 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. 如果你收集了许多不同领域的出色工作技巧清单，它们的交集会是什么样子？我决定通过制作一个清单来找出答案。 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." 部分是因为我的目标是创建一份可以被任何领域的人使用的指南。但我也对交集的形状感到好奇。而这个练习展示的一件事是，它确实有一个明确的形状；它不仅仅是一个标有“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壮志。 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：它必须是你天生擅长的，你对其有浓厚的兴趣，并且能够提供施展才华的空间。 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，你不必过多担心第三个标准。雄心勃勃的人对此通常已经过于保守了。所以你只需要找到自己有天赋和浓厚兴趣的事物即可。[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. 听起来很简单，但实际上往往很困难。当你年轻的时候，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不了解不同种类的工作是什么样子的。你最终从事的一些工作甚至可能还不存在。所以，虽然有些人在14岁就知道自己想做什么，但大多数人还需要弄清楚。 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. 找出要做什么的方法就是去做。如果你不确定要做什么，就猜一下。但是选择一个并开始行动。有时候你可能猜错，但没关系。了解多个领域是很好的，一些最重要的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. 养成自己做项目的习惯。不要让“工作”成为别人让你做的事情。如果有一天你能做出了出色的工作，那很可能是在自己的项目上。它可能是在一个更大的项目中，但你将是推动其中一部分的人。 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？无论什么对你来说都是令人兴奋和雄心勃勃的。随着你年龄的增长和对项目的品味的演变，兴奋和重要性将会融合在一起。在7岁时，用乐高搭建巨大的东西可能会让你感到兴奋和雄心勃勃，然后在14岁时自学微积分，直到21岁时开始探索物理学中未解之谜。但是始终保持兴奋感。 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. 有一种充满激动好奇心的力量，既是伟大工作的引擎，也是舵手。它不仅会驱使你前进，如果你任其发挥，还会指引你应该着手处理的事情。 What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. 你对什么事情过于好奇，好奇到大多数人都会觉得无聊的程度？那就是你正在寻找的东西。 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. 一旦你找到了自己过度感兴趣的事物，下一步就是学习足够的知识，让你能够接近知识的前沿。知识呈分形扩展，从远处看，边缘看起来很平滑，但一旦你学到足够接近其中一个边缘时，你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] 下一步是注意它们。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑希望忽略这些差距，以便对世界进行更简单的建模。许多发现都来自于对其他人视为理所当然的事情提出问题。[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. 如果答案看起来很奇怪，那就更好了。伟大的作品往往带有一丝奇异之感。从绘画到数学，你都能看到这一点。试图人为制造它会显得做作，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] 大胆追求与众不同的想法，即使其他人对它们不感兴趣——事实上，尤其是他们不感兴趣的时候。如果你对一些可能性感到兴奋，而其他人都忽视了它，而你有足够的专业知识来准确地指出他们所忽视的，那就是你能找到的最好的赌注。[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. 四个步骤：选择一个领域，学习足够到达前沿，注意到空白，探索有前途的领域。这是几乎每个做出伟大工作的人都采取的方式，无论是画家还是物理学家。 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. 第二步和第四步都需要努力工作。可能无法证明你必须努力工作才能取得伟大成就，但经验证据与死亡的证据一样重要。这就是为什么在你深感兴趣的事情上努力工作是至关重要的。兴趣会驱使你比单纯的勤奋更加努力地工作。 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. 最强大的动机有三个：好奇心、愉悦感和渴望做出令人印象深刻的事情。有时它们会融合在一起，而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. 大奖就是发现一个新的分形芽。你注意到知识表面上的裂缝，撬开它，里面有一个完整的世界。 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] 让我们再谈谈如何决定要从事什么样的工作这个复杂的问题。最主要的困难在于，除非亲自去做，否则你无法知道大多数工作是什么样子的。这意味着这四个步骤是相互重叠的：在你知道自己对某个工作的喜好程度或者自己在这个领域的能力有多强之前，你可能需要花上几年的时间去从事这个工作。而与此同时，你没有从事其他大部分类型的工作，也就无法学习到关于它们的知识。所以在最糟糕的情况下，你会基于非常不完整的信息做出迟钝的选择。[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. 野心的本质加剧了这个问题。野心有两种形式，一种是在对某个主题产生兴趣之前存在的，另一种是从兴趣中发展出来的。大多数做出伟大工作的人都有这两种混合，而前者越多，决定要做什么就越困难。 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都假装很简单。他们希望你在真正了解之前就对某个领域做出承诺。因此，一个有抱负的人在追求最佳轨迹时，往往会被系统视为一个破坏的例子。 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——如果他们承认这个系统不仅不能帮助你弄清楚应该做什么，而且是基于你在十几岁时会以某种魔法般的方式猜测的假设而设计的。他们不会告诉你，但我会告诉你：当涉及到确定应该做什么时，你是自己的。有些人运气好，猜对了，但其他人会发现自己在假设每个人都会的轨道上东奔西走。 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从事什么工作，你应该做什么呢？你不应该被动地漂流，期望问题会自行解决。你需要采取行动。但是，并没有一套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，你会惊讶地发现其中有多少运气的成分。他们通过偶然的相遇或者阅读一本碰巧拿起的书籍，找到了自己要从事的工作。所以，你需要让自己成为运气的大目标，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。[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. 当你有疑问时，优先追求有趣。随着对领域的了解越多，它们也会发生变化。举个例子，数学家所从事的工作与高中数学课堂上的工作非常不同。因此，你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会，让它们展示给你它们的特点。但是，随着你对一个领域的了解越多，它应该变得越来越有趣。如果不是这样，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. 如果你发现自己对不同的事物感兴趣，不要担心。你越是对有趣的事物有奇怪的品味，越好。奇怪的品味通常是强烈的，而对工作的强烈兴趣意味着你会更有生产力。如果你在少有人涉足的领域寻找，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. 有一种迹象表明你适合某种工作，那就是当你喜欢其他人觉得乏味或可怕的部分。 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. 但是领域不是人；你不需要对它们忠诚。如果在做一件事的过程中，你发现另一件更令人兴奋的事情，不要害怕转换方向。 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. 如果你为人们创造某样东西，请确保它是他们真正想要的。最好的方法就是创造你自己想要的东西。写下你想阅读的故事；打造你想使用的工具。由于你的朋友们可能有相似的兴趣，这也将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] 这应该遵循令人兴奋的规则。显然，最令人兴奋的故事写起来将是你想要阅读的故事。我之所以明确提到这种情况，是因为很多人都搞错了。他们不是按照自己的意愿去创作，而是试图迎合一些想象中更有见识的观众的需求。一旦你走上这条路，就会迷失方向。[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. 当你试图确定要从事什么工作时，有许多力量会使你迷失方向。自负、时尚、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、显赫的骗子。但是，如果你坚持追求自己真正感兴趣的事物，你将能够抵御它们的影响。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. 遵循自己的兴趣听起来可能是一种相对被动的策略，但在实践中，它通常意味着要克服各种障碍来追随它们。你通常需要冒险面对拒绝和失败。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. 但是虽然你需要勇气，通常不需要太多的计划。在大多数情况下，做出优秀工作的秘诀很简单：努力地投入到令人兴奋的雄心勃勃的项目中，好的结果自然会出现。与其制定计划然后执行，你只需要努力保持某些不变的因素。 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. 计划的问题在于它只适用于你能事先描述的成就。你可以通过在小时候决定并坚持不懈地追求这个目标来赢得金牌或致富，但你不能用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优秀工作的人来说，正确的策略不是过多地计划。在每个阶段，做任何看起来最有趣并为未来提供最佳选择的事情。我称之为“顺风而行”的方法。这似乎是大多数做出优秀工作的人所采取的方式。 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. 即使你找到了一件令人兴奋的工作，但并不意味着一切都会一帆风顺。有时候，某个新的想法会让你早上一跃而起，立刻开始工作。但也会有很多时候，事情并不如此顺利。 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. 你不能只是张开帆，任由灵感把你推向前方。在前进的路上会有逆风、洋流和隐藏的浅滩。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，但是工作过度也是有可能的，如果你这样做，你会发现收益递减：疲劳会让你变得愚蠢，最终甚至会损害你的健康。工作产生收益递减的临界点取决于类型。其中一些最艰难的类型，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。在你能够的范围内，尽量安排你的生活，让你有大块的时间来工作。如果你知道可能会被打断，你会回避艰难的任务。 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. 开始工作可能比继续工作更困难。你经常需要欺骗自己来克服这个最初的门槛。不要担心，这是工作的本质，而不是你个人的缺陷。工作有一种活化能，每天和每个项目都有。由于这个门槛是虚假的，因为它比继续工作所需的能量更高，所以告诉自己一个相应大小的谎言来克服它是可以的。 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. 如果你想做出优秀的工作，自欺欺人通常是一个错误，但这是一个罕见的例外。当我早上不情愿开始工作时，我经常通过说“我只是看看我到目前为止做了什么”来欺骗自己。五分钟后，我就会发现一些看起来错误或不完整的地方，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开始新项目。比如，对于一个项目需要多少工作量，你可以对自己撒谎。很多伟大的事情都是从有人说“有多难呢？”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案例。他们更加乐观，尽管他们的乐观主要源自无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时能战胜知识。 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，即使它比你预期的工作量要大。完成事情不仅仅是一种整洁或自律的锻炼。在许多项目中，很多最好的工作都发生在原本预计的最后阶段。 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] 另一种可以接受的谎言是夸大你所从事的工作的重要性，至少在你自己的心中如此。如果这能帮助你发现新的东西，最终可能会证明并不是谎言。[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] 由于工作有每天和每个项目两种开始的方式，所以也有两种拖延的形式。每个项目的拖延是更加危险的。你一年又一年地推迟开始那个雄心勃勃的项目，因为时机还不够成熟。当你以年为单位拖延时，你会发现自己什么都没做成。[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. 每个项目拖延的一个危险之处在于，它通常伪装成工作。你不只是闲坐着什么都不做，而是在勤奋地做其他事情。因此，每个项目的拖延并不像每天的拖延那样引起警觉。你太忙了，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] 战胜它的方法是偶尔停下来问自己：我是在做我最想做的事情吗？当你年轻的时候，如果答案有时是否定的，那也没关系，但随着年龄的增长，这种情况变得越来越危险。[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. 出色的工作通常需要花费大量时间来解决问题，这对大多数人来说可能看起来是不合理的。你不能把这段时间看作是一种成本，否则它会显得太高。你必须在工作进行时找到足够吸引人的乐趣。 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. 也许有些工作需要你在讨厌的事情上勤奋工作多年，然后才能享受到美好的部分，但这并不是伟大工作的方式。伟大的工作是通过持续专注于你真正感兴趣的事情而发生的。当你停下来回顾时，你会惊讶地发现自己已经走了很远。 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是我们低估了工作的累积效应。每天写一页看起来并不多，但如果你每天都这样做，一年下来你就能写一本书。这就是关键：坚持不懈。做伟大事情的人并不是每天完成很多工作，而是做了一些事情，而不是什么都没做。 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. 如果你做的工作能够累积，你将会获得指数级的增长。大多数人在做这种工作时是无意识的，但值得停下来思考一下。学习就是一个例子：你学习得越多，学习新知识就会变得更容易。吸引观众也是如此：你拥有的粉丝越多，他们就会带来更多新的粉丝。 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一开始时曲线看起来很平缓。实际上，它并不平缓，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，因此我们低估了指数增长在早期阶段的重要性。 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东西可能变得非常有价值，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，这也大多是无意识的：人们会推动自己度过学习新事物的最初无回报阶段，因为他们从经验中知道学习新事物总是需要一次初步推动，或者他们会一位粉丝接一位粉丝地扩大自己的受众，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增长，那么会有更多人这样做。 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. 工作并不仅仅发生在你有意识地努力时。当你散步、洗澡或躺在床上时，会有一种无目标的思考方式，它可以非常有效。通过稍微让思绪飘散，你经常能够解决那些无法通过正面攻击解决的问题。 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] 要从这种现象中受益，你必须以正常的方式努力工作。不能只是漫无目的地游荡。白日梦必须与有意识的工作交替进行，以提供问题。[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时要避免分心，但同样重要的是在另一半时间也要避免分心。当你让思绪漫游时，它会游向你当下最关心的事情。因此，要避免那种会让工作排在次要位置的分心，否则你会把这种宝贵的思考时间浪费在分心上。（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. 有意识地培养你对所从事领域的品味。直到你知道什么是最好的，以及它的优点所在，你才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] 这就是你的目标，因为如果你不努力成为最好的，你甚至都不会变得好。这个观察已经被很多不同领域的人提出过，或许值得思考为什么它是真实的。可能是因为雄心壮志是一个几乎所有错误都朝一个方向倾斜的现象——几乎所有未能达到目标的炮弹都是因为落得太短。或者可能是因为追求成为最好与追求变得好是两种质量上不同的事情。或者也许变得好只是一个过于模糊的标准。可能这三个都是真实的。[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，在这里存在一种规模经济。虽然试图成为最好可能会让你感到负担沉重，但实际上你往往会得到更多。这是令人兴奋的，也是一种奇妙的解放。它简化了事情。在某种程度上，努力成为最好的比仅仅努力做好要容易一些。 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. 有一个办法是努力创造一些百年后人们仍然关心的东西。不是因为他们的观点比你的同时代人更重要，而是因为百年后仍然被认为是好的东西更有可能真正优秀。 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。只需尽力做好工作，你无法避免以独特的方式完成它。 Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation. 风格是以独特的方式做事，而不是刻意去做。刻意去做就是虚伪。 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] 做作就是假装别人在做工作。你采用了一个令人印象深刻但虚假的人设，虽然你对这种令人印象深刻感到满意，但虚假性在工作中显露出来。[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. 对年轻人来说，成为别人的诱惑最大。他们常常觉得自己无足轻重。但你不必担心这个问题，因为只要你从事足够雄心勃勃的项目，这个问题就会自然解决。如果你成功完成了一个雄心勃勃的项目，你就不再是无足轻重的人；你就是那个做到了的人。所以，只要努力工作，你的身份就会自然而然地得到体现。 "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”是一个有用的准则，但是如何积极地表达这个观念呢？你会如何说出要成为什么，而不是不要成为什么？最好的答案是真诚。如果你真诚，不仅能避免做作，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? 认真的核心是在于保持智诚。我们从小就被教导要诚实，将其视为一种无私的美德，一种牺牲。但实际上，诚实也是一种力量的源泉。要看到新的观点，你需要对真相有异常敏锐的洞察力。你试图看到比他人更多的真相。而如果你在智诚上不诚实，又怎能拥有敏锐的洞察力呢？ 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在相反的方向上保持轻微的正压力。积极主动地愿意承认自己的错误。一旦你承认自己在某件事上错了，你就自由了。在那之前，你必须承担它。[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。非正式远比其语法上的负面含义更重要。它不仅仅是某种东西的缺失。它意味着关注重要的事情而不是无关紧要的事情。 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. 形式和做作之间的共同点在于，除了完成工作之外，你还试图在做的过程中展现出某种形象。但是，任何用于展现自己的精力都会削弱你的能力。这就是为什么书呆子在做出伟大的工作时具有优势的一个原因：他们几乎不费力地去追求外表。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. 书呆子们有一种天真大胆的特质，这正是你在做出伟大工作时所需要的。这不是学来的，而是从童年时代保留下来的。所以要坚持下去。成为那个敢于付诸行动的人，而不是坐在一旁对事物提出看似复杂的批评的人。"批评容易"在最字面的意义上是正确的，而通往伟大工作的道路从来都不容易。 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. 在某些工作中，持怀疑和悲观态度可能是一种优势，但如果你想做出伟大的工作，乐观态度是一种优势，即使这意味着有时候你会冒险看起来像个傻瓜。有一个古老的传统是做相反的事情。旧约圣经说最好保持沉默，以免看起来像个傻瓜。但这是为了显得聪明。如果你真的想要发现新事物，最好冒险告诉别人你的想法。 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] 有些人天生就是认真的，而对于其他人来说，需要有意识地努力。无论哪种认真都足够了。但我怀疑如果不认真，就不可能做出伟大的工作。即使你是认真的，这也是如此困难。你没有足够的错误余地来容纳受影响、知识不诚实、墨守成规、追求时尚或追求潮流所引入的扭曲。[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. 伟大的工作不仅与执行者本身一致，也与自身一致。通常都是一个整体。因此，如果你在做某事的过程中面临一个决策，就问问哪个选择更加一致。 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开始。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；当你需要重新做某事时，现状偏见和懒惰会合力让你对此保持否认态度。要战胜这种情况，请问自己：如果我已经做出了改变，我是否希望回到现在的状态？ 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. 有信心剪掉。不要因为你为之自豪，或者花了很多心血而留下不合适的东西。 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，将你所做的事情简化到其本质是很好的。结果会更加集中；你会更好地理解它；而且你将无法对自己是否存在真实性进行欺骗。 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从艺术中借来的一个隐喻。当我第一次听到“优雅”这个词用来描述一个证明时，我就是这么想的。但现在我怀疑数学的优雅在概念上更为重要——艺术的优雅的主要成分就是数学的优雅。无论如何，这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. 优雅可能是一个长期的赌注。费力的解决方案通常在短期内更有声望。它们需要付出很多努力，也很难理解，这两点至少会给人留下印象，即使只是暂时的。 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. 尽管一些最好的作品似乎轻而易举，因为它们在某种程度上已经存在。它们不需要被建造，只需要被发现。当你很难说你是在创造还是在发现某样东西时，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. 当你在做一项既可以被视为创造又可以被视为发现的工作时，倾向于选择发现。试着将自己看作是一个纯粹的媒介，让思想自然地展现出它们的形态。 (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，选择要解决的问题的问题是一个例外。通常被视为搜索，但在最好的情况下更像是创造。在最好的情况下，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. 同样地，如果你想要打造一个强大的工具，就让它毫无限制地自由发挥。一个强大的工具几乎可以说是以你意想不到的方式被使用，所以在消除限制方面要偏向于错误，即使你不知道其中的好处会是什么。 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. 伟大的工作往往像工具一样，是其他人建立在其基础上的东西。因此，如果你能创造出其他人可以使用的想法，或者提出其他人可以回答的问题，那就是一个好兆头。最好的想法在许多不同领域都有深远的影响。 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，它们会比你预期的更真实。 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. 单单真实是不够的，当然。伟大的想法必须既真实又新颖。而且，即使你已经学到了足够的知识，达到了知识前沿，也需要一定的能力去发现新的想法。 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。给它一个单独的名字似乎是合理的，因为它在某种程度上确实是一种独立的技能。在其他方面可能具备很高的能力，通常被称为“技术能力”，但在这方面可能并不多。 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“创造过程”这个词。它似乎有误导性。独创性不是一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。具有独创思维的人会不断产生关于他们关注的事物的新想法，就像一个角磨机会发出火花一样。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了解的，这些新想法可能不会很好。我认识的最有创意的思想家之一，在离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解大致与一个15岁的普通人相当，结果非常丰富多彩。但是，看到原创性与专业知识分离，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] 我不知道是否可能培养独创性，但肯定有办法充分利用你所拥有的独创性。例如，当你在做某件事情时，你更有可能产生独创的想法。独创的想法并不是通过试图产生独创的想法而得到的，而是通过试图构建或理解一些稍微困难的事物而得到的。[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. 谈论或写下你感兴趣的事情是产生新想法的好方法。当你试图用文字表达想法时，一个缺失的想法会产生一种真空，将其从你内心中抽出。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] 改变你的环境可以有所帮助。如果你去一个新地方，通常会发现你在那里有新的想法。旅程本身常常能够激发这些想法。但是你可能不需要走得太远才能获得这种好处。有时候，只是出去散散步就足够了。[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. 它还有助于在话题空间中旅行。如果你探索许多不同的话题，你会有更多新的想法，部分原因是因为这给了角磨机更多的表面积来工作，部分原因是因为类比是新想法的特别丰富的源泉。 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. 不要把你的注意力平均分配在很多话题上，否则你会变得过于分散。你应该根据某种类似于幂律的分布来分配它。对于一些话题要保持专业上的好奇心，对于更多的话题则可以保持随意的好奇心。 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。好奇心通过提供新事物给独创性提供了养料。但这种关系更为紧密。好奇心本身就是一种独创性；它大致上对应于问题，就像独创性对应于答案一样。而且，由于问题在最佳状态下是答案的重要组成部分，最佳状态下的好奇心是一种创造力的力量。 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? 拥有新的想法是一种奇怪的游戏，因为它通常包括看到一些一直在你眼前的事物。一旦你看到一个新的想法，它往往会显得很明显。为什么以前没有人想到这个呢？ When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one. 当一个想法既新颖又显而易见时，它很可能是一个好主意。 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. 看到一些显而易见的事情听起来很简单。然而，从经验上讲，产生新的想法却很困难。这种明显的矛盾的根源是什么？那就是看到新的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，这些模型既有助于我们，又限制了我们。当你修复一个错误的模型时，新的想法就变得显而易见。但是注意到并修复一个错误的模型却很困难。这就是为什么新的想法既显而易见又难以发现的原因：在你做一些困难的事情之后，它们变得容易看到。 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. 发现破碎的模式之一就是比其他人更严格。破碎的世界模式会在与现实碰撞的地方留下线索。大多数人不愿意看到这些线索。可以说他们对当前的模式有着极强的依赖性；这是他们的思维方式；因此，他们往往会忽视被破碎模式留下的线索，无论这些线索在回顾时看起来多么明显。 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. 要找到新的想法，你必须抓住破裂的迹象，而不是视而不见。这就是爱因斯坦所做的。他能够看到麦克斯韦方程的狂野含义，不仅仅是因为他在寻找新的想法，更因为他更加严格。 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。听起来有些矛盾，但如果你想修正你对世界的模型，成为那种习惯于打破规则的人会有所帮助。从旧模型的角度来看，包括你在内的每个人最初都会共享这个观点，新模型通常至少会打破一些隐含的规则。 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. 很少有人理解到需要多大程度的违规行为，因为一旦新的想法取得成功，它们似乎更加保守。一旦你开始使用它们带来的新世界模式，它们看起来就非常合理。但在当时并非如此；直到大部分一个世纪过去，日心说模型才被广泛接受，即使在天文学家中也是如此，因为它感觉是错误的。 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，如果你仔细思考一下，一个好的新想法必须对大多数人来说似乎是不好的，否则早就有人去探索了。所以你要寻找的是那些看起来疯狂，但是是正确类型的疯狂的想法。你如何辨别这些想法呢？你无法确定。通常，看起来不好的想法确实是不好的。但是那些正确类型的疯狂想法往往令人兴奋，它们富含深远的意义；而那些仅仅是不好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：享受打破规则和对规则漠不关心。我称这两种情况为积极和消极地独立思考。 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. 那些极具独立思想的人往往是调皮捣蛋的。规则不仅无法阻止他们，反而会激发他们更多的能量。对于这类人来说，对一个项目的大胆冒险感到愉悦有时足以激发足够的能量来启动它。 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. 打破规则的另一种方式是不在乎它们，甚至可能不知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和外行经常会做出新的发现；他们对某个领域的假设的无知充当了一种暂时的被动独立思考的源泉。阿斯伯格人似乎也对传统信念有一种免疫力。我认识的几个人说这有助于他们产生新的想法。 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. 严格加上违规听起来像是一种奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，它们是对立的。但是在这方面，流行文化有一个错误的模式。它隐含地假设问题是琐碎的，而在琐碎的事情上，严格和违规是对立的。但是在真正重要的问题上，只有违规者才能真正严格。 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. 一个被忽视的想法通常直到半决赛才会输掉。你在潜意识中确实看到了它，但是你的另一部分潜意识却否定了它，因为它太奇怪、太冒险、太费力、太有争议。这暗示了一个令人兴奋的可能性：如果你能关闭这些过滤器，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. 有一种方法是询问别人有什么好的想法可以探索。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. 你也可以通过从相反的方向开始，发现被忽视的想法：从遮蔽它们的东西开始。每个珍视但错误的原则都被一片未被探索的有价值的想法所包围，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] 宗教是一系列珍视但错误的原则。因此，任何可以被字面或隐喻地描述为宗教的东西都会在其背后拥有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。[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? 在你所从事的领域，人们对什么事情有宗教般的执着，即对某些原则过于依赖，而这些原则可能并不像他们想象的那样不言自明？如果你放弃这些原则，会有什么可能性呢？ 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. 人们在解决问题上比决定要解决哪些问题更具创意。即使是最聪明的人，在决定要从事哪个问题时也会出人意料地保守。那些在其他方面从不追求时尚的人也会被卷入追求时髦问题的工作中。 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。一个问题可能会占据你几年的时间，而探索解决方案可能只需要几天。但即便如此，我认为大多数人还是太保守了。他们不仅仅是在回应风险，也在回应时尚。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. 最有趣的一种不时髦的问题之一，就是人们认为已经被充分探索过的问题，实际上并没有。伟大的工作往往是将已有的东西发挥出潜在的潜力。杜勒尔和瓦特都做到了这一点。所以，如果你对一个被他人认为已经被挖掘干净的领域感兴趣，不要让他们的怀疑阻止你。人们对此经常是错误的。 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. 从事一个不时髦的问题可以非常令人愉悦。没有炒作或匆忙。机会主义者和批评家都在忙于其他事情。现有的工作通常具有老派的稳定性。而且培养那些本来会被浪费的想法，会带来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. 但最常见的被忽视的问题类型并不是指在时尚意义上过时。它只是似乎没有那么重要，实际上却非常重要。你如何发现这些问题呢？通过放纵自己——让好奇心驱使你，至少暂时地忽略那个告诉你只应该解决“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. 你确实需要解决重要的问题，但几乎每个人对于什么问题算得上重要都过于保守。如果在你的社区中有一个重要但被忽视的问题，那么它很可能已经在你的潜意识中引起了注意。所以试着问问自己：如果你要从“严肃”的工作中休息一下，去做一些只是因为它非常有趣的事情，你会做什么？答案可能比它看起来的重要得多。 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. 在选择问题上的独创性似乎比解决问题的独创性更重要。这就是区分那些发现全新领域的人的关键所在。因此，看似只是起步阶段的决定要从事什么工作，实际上是整个游戏的关键。 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. 很少有人能理解这一点。关于新想法的最大误解之一是关于问题与答案在其构成中的比例。人们认为伟大的想法是答案，但实际上真正的洞见往往在于问题本身。 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是它们在学校中的使用方式。在学校里，问题往往只存在很短的时间，就像不稳定的粒子一样。但是一个真正好的问题可以远远超过这个范畴。一个真正好的问题是一个部分的发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体落地的力和使行星保持轨道的力是相同的吗？仅仅通过提出这样的问题，你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. 未解答的问题可能是让人感到不舒服的东西。但是你越是承载着这些问题，就越有可能注意到一个解决方案——或者更令人兴奋的是，注意到两个未解答的问题是相同的。 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] 有时候你会长时间地思考一个问题。伟大的工作往往源于多年前你第一次注意到的问题，甚至是在你的童年时期，而且一直无法停止思考。人们经常谈论保持年轻时梦想的重要性，但同样重要的是保持年轻时的问题活跃。[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对其的普遍印象最不同的地方之一。在大众印象中，专家总是确定无疑的。但实际上，你越是感到困惑，越好，只要（a）你困惑的事情很重要，（b）其他人也不理解它们。 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] 想一想在一个新想法被发现之前的那一刻发生了什么。通常情况下，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地包含了困惑——混乱！你必须对世界充满谜题感到足够舒适，愿意去发现它们，但又不能太舒适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. 拥有未解之谜是一件很棒的事情。而这正是那种富人越富的情况，因为获取新问题的最佳方式就是尝试回答现有的问题。问题不仅仅引导我们找到答案，还会带来更多的问题。 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突出的一条线索，试着拉扯它，结果它变得越来越长。所以在尝试回答之前，不要要求问题显然很大。你很少能预测到这一点。甚至要注意到这条线索已经很困难，更不用说预测如果你拉扯它会有多少东西解开。 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. 最好是有点好奇心，随意地去拉扯很多线索，看看会发生什么。大事情从小事情开始。大事情的最初版本通常只是实验、或者是副业、或者是演讲，然后逐渐发展成为更大的事情。所以要开始很多小事情。 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] 多产是被低估的。你尝试的事情越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。不过要明白，尝试很多事情也意味着会尝试很多行不通的事情。你不能有很多好点子而没有很多坏点子。[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. 虽然听起来更负责任的做法是先研究之前的所有工作，但通过尝试不同的方法，你会更快地学习并且更有乐趣。当你确实需要查看之前的工作时，你会更好地理解它。所以，在开始的时候，尽量选择开始。而当开始意味着从小处开始时，这两个想法就像两个拼图一样完美契合。 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. 如何从小事做到伟大的事情？通过不断推出新版本。伟大的事情几乎总是通过不断推出新版本来完成的。你从一些小事开始，并逐渐发展，最终的版本比你原先计划的更聪明、更有野心。 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. 当你为人们制作某物时，制作连续版本尤为有用——快速将初始版本呈现给他们，并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. 从尝试可能最简单的方法开始。令人惊讶的是，很多时候它确实有效。如果不行，至少这会让你有个起点。 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内容。对于第一个版本来说，这样做有一个名字（花费太长时间才能发布），对于第二个版本来说，这样做也有一个名字（第二系统效应），但这两者只是更一般原则的具体例子而已。 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当作玩具而被忽视。当人们这样做时，这是一个好兆头。这意味着它具备了一个新想法所需的一切，只是缺乏规模，而这往往会随之而来。[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. 与从小事开始并逐步发展的方式相比，另一种选择是事先计划好要做的事情。计划通常似乎是更负责任的选择。说“我们要做x，然后做y，再做z”听起来更有条理，而不是说“我们要尝试x，看看会发生什么。”这样做更有条理，只是效果不如前者好。 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. 计划本身并不是好事。有时候是必要的，但它是一种必要的恶，是对无情条件的回应。这是你必须做的事情，因为你在使用不灵活的媒体，或者因为你需要协调很多人的努力。如果你把项目保持小规模，并使用灵活的媒体，你就不需要做太多的计划，你的设计可以逐步发展。 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. 尽量承担你能够承受的风险。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，而是寻找具有高预期价值的赌注。如果你偶尔不失败，那你可能过于保守了。 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，但年轻人往往会犯这个错误。缺乏经验使他们害怕冒险，但正是在年轻时你才能承担最多的风险。 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. 即使一个项目失败了，它也是有价值的。在进行项目的过程中，你会经历很少有人见过的领域，并遇到很少有人提出的问题。而在尝试做一些稍微困难的事情时，没有比这更好的问题来源了。 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. 当你年轻时，要充分利用年轻的优势；当你年长时，要善用年长的优势。年轻的优势包括活力、时间、乐观和自由；年长的优势则是知识、高效、财富和权力。努力奋斗，年轻时可以获得一些后者的优势，并在年老时保持一些前者的优势。 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. 老年人也有知道自己有哪些优势的优势。年轻人常常拥有这些优势却没有意识到。其中最大的优势可能是时间。年轻人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好方式是以稍微轻浮的方式利用它：去了解一些你不需要了解的事情，只是出于好奇，或者尝试建造一些酷炫的东西，或者成为某个领域的超级高手。 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”是一个重要的限定词。年轻时可以挥霍时间，但不要简单地浪费它。在做一些你担心可能是浪费时间的事情和做一些你确信会浪费时间的事情之间有很大的区别。前者至少是一个赌注，可能比你想象的更好。[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] 年轻的最微妙的优势，或者更准确地说是缺乏经验，就是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，有时两者并不完美地契合。通常问题出在你的大脑，但偶尔也可能是想法本身的问题。其中一部分突兀地凸出来，让你在思考时感到刺痛。习惯于这个想法的人已经学会忽略它，但你有机会不这样做。[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个东西时，要注意那些看起来不对或者缺失的地方。你可能会有忽略它们的冲动，因为99%的情况下问题出在你自己身上。而且为了继续进步，你可能不得不暂时搁置自己的疑虑。但是不要忘记它们。当你对这个主题有了更深入的了解后，回过头来检查一下它们是否还存在。如果它们在你现有的知识光下仍然有价值，那么它们很可能代表了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不必担心什么。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。因此，他们对一切都同样担心，而实际上他们应该更加关注一些事情，对其他事情几乎不用担心。 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的问题的一半。另一半是你所知道的那些并不正确的东西。当你成年时，你的头脑里充满了无意义的东西——你养成的坏习惯和你被教导的错误观念——只有当你至少清除掉与你想要从事的工作相关的无意义的东西，你才能做出伟大的工作。 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. 你脑子里的许多废话都是学校留下的。我们对学校已经习以为常，不知不觉地把上学等同于学习，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理念。 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，学校会导致被动学习。从你还是个小孩子的时候起，就有一个权威人物站在教室前面告诉你们所有人你们必须学习什么，然后衡量你们是否学会了。但是课程和考试并不是学习的本质，它们只是学校通常设计的产物。 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. 越早克服这种被动性越好。如果你还在上学，试着把你的教育看作是你的项目，把你的老师看作是为你工作而不是相反。这可能听起来有点牵强，但这不仅仅是一种奇怪的思想实验。从经济上讲，这是事实，而且在最好的情况下，这也是知识上的真理。最好的老师不想成为你的上司。他们更希望你能向前推进，把他们当作建议的来源，而不是被他们拉着学习。 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. 学校也会给你一种错误的工作印象。在学校里，他们告诉你问题是什么，并且几乎总是可以用你目前所学的知识解决。而在现实生活中，你必须弄清楚问题是什么，而且你经常不知道它们是否可解决。 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. 但也许学校对你最糟糕的事情就是训练你通过作弊来赢得考试。你不能通过这样做来做出伟大的工作。你无法欺骗上帝。所以停止寻找那种捷径。战胜体制的方法是专注于别人忽视的问题和解决方案，而不是节省工作本身。 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. 不要把自己看作是依赖某个门槛守卫者给你一个“机会”的人。即使这是真的，获得机会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. 不要对委员会的拒绝太过在意。给招生官员和奖项评审委员会留下深刻印象的品质与做出出色工作所需的品质是完全不同的。选择委员会的决定只有在它们作为反馈循环的一部分时才具有意义，而这种情况非常罕见。 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. 刚接触某个领域的人通常会模仿现有的作品。这本身并没有什么不好的。没有比试图复制它来学习某样东西的工作方式更好的方法了。而且，复制并不一定意味着你的作品缺乏原创性。原创性是新思想的存在，而不是旧思想的缺失。 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] 有一种好的复制方式和一种不好的方式。如果你要复制某样东西，就要公开地复制，而不是偷偷摸摸地，更不要无意识地复制。这就是那句被错误归属的名言“伟大的艺术家偷窃”的意思。真正危险的复制方式，是那种无意识地进行的复制，因为你只是一辆沿着别人铺设的轨道行驶的火车。但在另一方面，复制也可以是优越而不是屈从的标志。[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，你的早期工作几乎不可避免地在某种程度上基于他人的工作。项目很少是孤立存在的，它们通常是对先前工作的反应。当你刚开始时，你没有任何先前的工作；如果你要做出反应，那就必须是别人的工作。一旦你建立起自己的地位，你就可以对自己的工作做出反应。但是，尽管前者被称为衍生作品，而后者不是，从结构上看，这两种情况比它们看起来更相似。 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，最新颖的想法的新奇性有时会让它们一开始看起来比它们实际上更像是衍生物。新的发现通常在最初被发现者构思时，必须被看作是现有事物的变体，因为还没有概念性的词汇来表达它们。 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. 抄袭确实存在一些危险。其中之一是你往往会抄袭一些陈旧的东西——那些在它们的时代曾是知识前沿，但现在已经不再是了。 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. 当你复制某样东西时，不要复制它的每一个特点。有些特点如果你复制了会让你看起来可笑。比如，如果你只有18岁，不要模仿一位杰出的50岁教授的举止，或者几百年后的文艺复兴诗歌的习语。 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. 你所欣赏的事物中，有些特点正是他们在成功中克服的缺陷。事实上，最容易模仿的特点往往就是最有可能成为缺陷的地方。 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. 这在行为方面尤为真实。有些有才华的人是混蛋，这有时会让没有经验的人觉得成为混蛋是有才华的一部分。事实并非如此；有才华只是他们逃脱惩罚的方式而已。 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. 其中一种最强大的复制方式是将某物从一个领域复制到另一个领域。历史上充满了这种偶然发现的例子，所以通过有意识地学习其他类型的工作，或许能够帮助我们增加偶然的机会。如果你将它们视为隐喻，你可以从相当不同的领域中汲取灵感。 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. 负面的例子可以像正面的例子一样具有启发性。事实上，有时候你可以从做得不好的事情中学到更多，而不是从做得好的事情中学到。有时候只有在缺失的时候才能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] 如果你所在领域的许多顶尖人才聚集在一个地方，通常去参观一下是个好主意。这将增加你的雄心壮志，并且通过展示这些人也是凡人，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，你可能会得到比你预期的更热情的欢迎。大多数擅长某个领域的人都乐意与真正感兴趣的人交谈。如果他们在工作上非常出色，那么他们可能对此有着爱好者的兴趣，而爱好者总是愿意谈论他们的爱好。 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. 虽然可能需要一些努力才能找到真正优秀的人，但做出优秀的工作确实非常有威望，在某些地方，尤其是大学，有一种礼貌的虚构，即每个人都在从事优秀的工作。然而，这远非事实。大学内部的人不能公开说出来，但不同部门所做工作的质量差异巨大。有些部门有人在做出优秀的工作，有些部门过去曾有，而有些部门从未有过。 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. 寻找最好的同事。有很多项目是无法独自完成的，即使你正在做一个可以独立完成的项目，也很好有其他人来鼓励你并交流想法。 Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. 同事不仅仅影响你的工作，他们也会影响你自己。所以和那些你想成为的人一起工作，因为你会变得像他们一样。 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. 在同事之间，质量比数量更重要。拥有一两个优秀的同事要比拥有一大群还算不错的同事更好。事实上，不仅仅是更好，而是必要的，从历史来看：伟大的工作往往发生在聚集的环境中，这表明同事们往往决定了是否能够做出伟大的工作。 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. 你如何知道你有足够好的同事？根据我的经验，当你有的时候，你就知道了。这意味着如果你不确定，那可能是没有的意思。但是也许可以给出一个更具体的答案。这里有一个尝试：足够好的同事会提供令人惊讶的见解。他们能够看到和做到你所不能的事情。所以如果你有一些足够好的同事能够在这个意义上让你保持警惕，那你可能已经超过了门槛。 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] 我们大多数人都可以从与同事合作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人员，而启动这样的项目并非人人都适合。如果你想要运营这样的项目，你就必须成为一名经理，而良好的管理需要与其他任何工作一样的才能和兴趣。如果你没有这些，就没有中间道路可选：你要么强迫自己学习管理作为第二语言，要么避免这样的项目。[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. 保持你的士气。当你在进行雄心勃勃的项目时，这是一切的基础。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人，而不是受害者，你也更有可能做出出色的工作。 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，工作在一定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，它的困难本身就会成为你逃离日常生活困难的避风港。如果这是一种逃避现实，那么它是一种非常富有成效的形式，被一些历史上最伟大的思想家所采用。 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. 士气通过工作而增强：高昂的士气有助于你做出出色的工作，这又进一步提升了你的士气，使你能够做得更好。但是这个循环也可以反向运作：如果你的工作不出色，这可能会使你士气低落，使你更难以做好工作。由于这个循环对于朝着正确的方向运行非常重要，当你陷入困境时，切换到更容易的工作可能是一个好主意，这样你就能开始做一些事情了。 One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a ballon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always involves some backtracking. 雄心勃勃的人们常犯的一个最大错误就是一次性地让挫折摧毁他们的士气，就像气球爆炸一样。你可以通过明确地将挫折视为你的过程的一部分来免疫自己。解决困难问题总是需要一些倒退。 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. 做出出色的工作就像是一次深度优先搜索，其根节点是渴望。所以，“如果一开始没有成功，就再试一次”并不完全正确。应该是：如果一开始没有成功，要么再试一次，要么回溯然后再试一次。 "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”也不完全正确。显然，有时候选择退出是正确的。更准确的版本应该是：永远不要让挫折使你退缩超过必要的程度。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. 如果工作是一种挣扎，并不一定是个坏兆头，就像跑步时喘不过气并不代表不好一样。这取决于你跑得有多快。所以要学会区分好痛和坏痛。好痛是努力的象征，坏痛则是损伤的标志。 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. 观众是士气的关键组成部分。如果你是学者，你的观众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，它可能是传统意义上的观众。无论如何，它不需要很多。观众的价值与其规模并不成正比。这对于名人来说是个坏消息，但对于刚刚起步的人来说是个好消息，因为这意味着一个小而忠诚的观众群体足以支持你。如果有一小撮人真心喜欢你所做的事情，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] 尽可能地避免让中间人介入你和你的受众之间的关系。在某些工作类型中，这是不可避免的，但是如果能够直接与受众沟通，那么摆脱中间人的束缚将会带来极大的自由感。[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. 你与之相处的人也会对你的士气产生很大的影响。你会发现有些人会增加你的能量，而有些人会削弱你的能量，而且某个人的影响力并不总是你所期望的。寻找那些能增加你能量的人，避免那些会削弱你能量的人。当然，如果有人需要你照顾，那就优先考虑照顾他们。 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，或者把你的工作视为与他争夺注意力的竞争对手。如果你有抱负，你就需要工作；这几乎就像一种病症；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] 最终士气是与身体相关的。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，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. 做出出色工作的人不一定比其他人更快乐，但他们比不做出出色工作的人更快乐。事实上，如果你聪明有抱负，不努力工作是很危险的。聪明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. 想要给别人留下深刻印象是可以的，但要选择正确的人。你尊重的人的意见才是重要的信号。名声只是一个更大群体的意见，你可能尊重也可能不尊重，它只会带来噪音。 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. 一种工作的声望最多只能作为一个滞后指标，有时甚至是完全错误的。如果你做得足够好，它就会变得有声望。所以，对于一种工作，应该问的问题不是它有多少声望，而是它能做得有多好。 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；不要因为别人在追逐某事而让自己被卷入其中。事实上，不要让竞争对手让你做任何比更加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." 注意到这个词出现的频率有多高。如果你问一个神谕如何做出伟大的工作，而神谕只回答一个词，我会押注在“好奇心”上。 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. 这并不直接转化为建议。仅仅保持好奇心是不够的，而且你也无法命令好奇心。但你可以培养它，并让它驱使你前进。 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. 好奇心是做出优秀工作的关键，它会为你选择领域，带你走向前沿，让你注意到其中的空白，并驱使你去探索。整个过程就像是与好奇心共舞。 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，我尽量把这篇文章写得尽可能短。但至少它的长度起到了一个筛选的作用。如果你能读到这里，那么你一定对做出优秀的工作感兴趣。如果是这样，你已经比你自己意识到的更进一步了，因为愿意去追求卓越的人群是很少的。 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? 做出优秀工作的因素是指字面上的、数学意义上的因素，它们包括：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。运气是无法控制的，所以我们可以忽略它。而且我们可以假设，如果你确实想要做出优秀的工作，那么努力是必然的。所以问题归结为能力和兴趣。你能否找到一种工作，能够将你的能力和兴趣结合起来，产生一系列新的想法？ 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. 在这里有乐观的理由。有很多不同的方式可以做出伟大的工作，甚至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，你最适合的可能是一个相当匹配的选择。可能是一个滑稽地匹配的选择。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。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. 有很多人可以尝试做出伟大的工作，但实际上做出伟大工作的人却很少。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傲慢的。而且这似乎很困难；如果你尝试这样做，肯定会失败。这种心理计算很少是明确的。很少有人会有意识地决定不去尝试做出伟大的工作。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. 所以我要对你耍个小花招。你想做出优秀的工作，还是不想？现在你必须有意识地做出决定。对此我感到抱歉。我不会对一般观众这样做。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. 不要担心太过自以为是。你不必告诉任何人。如果事情太难，你失败了又怎样？很多人有比这更糟糕的问题。事实上，如果这是你最糟糕的问题，你还算幸运。 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。但是，很多人都必须努力工作。如果你正在从事一项你觉得非常有趣的工作，而且如果你走在正确的道路上，那么这份工作可能会比你的很多同行感觉更轻松。 The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you? 那些发现就在那里，等待着被发现。为什么不由你来发现呢？ Notes 笔记 [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. [1] 我不认为你能给出一个精确的伟大工作的定义。做伟大的工作意味着将某件重要的事情做得如此出色，以至于扩展了人们对可能性的想法。但重要性没有一个门槛。这是一个程度的问题，而且通常很难在当时判断。所以我宁愿人们专注于发展自己的兴趣，而不是担心自己是否重要。只要试着做一些令人惊叹的事情，将来的一代会评判你是否成功。 [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! [2] 很多脱口秀都是基于对日常生活中的异常现象的观察而产生的。"你有没有注意到……？" 新的想法来自于对非琐碎事物的观察。这或许可以解释为什么人们对新想法的反应往往是先笑出声的前半部分：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. [3] 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看好的事情感到兴奋，但你无法给出比“他们不理解”更精确的解释，那么你开始进入怪人的领域了。 [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. [4] 寻找要解决的问题并不仅仅是在当前版本的你和已知问题清单之间找到一个匹配。你通常需要与问题共同进化。这就是为什么有时候很难确定要做什么的原因。搜索空间非常广阔。它是所有可能类型的工作（已知和尚未发现的）以及你未来可能的所有版本的笛卡尔积。 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，所以你必须依靠启发式方法来生成有希望的路径，并希望最佳匹配会被聚集在一起。然而，并不总是如此；不同类型的工作之间的相似性往往更多地是由历史的偶然性而非内在的相似性所决定。 [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. [5] 好奇心旺盛的人更容易做出出色的工作，原因有很多，但其中一个比较微妙的原因是，通过广泛涉猎，他们更有可能在一开始就找到适合自己从事的事情。 [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. [6] 如果你觉得观众比你不够精明，为他们制作东西也可能是危险的，因为这会导致你对他们说话时显得高高在上。如果你以足够冷嘲热讽的方式做这件事，你可以赚很多钱，但这不是创作出伟大作品的途径。不过，使用这种方式的人可能并不在乎。 [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. [7] 这个想法我是从哈代的《一个数学家的辩白》中学到的，我推荐给任何有雄心壮志在任何领域做出伟大工作的人。 [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. [8] 就像我们在一天内高估了自己能做的事情，低估了自己在几年内能做的事情一样，我们也高估了一天拖延所造成的损害，低估了几年拖延所造成的损害。 [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. [9] 通常情况下，你不能仅仅做自己想做的事情就能得到报酬，尤其是在初期阶段。有两种选择：做与你想做的工作相近的工作并希望逐渐接近目标，或者完全做其他工作并在业余时间进行自己的项目。这两种方式都可行，但都有缺点：在第一种方式中，你的工作默认会受到限制；而在第二种方式中，你必须努力争取时间来做自己的项目。 [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. [10] 如果你正确安排好你的生活，它会自动带来专注和放松的循环。完美的安排是一个你工作并且可以步行往返的办公室。 [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. [11] 可能有一些非常不拘世俗的人在不自觉地做出了伟大的工作。如果你想将这个规则扩展到涵盖这种情况，那就是：除了做到最好，不要试图成为其他任何东西。 [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. [12] 在像演戏这样的工作中，情况变得更加复杂，因为目标是扮演一个虚假的角色。但即使在这种情况下，也有可能受到影响。也许在这些领域中，规则应该是避免无意识的做作。 [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. [13] 只有当你的信念是不可质疑且不可证伪的时候，才能安全地拥有它们。例如，拥有每个人都应该在法律面前平等对待的原则是安全的，因为带有“应该”这个词的句子并不是对世界的陈述，因此很难被证伪。如果没有证据能够证伪你的原则之一，那么就不会有任何你需要忽视的事实来保持它的存在。 [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. [14] 做作比知识不诚实更容易纠正。做作通常是年轻人的缺点，随着时间的推移会逐渐消失，而知识不诚实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. [15] 显然你不必在你有这个想法的确切时刻工作，但你可能最近一直在工作。 [16] Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects. [16] 有人说精神活性药物有类似的效果。我持怀疑态度，但对它们的效果几乎一无所知。 [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. [17] 例如，你可以将第n个最重要的主题的注意力分配为(m-1)/m^n，其中m > 1。当然，你无法如此精确地分配你的注意力，但至少这给出了一个合理分配的想法。 [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. [18] 定义宗教的原则必须是错误的。否则，任何人都可以采纳它们，宗教的信徒就无法与其他人区分开来。 [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. [19] 或许写下一个你年轻时曾经好奇的问题清单是个不错的练习。你可能会发现现在你有能力去解答其中的一些问题。 [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. [20] 原创性和不确定性之间的联系导致了一个奇怪的现象：因为传统思维者比独立思考者更加确定，所以他们在争论中往往占据上风，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“如果你想要有好的创意，你必须有很多创意。” [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. [22] 将一个项目称为“玩具”就像将一个陈述称为“不合适”一样。这意味着没有更实质性的批评可以被接受。 [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. [23] 判断你是否在浪费时间的一种方法是问自己你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，而玩那些你可以创造东西的游戏比玩那些不能创造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. [24] 另一个相关的优势是，如果你还没有公开发表任何言论，你就不会对支持你先前结论的证据产生偏见。在这方面，如果你具备足够的正直，你可以实现永恒的青春，但很少有人能做到。对于大多数人来说，先前发表的观点会产生类似意识形态的影响，只是数量上的差异。 [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. [25] 在17世纪30年代初，丹尼尔·迈滕斯绘制了一幅画，描绘了亨利埃塔·玛丽亚将月桂花环递给查理一世。范·戴克随后绘制了自己的版本，以展示他的绘画技巧更加出色。 [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] 我故意对一个地方的定义含糊不清。截至目前，身处同一物理空间确实有难以复制的优势，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. [27] 当其他人需要做的工作非常受限制时，比如SETI@home或比特币，这是错误的。通过定义具有更多节点行动自由的类似受限协议，可能可以扩大这种错误的范围。 [28] Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably a good idea. [28] 推论：建立一个让人们能够绕过中间人直接与他们的受众互动的东西，可能是一个好主意。 [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. [29] 始终走同一条路线可能会有所帮助，因为这样可以释放思考的注意力。对我来说，感觉就是这样，而且也有一些历史证据支持这一观点。 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 Neilsen, Courtenay Pipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts. 感谢Trevor Blackwell、Daniel Gackle、Pam Graham、Tom Howard、Patrick Hsu、Steve Huffman、Jessica Livingston、Henry Lloyd-Baker、Bob Metcalfe、Ben Miller、Robert Morris、Michael Neilsen、Courtenay Pipkin、Joris Poort、Mieke Roos、Rajat Suri、Harj Taggar、Garry Tan以及我的小儿子对建议和草稿的阅读。 |