管这意味着你有时会冒着看起来像傻瓜的风险。古老的传统则是做相反的事情。旧约圣经说，保持沉默更好，以免看起来像个傻瓜。但那是为了看起来聪明的建议。如果你真的想发现新事物，冒险告诉人们你的想法会更好。 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] 有些人天生认真，而另一些人则需要有意识地努力。无论哪种认真都足够。但我怀疑如果不认真，就不可能做出伟大的工作。即使你很认真，这也很难做到。你没有足够的容错空间来适应因受影响、智力不诚实、正统、时尚或酷而引入的扭曲。 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. 伟大的工作不仅与执行者一致，也与其自身一致。它通常是一个整体。因此，如果在进行某项工作时面临决策，请问哪个选择更为一致。 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? 你可能需要扔掉一些东西并重新做。你不一定非得这样做，但你必须愿意去做。这可能需要一些努力；当你需要重新做某件事时，现状偏见和懒惰会结合在一起让你对此保持否认。要克服这一点，可以问自己：如果我已经做出了改变，我还会想要回到现在的状态吗？ 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. 要有信心去裁剪。不要因为你对某样东西感到自豪，或者因为它花费了你很多精力，就保留不合适的东西。 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，在某些工作中，将你所做的事情剥离到其本质是有益的。结果会更加集中；你会更好地理解它；你也无法对自己撒谎，是否真的存在什么。 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. 数学优雅听起来可能只是一个来自艺术的隐喻。这是我第一次听到“优雅”这个词用在证明上时的想法。但现在我怀疑它在概念上是更为基础的——艺术优雅的主要成分是数学优雅。无论如何，这都是一个超越数学的有用标准。 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. 优雅可能是一种长期的投资。然而，繁琐的解决方案在短期内往往更具声望。它们需要付出大量的努力，并且难以理解，这两点至少在短期内会给人留下深刻印象。 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. 有些最优秀的作品看起来似乎花费了相对较少的努力，因为在某种意义上，它们已经存在。它不需要被构建，只需要被发现。当你很难判断自己是在创造某样东西还是在发现它时，这是一种非常好的迹象。 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. 当你从事的工作可以被视为创造或发现时，倾向于发现。试着把自己看作是一个简单的通道，让思想自然成形。 (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，唯一的例外是选择一个问题进行研究。这通常被视为搜索，但在最佳情况下，它更像是创造某种东西。在最佳情况下，你在探索的过程中创造了这个领域。 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，如果你想要构建一个强大的工具，就要让它尽可能不受限制。强大的工具几乎可以定义为会以你意想不到的方式被使用，因此要倾向于消除限制，即使你不知道这样做的好处是什么。 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. 伟大的作品往往像工具一样，意味着它是其他人可以在其基础上构建的。因此，如果你正在创造他人可以使用的想法，或提出他人可以回答的问题，这就是一个好兆头。最好的想法在许多不同领域都有影响。 If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended. 如果你以最一般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，单靠真实是不够的。伟大的想法必须既真实又新颖。而且，即使在你学到了足够的知识，达到了知识的前沿，仍然需要一定的能力去看到新的想法。 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，我们将这种能力称为独创性、创造力和想象力。给它一个单独的名称似乎是合理的，因为在某种程度上它确实是一种独立的技能。一个人在其他方面可能有很强的能力——拥有通常所称的技术能力——但却可能在这方面并不出色。 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. 我从来不喜欢“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。原创思考者会对他们关注的事物不断产生新想法，就像角磨机喷出火花一样。他们无法控制。 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. 如果他们关注的事情是他们不太理解的，那么这些新想法可能并不好。我认识的一个最具原创性的思想家在离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解大致与普通 15 岁青少年相当，结果非常丰富多彩。但看到原创性与专业知识如此分离，使其本质更加清晰。 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，但肯定有方法可以充分利用你所拥有的任何原创性。例如，当你在做某件事情时，你更有可能产生原创想法。原创想法并不是通过试图产生原创想法而来的，而是通过试图构建或理解一些稍微困难的事物而产生的。 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。当你试图将想法用语言表达时，缺失的想法会产生一种真空，吸引它从你内心涌现出来。实际上，有一种思维方式只能通过写作来实现。 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] 改变你的环境可能会有所帮助。如果你去一个新地方，你会发现自己在那里有新的想法。旅程本身常常会激发这些想法。但你可能不需要走得太远就能获得这种好处。有时候，简单地散步就足够了。 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. 它还有助于在主题空间中旅行。如果你探索许多不同的主题，你会有更多的新想法，部分原因是这给角磨机提供了更多的表面积来工作，部分原因是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. 不要将注意力平均分配在多个主题上，否则你会分散精力。你应该根据类似于幂律的方式来分配注意力。对少数主题保持专业的好奇心，对更多主题保持随意的好奇心。 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. 好奇心和独创性密切相关。好奇心通过提供新的事物来激发独创性。但这种关系比这更紧密。好奇心本身就是一种独创性；它与问题的关系就像独创性与答案的关系。由于问题在最佳状态下是答案的重要组成部分，因此好奇心在最佳状态下是一种创造性力量。 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? 拥有新想法是一种奇怪的游戏，因为它通常是看到那些就在你眼前的事物。一旦你看到了一个新想法，它往往显得理所当然。为什么之前没有人想到这一点呢？ When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one. 当一个想法看起来既新颖又显而易见时，它可能是个好主意。 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似乎很简单。然而，从经验上看，产生新想法却很困难。这种明显矛盾的根源是什么？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又限制我们。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。这就是为什么新想法既显而易见又难以发现：在你做一些困难的事情之后，它们变得容易被看到。 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. 发现破碎模型的一种方法是比其他人更严格。世界的破碎模型在与现实碰撞时留下了一系列线索。大多数人不想看到这些线索。说他们依赖于当前的模型是轻描淡写的；这就是他们思考的方式；因此，他们往往会忽视其破裂所留下的线索，尽管从事后看来，这些线索可能显得非常明显。 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. 要寻找新想法，你必须抓住破裂的迹象，而不是视而不见。这正是爱因斯坦所做的。他能够看到麦克斯韦方程的狂野含义，并不是因为他在寻找新想法，而是因为他更加严格。 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. 你需要的另一件事是愿意打破规则。听起来矛盾，但如果你想修正你的世界观，成为一个乐于打破规则的人是有帮助的。从每个人，包括你最初共享的旧模型的角度来看，新模型通常会打破至少隐含的规则。 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规则突破程度，因为一旦新想法成功，它们看起来就显得更加保守。当你使用它们带来的新世界模型时，它们似乎是完全合理的。但在当时并非如此；即使在天文学家中，日心模型的普遍接受也花费了近一个世纪，因为它感觉是如此错误。 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. 确实，如果你仔细想想，一个好的新想法对大多数人来说必须看起来很糟糕，否则就会有人已经探索过它。因此，你要寻找的是那些看起来疯狂的想法，但是真正的疯狂。你如何识别这些想法？你无法确定。通常，看起来糟糕的想法确实是糟糕的。但那些真正疯狂的想法往往令人兴奋；它们蕴含丰富的意义；而那些仅仅糟糕的想法往往令人沮丧。 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. 有两种方式可以舒适地打破规则：享受打破规则的过程，或者对规则漠不关心。我将这两种情况称为积极和消极的独立思考。 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. 那些极具独立思维的人是顽皮的。规则不仅无法阻止他们；打破规则反而给他们带来额外的能量。对于这种人来说，项目的大胆构想有时足以提供启动所需的激活能量。 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法是不在乎它们，或者甚至知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和外部人士常常会有新的发现；他们对一个领域假设的无知成为了一种暂时的被动独立思考的源泉。我认识的几位阿斯伯格症患者似乎也对传统信念有一种免疫力。他们中的几位表示，这帮助他们产生新的想法。 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. 严格与破规听起来像是一个奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，它们是对立的。但在这方面，流行文化有一个破碎的模型。它隐含地假设问题是微不足道的，而在微不足道的事情上，严格与破规是对立的。但在真正重要的问题上，只有破规者才能真正做到严格。 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. 一个被忽视的想法往往不会在半决赛之前就被淘汰。你在潜意识中确实会看到它，但你潜意识的另一部分却会否定它，因为这会太奇怪、太冒险、太费力、太有争议。这暗示了一个令人兴奋的可能性：如果你能关闭这样的过滤器，你就能看到更多的新想法。 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. 一种方法是询问对他人来说有哪些好的想法可以探索。这样你的潜意识就不会为了保护你而否定它们。 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. 你也可以通过反向思考来发现被忽视的想法：从遮蔽它们的事物入手。每一个被珍视但错误的原则周围都有一个死区，里面充满了未被探索的有价值的想法，因为它们与之相矛盾。 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，其背后都将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种类型的发现。 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，人们对哪些原则过于执着，以至于可能并不像他们想的那样显而易见？如果你抛弃这些原则，会有什么可能性？ 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. 人们在解决问题时表现出更多的创造力，而不是在决定解决哪些问题时。即使是最聪明的人，在决定工作内容时也可能出乎意料地保守。那些在其他方面从未想过要追求时尚的人，反而会被吸引去研究时下流行的问题。 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. 人们在选择问题而非解决方案时更保守的一个原因是，问题的风险更大。一个问题可能会让你困扰多年，而探索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。他们不仅仅是在应对风险，还在迎合时尚。不受欢迎的问题往往被低估。 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. 一种最有趣的非时尚问题是人们认为已经被充分探索的问题，但实际上并没有。伟大的作品往往会将已经存在的事物展现出其潜在的可能性。杜勒和瓦特都做到了这一点。因此，如果你对一个别人认为已经没有潜力的领域感兴趣，不要让他们的怀疑动摇你。人们在这方面常常是错误的。 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. 处理一个不时髦的问题可能非常令人愉悦。没有炒作或急迫感。投机者和批评家都忙于其他事情。现有的工作往往具有老派的稳固性。在培养那些本可能被浪费的想法时，能感受到一种令人满意的经济感。 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. 但最常被忽视的问题并不是在时尚上显得过时。它只是看起来没有那么重要，实际上却非常重要。你如何找到这些问题？通过自我放纵——让你的好奇心自由发挥，暂时忽略你脑海中那个告诉你只应该关注“重要”问题的小声音。 You do need to work 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. 你确实需要关注重要问题，但几乎每个人对什么算是重要问题都过于保守。如果你所在的社区有一个重要但被忽视的问题，它可能已经在你的潜意识中引起了注意。所以试着问问自己：如果你要暂时从“严肃”的工作中抽身，去做一些仅仅因为它会非常有趣的事情，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. 选择问题的原创性似乎比解决问题的原创性更为重要。这就是区分那些发现全新领域的人的原因。因此，看似仅仅是初步步骤的决定工作方向，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. 很少有人理解这一点。关于新想法的一个最大误解是它们的构成中问题与答案的比例。人们认为伟大的想法是答案，但实际上真正的洞察力往往在于问题本身。 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. 我们低估问题的部分原因在于它们在学校中的使用方式。在学校中，问题往往只存在短暂的时间就被回答，就像不稳定的粒子。然而，一个真正好的问题可以远不止于此。一个真正好的问题是部分发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体落向地球的力量与保持行星在轨道上的力量是一样的吗？仅仅提出这样的问题，你就已经进入了令人兴奋的新领域。 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. 未解的问题可能是让人感到不适的负担。但你所承载的越多，发现解决方案的机会就越大——或者更令人兴奋的是，发现两个未解的问题其实是相同的。 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] 有时候你会长时间怀揣一个问题。伟大的作品往往源于回到你在多年前——甚至是童年时——首次注意到的问题，并且无法停止思考。人们常常谈论保持年轻梦想的重要性，但保持年轻问题的活力同样重要。 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. 这就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，专家是确定无疑的。但实际上，你越困惑越好，只要（a）你困惑的事情是重要的，并且（b）其他人也不理解这些事情。 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] 想想在一个新想法被发现的前一刻发生了什么。通常，某个具备足够专业知识的人会对某件事感到困惑。这意味着原创性部分源于困惑——即混乱！你必须对这个充满难题的世界感到足够舒适，以至于愿意去看待这些难题，但又不能舒适到不想去解决它们。 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. 拥有未解之问是件美好的事情。这正是一个富者愈富的情况，因为获取新问题的最佳方式是尝试回答现有的问题。问题不仅会引出答案，还会引出更多的问题。 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有一根线头突出，试着拉扯它，结果它变得越来越长。因此，不要要求一个问题在你尝试回答之前就显得明显重要。你很难预测这一点。即使是注意到那根线头也很困难，更不用说预测如果你拉扯它会解开多少。 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. 最好保持好奇心，去尝试很多不同的事物，看看会发生什么。大事都是从小事开始的。大事的初始版本往往只是实验、边项目或讨论，随后发展成更大的东西。所以，开始很多小项目。 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] 多产是被低估的。你尝试的事物越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。不过要明白，尝试很多事情意味着也会尝试很多不奏效的事情。你不可能有很多好主意而没有很多坏主意。 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. 尽管听起来更负责任的是先研究之前所做的一切，但通过尝试来学习会更快且更有趣。当你回顾之前的工作时，你也会更好地理解它。因此，倾向于开始。开始时从小做起会更容易；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. 如何从小开始做到伟大？通过不断迭代版本。伟大的事物几乎总是通过不断的版本演变而成。你从小事开始，逐步发展，最终的版本比你最初的计划更聪明、更雄心勃勃。 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. 在为人们制作某样东西时，快速推出初始版本并根据他们的反馈不断演变是特别有用的。 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. 首先尝试最简单的可能有效的事情。令人惊讶的是，这种方法往往有效。如果不行，这至少可以让你开始。 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过多的新内容。对于第一个版本，这种做法有一个名称（发货时间过长），而对于第二个版本则称为（第二系统效应），但这两者只是一个更一般原则的实例。 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视为玩具。当人们这样做时，这是一个好兆头。这意味着它具备了新想法所需的一切，除了规模，而规模往往会随之而来。 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的一种替代方案是提前规划你要做的事情。而规划通常看起来是更负责任的选择。说“我们将做 x，然后是 y，最后是 z”听起来比“我们将尝试 x，看看会发生什么”更有条理。确实更有条理；只是效果没有那么好。 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. 规划本身并不好。有时它是必要的，但它是一种必要的恶——对无情环境的反应。这是你必须做的事情，因为你在与不灵活的媒介打交道，或者因为你需要协调很多人的努力。如果你保持项目小型化并使用灵活的媒介，你就不必过多规划，你的设计可以随之演变。 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. 承担你能承受的风险。在一个有效的市场中，风险与回报成正比，因此不要寻求确定性，而是寻找具有高预期值的投资。如果你偶尔不失败，那你可能过于保守。 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相关，但年轻人往往会犯这个错误。缺乏经验使他们害怕风险，但正是在年轻时，你最能承受风险。 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. 即使是一个失败的项目也可以是有价值的。在这个过程中，你将跨越少有人涉足的领域，遇到少有人提出的问题。而在尝试做一些稍微困难的事情时，遇到的问题可能是最好的问题来源。 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. 在年轻时利用青春的优势，年长时利用年龄的优势。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. 年长者也有优势，他们知道自己拥有哪些优势。年轻人往往拥有这些优势却没有意识到。最大的优势可能就是时间。年轻人根本不知道他们在时间上是多么富有。将这段时间转化为优势的最佳方式是以稍微轻松的方式利用它：出于好奇去了解一些你不需要知道的事情，或者尝试建造一些仅仅因为它看起来很酷的东西，或者在某个领域变得异常出色。 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“稍微”是一个重要的限定。年轻时要奢侈地花时间，但不要简单地浪费时间。做一些你担心可能是浪费时间的事情和做一些你确定会浪费时间的事情之间有很大的区别。前者至少是一种赌注，可能比你想的更好。 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] 年轻的最微妙优势，或者更准确地说是缺乏经验的优势在于，你用新鲜的眼光看待一切。当你的大脑第一次接受一个想法时，有时这两者并不完全契合。通常问题出在你的大脑，但偶尔也出在这个想法上。它的某个部分显得格外突兀，让你在思考时感到刺痛。习惯了这个想法的人已经学会忽视它，但你有机会不这样做。 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件事情时，要注意那些看起来不对劲或缺失的东西。你可能会想要忽视它们，因为有 99%的可能性问题出在你自己身上。你可能需要暂时搁置你的疑虑以便继续进步。但不要忘记它们。当你对这个主题有了更深入的了解后，回过头来检查它们是否仍然存在。如果在你目前的知识背景下它们仍然合理，那么它们很可能代表着一个尚未被发现的想法。 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. 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. 但你不知道的只是缺乏经验问题的一半。另一半是你所知道的那些不正确的东西。你步入成年时，脑海中充满了无稽之谈——你养成的坏习惯和你所接受的错误观念——在你清除掉至少那些妨碍你想要从事的工作的无稽之谈之前，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. 你脑海中留下的许多无稽之谈都是学校造成的。我们对学校习以为常，以至于无意识地将上学视为学习的同义词，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观念。 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，学校会导致被动。自你还是小孩时，课堂前方就有一个权威在告诉你们必须学习什么，然后衡量你们是否学会了。但课堂和考试并不是学习的本质；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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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] 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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] 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. 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. 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. Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. 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. 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. 你怎么知道自己是否有足够优秀的同事？根据我的经验，当你有这样的同事时，你会知道。这意味着如果你不确定，可能就没有。但也许可以给出一个更具体的答案。以下是我的尝试：足够优秀的同事会提供令人惊讶的见解。他们能看到和做你无法做到的事情。因此，如果你有几位同事足够优秀，能够在这方面让你保持警觉，那么你可能已经达到了标准。 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] 大多数人都能从与同事的合作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人力，而启动这样的项目并不适合每个人。如果你想管理这样的项目，你就必须成为一名经理，而良好的管理能力和兴趣与其他工作一样重要。如果你没有这些能力，就没有中间道路：你要么强迫自己学习管理这门“第二语言”，要么避免这样的项目。 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. 提升你的士气。这是你在进行雄心勃勃的项目时一切的基础。你必须像对待一个活生生的有机体一样去培养和保护它。 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. 士气始于你对生活的看法。如果你是一个乐观主义者，你更有可能做出出色的工作；如果你认为自己是幸运的，而不是受害者，你也更有可能取得成功。 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。如果你选择的工作是纯粹的，那么它所带来的困难将成为你逃避日常生活困难的避风港。如果这是一种逃避主义，那它是一种非常富有成效的逃避方式，而且历史上许多伟大的思想家都曾使用过这种方式。 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. 士气通过工作相互影响：高士气帮助你做好工作，从而提高士气，帮助你做得更好。但这个循环也可以反向运作：如果你没有做好工作，这可能会让你感到沮丧，使得情况变得更加困难。因此，确保这个循环朝着正确的方向运转非常重要，当你陷入困境时，转向更简单的工作可能是个好主意，这样你就能开始完成一些任务。 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. 雄心勃勃的人常犯的一个最大错误就是让挫折瞬间摧毁他们的士气，就像气球爆炸一样。你可以通过明确将挫折视为你过程的一部分来为自己接种免疫。解决困难问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. 做好工作是一种深度优先搜索，其根节点是渴望。因此，“如果一开始你没有成功，就再试一次”并不完全正确。应该是：如果一开始你没有成功，要么再试一次，要么回溯再试一次。 "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”也不完全正确。显然，有时选择退出是正确的。更准确的说法是：永远不要让挫折让你过度退缩。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. 如果工作很艰难，这不一定是个坏兆头，就像跑步时气喘吁吁并不一定是坏事。这要看你跑得有多快。因此，要学会区分好的疼痛和坏的疼痛。好的疼痛是努力的标志；坏的疼痛则是受伤的迹象。 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. 观众是士气的一个关键组成部分。如果你是一名学者，你的观众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，观众可能是传统意义上的观众。无论哪种情况，观众的规模不需要很大。观众的价值并不会随着其规模的增加而线性增长。这对名人来说是个坏消息，但对刚起步的人来说是个好消息，因为这意味着一个小而专注的观众群体就足以支持你。如果少数人真正喜欢你所做的事情，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] 尽可能避免让中介介入你与观众之间。在某些类型的工作中，这是不可避免的，但逃离这种局面是如此解放，如果能够直接沟通，你可能更适合转向相邻的类型。 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. 你花时间与之相处的人也会对你的士气产生很大影响。你会发现，有些人能提升你的能量，而有些人则会降低它，而某人的影响并不总是你所预期的。寻找那些能提升你能量的人，避免那些降低你能量的人。当然，如果有需要你照顾的人，那是优先考虑的。 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. 不要嫁给一个不理解你需要工作的人的人，或者把你的工作视为争夺你注意力的竞争。如果你有抱负，你就需要工作；这几乎就像是一种病态；所以一个不让你工作的人，要么是不理解你，要么是理解但不在乎。 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，士气是身体的表现。你用身体思考，因此照顾好它非常重要。这意味着要定期锻炼，饮食和睡眠要良好，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。 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. 做出伟大工作的人的幸福感不一定比其他人更高，但他们的幸福感比起不做这些工作时要高。事实上，如果你聪明且有抱负，不去追求生产力是危险的。那些聪明且有抱负但成就不大的人往往会变得愤世嫉俗。 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. 想要给他人留下深刻印象是可以的，但要选择合适的人。你所尊重的人的意见是有价值的信号。而名声，即来自一个你可能尊重也可能不尊重的更大群体的意见，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，有时甚至完全错误。如果你把任何事情做得足够好，它就会变得有声望。因此，关于一种工作的提问不在于它有多大的声望，而在于它能做得多好。 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. 竞争可以是一个有效的激励因素，但不要让它为你选择问题；不要因为别人而被吸引去追逐某些东西。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，它比你更了解值得关注的事物。 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." 注意这个词出现的频率。如果你问一个神谕者做出伟大工作的秘密，而神谕者用一个单词回答，我的猜测是“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，而且你也无法强迫好奇心。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. 好奇心是做好工作的四个步骤的关键：它会为你选择领域，让你走向前沿，使你注意到其中的空白，并驱使你去探索这些空白。整个过程是一种与好奇心共舞的方式。 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，我尽量把这篇文章写得简短。但它的长度至少意味着它起到了过滤的作用。如果你能看到这里，你一定对做出出色的工作感兴趣。如果是这样，你已经比你想象的走得更远，因为愿意去做的人是少之又少的。 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在字面和数学意义上都是因素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。根据定义，运气是你无法控制的，因此我们可以忽略它。如果你确实想做出伟大工作，我们可以假设努力是存在的。因此，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，产生大量新想法吗？ 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。有很多不同的方式可以做出出色的工作，还有更多尚未被发现的方式。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，你最适合的那一份可能非常契合。可能是滑稽地契合。这只是一个寻找的问题，以及你的能力和兴趣能带你走多远。而你只能通过尝试来回答这个问题。 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. 更多人可能会尝试做伟大的工作，但实际上这样做的人并不多。阻碍他们的原因是谦逊和恐惧的结合。试图成为牛顿或莎士比亚似乎显得自以为是。这也似乎很困难；如果你尝试这样的事情，肯定会失败。可以推测，这种计算很少是明确的。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. 所以我打算给你来个小把戏。你想做出伟大的工作，还是不想？现在你必须做出有意识的决定。抱歉，我本不想对普通观众这样做。但我们已经知道你对此感兴趣。 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. 别担心会显得自以为是。你不必告诉任何人。如果这太难了，你失败了，那又怎么样？很多人面临的问题比这更糟。事实上，如果这是你面临的最糟糕的问题，你就算幸运了。 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。但再说一次，很多人都必须努力工作。如果你正在从事一些你觉得非常有趣的事情，而如果你走在正确的道路上，你必然会这样，那么这项工作可能会比你许多同龄人的工作感觉轻松得多。 The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you? 发现就在眼前，等待被发掘。为什么不由你来呢？ Notes [1] I don't think you could give a precise definition of what counts as great work. Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. But there's no threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree, and often hard to judge at the time anyway. So I'd rather people focused on developing their interests rather than worrying about whether they're important or not. Just try to do something amazing, and leave it to future generations to say if you succeeded. 我认为你无法给出一个精确的定义来说明什么算是伟大的工作。做伟大的工作意味着把某件重要的事情做到极致，从而拓展人们对可能性的想法。但重要性没有明确的标准。这是一个程度的问题，而且通常在当时很难判断。因此，我更希望人们专注于发展自己的兴趣，而不是担心它们是否重要。只需努力做一些令人惊叹的事情，把成功与否留给未来的世代来评判。 [2] A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha! 许多单口喜剧都是基于对日常生活中异常现象的观察。“你有没有注意到……？”新的想法往往来自于对一些不重要事物的这种观察。这或许可以解释为什么人们对新想法的反应通常是笑的前半部分：哈！ [3] That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited about something most authorities discount, but you can't give a more precise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're starting to drift into the territory of cranks. 第二个限定条件至关重要。如果你对某件大多数权威人士不屑一顾的事情感到兴奋，但你无法给出比“他们不懂”更准确的解释，那么你就开始漂移到怪人领域。 [4] Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible future versions of you. 找到一个可以工作的项目并不仅仅是将你当前的状态与已知问题列表进行匹配。你通常需要与问题共同进化。这就是为什么有时很难确定该做什么的原因。搜索空间是巨大的。它是所有可能工作类型的笛卡尔积，包括已知的和尚未发现的，以及你所有可能的未来版本。 There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have to rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be; different types of work have been collected together as much by accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them. 你不可能搜索整个空间，因此你必须依赖启发式方法来生成有前景的路径，并希望最佳匹配能够聚集在一起。但它们并不总是如此；不同类型的工作在很大程度上是由于历史的偶然性而被收集在一起，而不是它们之间的内在相似性。 [5] There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place. 好奇的人更有可能做出伟大工作的原因有很多，但其中一个更微妙的原因是，通过广泛探索，他们更有可能找到合适的工作方向。 [6] It can also be dangerous to make things for an audience you feel is less sophisticated than you, if that causes you to talk down to them. You can make a lot of money doing that, if you do it in a sufficiently cynical way, but it's not the route to great work. Not that anyone using this m.o. would care. 为一个你认为不如你成熟的观众制作内容可能也会很危险，如果这导致你对他们居高临下。如果你以足够愤世嫉俗的方式去做，这样可以赚很多钱，但这并不是通往伟大作品的道路。使用这种方式的人也不会在意。 [7] This idea I learned from Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any field. 我从哈代的《数学家的自白》中学到了这个观点，我推荐给任何有志于在任何领域做出伟大工作的人的阅读。 [8] Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years. 正如我们高估了自己一天能做的事情，低估了几年能做的事情，我们也高估了拖延一天所造成的损害，低估了拖延几年所造成的损害。 [9] You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want, especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side. Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight to get time to do it. 通常情况下，你无法通过做自己想做的事情来获得报酬，尤其是在早期阶段。你有两个选择：为接近你想做的工作获得报酬，并希望能逐渐靠近，或者为完全不同的事情获得报酬，同时在业余时间做自己的项目。这两种方式都可以奏效，但都有缺点：第一种方法默认情况下会妥协你的工作，而第二种方法则需要你争取时间去做。 [10] If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from. 如果你正确地安排生活，它将自动提供专注-放松的循环。完美的安排是一个你工作的办公室，并且你可以步行往返。 [11] There may be some very unworldly people who do great work without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to cover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except the best. 有些非常不世俗的人可能在没有刻意尝试的情况下做出伟大的工作。如果你想将这个规则扩展到这种情况，它变成了：不要试图成为除了最好的任何东西。 [12] This gets more complicated in work like acting, where the goal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to be affected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoid unintentional affectation. 这在表演等工作中变得更加复杂，因为目标是采用一个虚假的角色。但即使在这里，也可能受到影响。也许在这些领域的规则应该是避免无意的做作。 [13] It's safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionable if and only if they're also unfalsifiable. For example, it's safe to have the principle that everyone should be treated equally under the law, because a sentence with a "should" in it isn't really a statement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. And if there's no evidence that could disprove one of your principles, there can't be any facts you'd need to ignore in order to preserve it. 如果你的信念是不可质疑的，并且也是不可证伪的，那么拥有这样的信念是安全的。例如，人人在法律面前平等的原则是安全的，因为包含“应该”的句子并不是真正关于世界的陈述，因此很难被反驳。如果没有证据能够反驳你的某个原则，那么就不存在你需要忽视的事实来维持这个原则。 [14] Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty. Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw. 做作比智力不诚实更容易治愈。做作往往是年轻人的缺点，随着时间的推移会消失，而智力不诚实则更多是一种性格缺陷。 [15] Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact moment you have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairly recently. 显然，你不必在想到这个主意的那一刻就工作，但你可能最近刚刚在工作。 [16] Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects. 一些人说精神活性药物有类似的效果。我对此持怀疑态度，但对它们的效果几乎完全无知。 [17] For example you might give the nth most important topic (m-1)/m^n of your attention, for some m > 1. You couldn't allocate your attention so precisely, of course, but this at least gives an idea of a reasonable distribution. 例如，您可能会将第 n 个最重要的话题分配 (m-1)/m^n 的关注度，其中 m > 1。 当然，您无法如此精确地分配注意力，但这至少提供了一个合理分配的概念。 [18] The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken. Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else. 定义宗教的原则必须是错误的。否则，任何人都可能采纳这些原则，而宗教信徒与其他人之间就没有任何区别。 [19] It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're now in a position to do something about some of them. 列出你年轻时曾经好奇的问题可能是个不错的练习。你可能会发现，现在你有能力去解决其中的一些问题。 [20] The connection between originality and uncertainty causes a strange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certain than the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper hand in disputes, even though they're generally stupider. 原创性与不确定性之间的联系导致了一种奇怪的现象：因为传统思维的人比独立思维的人更有确定性，这往往使他们在争论中占据上风，尽管他们通常更愚蠢。 The best lack all conviction, while the worst[21] Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas." [21] 源自林纳斯·鲍林的“如果你想要好的想法，你必须有很多想法。” [22] Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking a statement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantial criticism can be made to stick. 将一个项目称为“玩具”的攻击方式类似于将一个声明称为“不恰当”的攻击。这意味着无法提出更具实质性的批评。 [23] One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than playing games where you don't. 判断你是否在浪费时间的一种方法是问自己是在创造还是在消费。编写电脑游戏比玩游戏更不容易浪费时间，而玩那些可以创造东西的游戏比玩那些不能创造东西的游戏更不容易浪费时间。 [24] Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anything publicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supports your earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieve eternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people, having previously published opinions has an effect similar to ideology, just in quantity 1. 另一个相关的优势是，如果你还没有公开发表任何言论，你就不会对支持你早期结论的证据产生偏见。凭借足够的诚信，你可以在这方面实现永恒的年轻，但很少有人能够做到。对于大多数人来说，之前发表的观点的影响类似于意识形态，只是在数量上为 1。 [25] In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted his own version to show how much better he was. 在 1630 年代初，丹尼尔·迈滕斯创作了一幅亨丽埃塔·玛丽亚将月桂花环递给查理一世的画作。范戴克随后绘制了自己的版本，以展示他更高超的技艺。 [26] I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As of this writing, being in the same physical place has advantages that are hard to duplicate, but that could change. [26] 我故意对“地方”这个概念保持模糊。截至目前，身处同一个物理空间有一些难以复制的优势，但这种情况可能会改变。 [27] This is false when the work the other people have to do is very constrained, as with SETI@home or Bitcoin. It may be possible to expand the area in which it's false by defining similarly restricted protocols with more freedom of action in the nodes. 当其他人需要做的工作受到严格限制时，这种说法是错误的，例如 SETI@home 或比特币。通过定义类似限制的协议并在节点中增加行动自由度，可能有可能扩大这种错误的适用范围。 [28] Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably a good idea. 推论：建立一种让人们绕过中介，直接与他们的受众互动的方式，可能是个好主意。 [29] It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, because that frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, and there is some historical evidence for it. 始终沿着相同的路线行走或跑步可能是有帮助的，因为这可以释放注意力用于思考。对我来说，确实是这样的，并且有一些历史证据支持这一点。 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Pam Graham, Tom Howard, Patrick Hsu, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Henry Lloyd-Baker, Bob Metcalfe, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, Courtenay Pipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts. |