 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. 如果你收集了很多不同领域的优秀工作技巧，那么这些技巧的交集会是什么样子呢？我决定通过制作来找出答案。 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." 我的部分目标是制作一份指南，供任何领域的工作人员使用。但我也对交叉点的形状感到好奇。这个练习表明，它确实有明确的形状；它不仅仅是一个标有 "努力工作 "的点。 The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. 以下食谱假定你雄心勃勃。 The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. 第一步是决定从事什么工作。你所选择的工作必须具备三个特点：它必须是你有天赋的、你有浓厚兴趣的，以及能提供出色工作空间的。 In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1] 实际上，你不必太担心第三条标准。有抱负的人在这方面已经过于保守了。因此，你需要做的就是找到自己有天赋并感兴趣的事情。[1] That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out. 这听起来很简单，但往往很困难。年轻时，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不知道不同类型的工作是什么样的。有些你最终要做的工作可能还不存在。因此，有些人在 14 岁时就知道自己想做什么，而大多数人则需要自己摸索。 The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. 确定工作内容的方法就是工作。如果你不确定该做什么，那就猜猜看。但要选准一件事，然后着手去做。有些时候你可能会猜错，但没关系。了解多方面的事物是件好事；一些最大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. 养成为自己的项目工作的习惯。不要让 "工作 "成为别人让你做的事情。如果有一天你真的能做出伟大的工作，那很可能是在你自己的项目上。它可能是某个更大项目的一部分，但你将是其中的主导者。 What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. 你的项目应该是什么？只要在你看来是令人兴奋的雄心壮志。随着年龄的增长，你对项目的喜好也在不断变化，令人兴奋和重要这两个词将会趋于一致。7 岁时，用乐高积木搭建庞然大物，14 岁时自学微积分，21 岁时开始探索物理学中的未解之谜，这些都是令人兴奋的雄心壮志。但要始终保持兴奋。 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，也是伟大工作的舵手。它不仅是你的动力，而且如果你顺其自然，它还会告诉你该做什么。 What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. 你对什么过分好奇--好奇到会让其他人感到厌烦的程度？这就是你要寻找的。 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分感兴趣的东西，下一步就是要学习足够多的知识，让你走到知识的前沿。知识的扩展是分形的，从远处看它的边缘是平滑的，但一旦你学到足够的知识，接近了知识的边缘，就会发现它们充满了差距。 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] 下一步就是注意到它们。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑想忽略这些差距，以便建立一个更简单的世界模型。许多发现都来自于对别人认为理所当然的事物的提问。[2] If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears, embrace it. 如果答案看起来很奇怪，那就更好了。伟大的作品往往都带有奇怪的色彩。从绘画到数学都是如此。如果试图制造它，那将会受到影响，但如果它出现了，那就接受它吧。 Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. [3] 大胆追逐离经叛道的想法，即使其他人对它们不感兴趣--事实上，尤其是当他们不感兴趣时。如果你对别人都忽视的某种可能性感到兴奋，而你又有足够的专业知识来准确说出他们都忽视了什么，这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，学习足够的知识以达到前沿水平，发现差距，探索有潜力的领域。实际上，从画家到物理学家，每一个做出伟大成就的人都是这样做的。 Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could. 第二步和第四步需要付出艰苦的努力。也许无法证明你必须努力工作才能做大事，但经验证据与死亡率的证据是一样的。这就是为什么必须从事自己深感兴趣的工作。兴趣会促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. 三个最强大的动机是好奇心、愉悦感和做一件令人印象深刻的事情的愿望。有时，它们会交汇在一起，这种组合是最强大的。 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. 大奖是发现一个新的分形萌芽。你注意到知识表面的一条裂缝，撬开它，里面就是一个完整的世界。 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] 让我们再来谈谈确定工作内容的复杂工作。这很难的主要原因是，你无法知道大多数工作是什么样的，除非去做。这就意味着这四个步骤是重叠的：你可能需要在某件事情上工作数年，才能知道自己有多喜欢它，或者有多擅长它。而在此期间，你并没有从事其他大多数类型的工作，因此也就无法了解这些工作。因此，在最坏的情况下，你会根据非常不完整的信息来选择后期工作。[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. 野心的性质加剧了这一问题。野心有两种形式，一种是在对主题产生兴趣之前，另一种是在兴趣的基础上产生的。大多数成就非凡的人都兼具前者和后者，而前者越多，就越难决定该做什么。 The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage. 大多数国家的教育系统都假装这很容易。他们希望你在了解一个领域的真实情况之前，早早就投入其中。结果，一个雄心勃勃的人在最佳轨迹上，往往会被系统解读为破罐子破摔。 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，这个系统不仅不能帮你想出什么工作，而且在设计时还假定你作为一个十几岁的孩子会莫名其妙地猜到。他们没有告诉你，但我要告诉你：要想知道该做什么，你只能靠自己。有些人运气好，真的猜对了，但其他人会发现自己在假设每个人都猜对的轨道上斜着爬行。 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] 如果你年轻有为，却不知道该做什么，该怎么办？你不应该被动地随波逐流，以为问题会自己解决。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，你会发现其中有多少运气的成分。他们是在一次偶然的会面中，或者是在阅读一本偶然捡到的书时，发现了需要努力的方向。因此，你需要让自己成为幸运的大目标，而做到这一点的方法就是保持好奇心。尝试很多事情，接触很多人，读很多书，问很多问题。[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. 如果有疑问，请根据趣味性进行优化。随着了解的增多，领域也会发生变化。例如，数学家所做的工作与你在高中数学课上所做的工作截然不同。因此，你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会，向你展示它们是什么样的。但是，一个领域应该随着你对它了解的增多而变得越来越有趣。如果没有，那可能就不适合你。 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，也不要担心。你的兴趣爱好越奇怪越好。奇怪的兴趣往往是强烈的兴趣，而强烈的工作兴趣意味着你将会很有成就感。而且，如果你在很少有人关注的地方寻找，你就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. 你适合从事某种工作的一个标志是，你甚至喜欢别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. 但领域不是人，你不需要对它们忠诚。如果在从事一项工作的过程中，你发现了另一项更令人兴奋的工作，不要害怕转换。 If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience. 如果你要为人们制作一些东西，一定要确保是他们真正想要的。要做到这一点，最好的办法就是做出你自己想要的东西。写你想读的故事，做你想用的工具。因为你的朋友们可能有相似的兴趣爱好，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] 这应遵循 "令人兴奋 "规则。显然，最令人兴奋的故事就是你想读的故事。我之所以明确提到这个案例，是因为很多人都搞错了。他们不是创作自己想要的作品，而是试图创作一些假想的、更复杂的观众想要的作品。一旦走上这条路，你就会迷失方向。[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. 当你想知道该做什么时，有很多力量会把你引入歧途。自命不凡、时尚、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、显赫的骗子。但如果你坚持做自己真正感兴趣的事，你就能抵御所有这些诱惑。只要你感兴趣，就不会误入歧途。 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. 追随自己的兴趣听起来似乎是一种相当被动的策略，但在实践中，这通常意味着追随自己的兴趣要越过重重障碍。你通常要冒着被拒绝和失败的风险。因此，这确实需要很大的勇气。 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. 不过，虽然你需要勇气，但通常并不需要太多的计划。在大多数情况下，完成伟大工作的秘诀很简单：在雄心勃勃的项目上努力工作，就会有好结果。与其制定计划然后付诸实施，不如努力保持某些不变性。 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，它只适用于你可以提前描述的成就。你可以在孩提时代就决定要赢得金牌或致富，然后顽强地追求这一目标，但你无法通过这种方式发现自然选择。 I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it. 我认为，对于大多数想做大事的人来说，正确的策略是不要计划太多。在每个阶段，做任何看起来最有趣的事情，为未来提供最好的选择。我把这种方法称为 "逆风而行"。这也是大多数成功人士的做法。 Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't like that. 即使你找到了令人兴奋的工作，工作起来也并不总是那么简单。有时，一些新想法会让你一早从床上蹦起来，直接投入工作。但也有很多时候，情况并非如此。 You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a technique to working, just as there is to sailing. 你不能一扬帆就被灵感吹得向前飞。会有逆风、逆流和暗礁。因此，工作是有技巧的，就像航海一样。 For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day. 例如，虽然你必须努力工作，但也有可能工作得太辛苦，如果你这样做，你会发现你得到的回报越来越少：疲劳会让你变得愚蠢，最终甚至损害你的健康。工作收益递减的程度取决于工作的类型。有些最难的工作，你可能每天只能做四五个小时。 Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted. 理想情况下，这些时间应该是连续的。在可能的范围内，尽量安排好自己的生活，以便有大块的时间来工作。如果你知道自己可能会被打断，你就会对艰巨的任务望而却步。 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难。你常常需要欺骗自己，才能跨过最初的门槛。别担心，这是工作的本质，不是你性格上的缺陷。无论是每天还是每个项目，工作都有一种激活能量。既然这个阈值是假的，因为它比继续工作所需的能量要高，那么为了克服这个阈值，对自己撒一个相应程度的谎也是可以的。 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. 如果你想做好工作，欺骗自己通常是个错误，但这是极少数不欺骗自己的情况之一。当我早上不愿意开始工作时，我经常欺骗自己说："我先把目前的东西看一遍"。五分钟后，我发现了一些似乎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启动新项目。比如，在一个项目需要多少工作量的问题上欺骗自己是可以的。很多伟大的事情都是从有人说 "这能有多难？"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. 在这种情况下，年轻人更有优势。他们更乐观，尽管他们乐观的来源之一是无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时会战胜知识。 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. 尽量完成你开始做的事情，即使结果比你预想的更费事。完成工作不仅仅是为了整洁或自律。在许多项目中，许多最出色的工作都是在最后阶段完成的。 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] 另一个允许的谎言是夸大你正在做的事情的重要性，至少在你自己的心目中是这样。如果这能帮助你发现一些新东西，那么它可能就不是谎言了。[7] Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. [8] 既然有两种意义上的开工--每天和每个项目，也就有两种形式的拖延。每个项目的拖延更为危险。因为时机不成熟，你会把那个雄心勃勃的项目从一年拖到另一年。当你以年为单位进行拖延时，你会有很多事情做不成。[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. 每个项目的拖延症之所以如此危险，原因之一是它通常把自己伪装成工作。你并不是无所事事，而是在勤勤恳恳地做其他事情。因此，每个项目的拖延不会像每天的拖延那样触发警报。你太忙了，根本注意不到。 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] 战胜它的方法就是偶尔停下来问问自己：我是否在做我最想做的事情？年轻时，如果答案有时是否定的也没关系，但随着年龄的增长，这种情况会越来越危险。[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在大多数人看来不合理的时间上。你不能把这段时间看作是一种成本，否则就会显得过高。你必须在工作的过程中发现工作有足够的吸引力。 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. 也许有些工作需要你勤奋工作数年，做你讨厌的事情，然后才会有好的结果，但这并不是伟大工作的发生方式。伟大的工作是通过坚持不懈地专注于你真正感兴趣的事情而实现的。当你停下来总结时，你会惊讶于自己已经走了这么远。 The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing. 我们之所以感到惊讶，是因为我们低估了工作的累积效应。每天写一页纸听起来不多，但如果你每天都这样做，一年就能写一本书。这就是关键所在：坚持不懈。做大事的人不会每天都做很多事。他们会有所收获，而不是一无所获。 If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you. 如果你做的工作能产生复合效应，你就会获得指数级的增长。大多数人都是无意识地这样做的，但这值得我们停下来思考。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，就越容易学到更多。增加受众也是一种现象：你拥有的粉丝越多，他们就会给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，开始时感觉曲线是平的。其实不然，它仍然是一条美妙的指数曲线。但我们无法凭直觉把握这一点，所以在指数增长的早期阶段，我们低估了它的价值。 Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it. 指数级增长的东西会变得非常有价值，值得我们付出非凡的努力去启动它。但是，由于我们在早期低估了指数增长，这也大多是在无意识的情况下实现的：人们在学习新事物的最初阶段勉为其难，因为他们从经验中知道，学习新事物总是需要最初的努力，或者他们一次增加一个粉丝，因为他们没有更好的事情可做。如果人们有意识地意识到他们可以投资于指数增长，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. 工作不只是在你努力的时候才会发生。在走路、洗澡或躺在床上时，你都会进行一种不定向的思考，这种思考可能非常强大。只要让你的思维稍稍游离一下，你往往就能解决通过正面攻击无法解决的问题。 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，才能从这种现象中受益。你不能只是走来走去做白日梦。白日梦必须与刻意的工作交织在一起，以提出问题。[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，但在另一半时间里避免分心也很重要。当你让思绪游离时，它会游离到你当时最关心的事情上。因此，要避免那种把你的工作挤出首要位置的分心，否则你就会把这种宝贵的思考浪费在分心上。(例外：不要逃避爱情）。 Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for. 有意识地培养自己对本领域工作的品味。除非你知道哪个是最好的，以及为什么是最好的，否则你就不知道自己的目标是什么。 And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true. [11] 这就是你的目标，因为如果你不努力做到最好，你甚至连好都做不到。很多人在不同的领域都提出过这样的观点，我们不妨思考一下为什么会有这样的观点。这可能是因为野心是一种几乎所有误差都在一个方向上的现象--几乎所有偏离目标的炮弹都是由于落空而错过的。也可能是因为 "做最好的 "的野心与 "做好人 "的野心有着本质的区别。也可能是 "好 "这个标准太模糊了。也许三者都是对的。[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，这里有一种规模经济。虽然努力做到最好似乎会让你背上沉重的负担，但实际上，你往往会净胜一筹。这是令人兴奋的，也是一种奇怪的解放。它简化了事情。在某些方面，努力做到最好比仅仅努力做到好更容易。 One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than your contemporaries', but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good. 要想目标高远，方法之一就是努力制作百年之后人们仍会关注的作品。这并不是因为他们的意见比你同时代人的意见更重要，而是因为一百年后看起来仍然不错的东西更有可能是真正的好东西。 Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive way. 不要试图以一种独特的风格工作。你只需尽力把工作做到最好；你无法不把工作做得与众不同。 Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation. 风格就是不刻意地以独特的方式做事。刻意为之就是矫揉造作。 Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. [12] 实际上，"假装 "就是假装不是你在做这件事。你采用了一个令人印象深刻但虚假的角色，虽然你对这种令人印象深刻的角色感到满意，但这种虚假性却在作品中显现出来。[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。他们常常觉得自己是无名小卒。但你永远不需要担心这个问题，因为如果你从事的是足够雄心勃勃的项目，这个问题就会迎刃而解。如果你在一个雄心勃勃的项目上取得了成功，你就不是无名小卒，你就是那个成功的人。因此，只需做好工作，你的身份问题就会迎刃而解。 "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. 就目前而言，"避免矫揉造作 "是一条有用的规则，但你如何积极地表达这一观点？如何说 "要做什么"，而不是 "不要做什么"？最好的答案就是认真。如果你是认真的，你就不仅能避免装腔作势，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? 诚实的核心是理智上的诚实。我们从小就被教导，诚实是一种无私的美德，是一种牺牲。但事实上，诚实也是力量的源泉。要看到新的想法，你需要一双异常敏锐的眼睛来发现真相。你要比别人看到更多的真相。如果你在思想上不诚实，又怎么会有一双洞察真理的慧眼呢？ 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] 避免智力不诚实的方法之一是保持一种相反方向的轻微正压力。积极承认自己的错误。一旦你承认自己错了，你就自由了。在此之前，你必须背负它。[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. 认真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。它不仅仅是没有什么东西。它意味着关注重要的东西，而不是不重要的东西。 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. 形式主义和装腔作势的共同之处在于，你在做工作的同时，还要努力让自己看起来像个样子。但是，你的任何努力都是为了让自己看起来更优秀。这就是书呆子在出色工作方面具有优势的原因之一：他们几乎不需要花费精力去表现什么。事实上，这基本上就是书呆子的定义。 Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy. 书呆子有一种天真无邪的胆识，而这正是做大事所需要的。这不是学来的，而是从小保留下来的。所以要牢牢抓住它。做一个把事情摆在那里的人，而不是坐在后面对事情提出听起来很高深的批评的人。"批评很容易 "这句话在字面上是正确的，而通往伟大工作的道路从来都不是一帆风顺的。 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. 也许在某些工作中，愤世嫉俗、悲观失望是一种优势，但如果你想做伟大的工作，乐观是一种优势，尽管这意味着你有时会冒着看起来像个傻瓜的风险。反其道而行之是一种古老的传统。旧约》说，最好保持沉默，以免看起来像个傻瓜。但这只是为了显得聪明而提出的建议。如果你真的想发现新事物，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] 有些人天生就很认真，而有些人则需要有意识地努力。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事业。即使你认真，也很难做到。你没有足够的余地来容纳因受影响、理智上不诚实、正统、时髦或酷而带来的扭曲。[14] Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent. 伟大的作品不仅与创作者一致，而且与作品本身一致。它通常都是一脉相承的。因此，如果你在创作过程中面临抉择，不妨问一问哪种选择更具有一致性。 You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some effort; when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert to what I have now? 你可能不得不扔掉一些东西，然后重做。你不一定非得这样做，但你必须愿意这样做。这可能需要一些努力；当你需要重做某件事情时，维持现状的偏见和懒惰会让你对此持否定态度。为了克服这种情况，请问：如果我已经做出了改变，我还想回到现在的状态吗？ 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. 有信心剪掉。不要因为你引以为豪，或者因为它花费了你很多精力，就保留一些不合适的东西。 Indeed, in some kinds of work it's good to strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'll understand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself about whether there's anything real there. 的确，在某些工作中，无论你在做什么，把它的本质剥离出来是件好事。这样做的结果会更集中，你会更好地理解它，也不会再自欺欺人地怀疑它是否真实存在。 Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant" applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math. 数学的优雅听起来可能只是一个来自艺术的比喻。当我第一次听到 "优雅 "一词用于证明时，我也是这么想的。但现在我怀疑它在概念上是先行的--艺术优雅的主要成分就是数学优雅。无论如何，它是一个有用的标准，远远超出了数学的范畴。 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. 不过，优雅可以是一个长期的赌注。费力的解决方案往往在短期内更有声望。它们耗费大量精力，而且难以理解，这两点都会给人留下深刻印象，至少是暂时的。 Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it. 而一些最优秀的作品则看起来不费吹灰之力，因为从某种意义上说，它早已存在。它不需要被创造，只需要被看见。如果很难说你是在创造还是在发现什么，这就是一个非常好的迹象。 When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape. 当你所做的工作既可以被视为创造，也可以被视为发现时，请偏向于发现。试着把自己当成一个单纯的管道，通过它，创意自然成形。 (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，选择要解决的问题是个例外。这通常被视为搜索，但在最好的情况下，它更像是创造。在最好的情况下，你在探索的过程中创造了领域）。 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，如果你想打造一个功能强大的工具，就应该让它不受限制。一个功能强大的工具几乎可以说会以你意想不到的方式被使用，所以即使你不知道会带来什么好处，也要尽量避免限制。 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. 优秀的作品往往具有工具性，可以让他人在此基础上更上一层楼。因此，如果你创造的想法能为他人所用，或者揭示的问题能为他人所解答，这就是一个好兆头。最好的想法会在许多不同领域产生影响。 If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended. 如果你用最笼统的形式来表达你的想法，它们就会比你想要的更真实。 True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge. 当然，仅有 "真实 "是不够的。伟大的想法必须是真实的、新颖的。即使你已经学到了足够的知识，到达了知识的前沿，也需要一定的能力才能看到新的想法。 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，我们给这种能力取名为原创力、创造力和想象力。给它一个单独的名字似乎也是合理的，因为在某种程度上它的确是一种独立的技能。我们有可能在其他方面拥有很强的能力--拥有很多通常所说的 "技术能力"--但在这方面却没有太多的能力。 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. 我一直不喜欢 "创作过程 "这个词。它似乎具有误导性。原创不是一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。具有独创性思维的人无论专注于什么，都会产生新的想法，就像角磨机产生火花一样。他们情不自禁。 If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understand very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear. 如果他们关注的事情是他们不太了解的事情，那么这些新想法可能并不好。我认识的一个思想最新颖的人在离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解和普通 15 岁的孩子差不多，结果却多姿多彩，令人叹为观止。但是，看到原创性与专业知识如此分离，其本质就更加清晰了。 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出独创性，但肯定有办法充分利用你所拥有的一切。例如，当你在做某件事情时，你就更有可能产生独创性的想法。原创性想法并不是来自于试图拥有原创性想法。它们来自于对一些稍显困难的东西的尝试和理解。[15] Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. 谈论或书写自己感兴趣的事物是产生新想法的好方法。当你试图将想法付诸文字时，缺失的想法会形成一种真空，将你的想法吸引出来。事实上，有一种思考只有通过写作才能完成。 Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk. [16] 改变你的环境会有所帮助。如果你去了一个新的地方，你往往会发现自己在那里有了新的想法。旅途本身往往就会让它们消失。但是，你可能不需要走很远就能获得这种益处。有时，只需出去走走就足够了。[16] It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. 在主题空间中旅行也有帮助。如果你探索许多不同的主题，你就会有更多的新思路，部分原因是这给了角磨机更多的工作表面积，部分原因是类比是新思路的一个特别富有成效的来源。 Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. [17] Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. 不过，不要把注意力平均分配到多个主题上，否则会让自己过于分散。你需要按照类似幂律的方式来分配注意力。[17] 对少数几个话题保持专业好奇心，对更多话题保持闲暇好奇心。 Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force. 好奇心与独创性密切相关。好奇心为原创性提供了新的工作内容，从而滋养了原创性。但两者之间的关系远不止于此。好奇心本身就是一种独创性；好奇心之于问题，大致相当于独创性之于答案。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力。 Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before? 有新想法是一种奇怪的游戏，因为它通常包括看到在你眼皮底下的东西。一旦你看到了一个新想法，它往往会显得显而易见。为什么以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，它可能就是一个好想法。 Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction? It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard. 看到一些显而易见的东西听起来很容易。然而，根据经验产生新想法却很难。这种明显矛盾的根源是什么呢？因为看到新想法通常需要你改变看待世界的方式。我们通过既帮助我们又限制我们的模型来看待世界。当你修复了一个破损的模型，新想法就会变得显而易见。但是，注意到并修复一个破损的模型是很难的。这就是为什么新想法既显而易见又难以发现的原因：在你做了一些困难的事情之后，它们就很容易被发现了。 One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect. 发现破损模式的方法之一就是比别人更严格。破损的世界模型会在与现实的碰撞中留下线索。大多数人都不想看到这些线索。可以轻描淡写地说，他们对自己当前的模式情有独钟；这是他们的思维模式；因此，他们会倾向于忽略其破损所留下的线索，无论回想起来这些线索多么显眼。 To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter. 要找到新思想，就必须抓住破损的迹象，而不是视而不见。爱因斯坦就是这样做的。他之所以能够看到麦克斯韦方程的巨大影响，与其说是因为他在寻找新思想，不如说是因为他更加严格。 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. 你还需要有打破常规的意愿。虽然听起来有些矛盾，但如果你想修复自己的世界模型，那么你就必须是那种乐于打破常规的人。从包括你在内的每个人最初都认同的旧模式的角度来看，新模式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. 很少有人了解需要打破规则的程度，因为新想法一旦成功，就会显得保守得多。一旦你使用了它们带来的新的世界模型，它们似乎就完全合理了。但在当时却并非如此；日心说花了一个多世纪的时间才被普遍接受，甚至在天文学家中也是如此，因为它让人感觉错得离谱。 Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing. 事实上，如果你仔细想想，一个好的新想法在大多数人看来一定是糟糕的，否则早就有人探索出来了。因此，你要寻找的是那些看似疯狂，但又是正确的疯狂的想法。如何识别这些创意？你无法确定。看似糟糕的想法往往就是糟糕的。但恰到好处的疯狂想法往往令人兴奋；它们蕴含着丰富的内涵；而仅仅是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. 自在地打破规则有两种方式：一种是乐于打破规则，另一种是对规则无动于衷。我把这两种情况分别称为 "积极独立 "和 "消极独立"。 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. 独立思考的人是顽皮的。规则不仅不能阻止他们，打破规则还会给他们带来额外的能量。对这类人来说，有时对一个项目的大胆尝试感到欣喜，就会为项目的启动提供足够的能量。 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. 打破常规的另一种方式是不关心它们，甚至可能不知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和局外人经常会有新的发现；他们对某一领域的假设一无所知，这成为他们暂时被动独立思考的源泉。阿斯匹灵似乎对传统观念也有一种免疫力。我认识的一些人说，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. 严格加破坏规则听起来是个奇怪的组合。在大众文化中，它们是对立的。但流行文化在这方面的模式是残缺不全的。它隐含地假定问题都是琐碎的，而在琐碎的问题中，严格和破坏规则是对立的。但在真正重要的问题上，只有破坏规则的人才能真正做到严格。 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. 一个被忽视的创意往往不会输到半决赛。在你的潜意识中，你确实看到了它，但你潜意识中的另一部分却把它否决了，因为它太奇怪、太冒险、太费事、太有争议。这就提出了一个令人兴奋的可能性：如果你能关掉这些过滤器，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. 其中一个办法就是问问别人有什么好主意可以探讨。这样，你的潜意识就不会为了保护自己而否定它们。 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. 你也可以从另一个方向去发现被忽视的想法：从遮蔽它们的东西入手。每一个被珍视但却错误的原则周围，都有一个由有价值的想法组成的 "死角"，这些想法因为与原则相悖而未被发掘。 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] 宗教是人们所珍视但却错误的原则的集合。因此，任何可以从字面上或隐喻上被描述为宗教的东西，都会在其阴影下蕴藏着宝贵的未被探索的思想。哥白尼和达尔文都有过此类发现。[18] What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it? 在你的领域，人们对什么抱有宗教信仰，即过于执着于某些原则，而这些原则可能并不像他们认为的那样不言自明？如果摒弃它，什么才是可能的？ 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的独创性要比决定解决哪些问题时表现出的独创性多得多。即使是最聪明的人，在决定研究什么问题时也会出奇地保守。那些从未想过要以其他方式赶时髦的人，也会被时髦的问题所吸引。 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，原因之一是问题的赌注更大。一个问题可能会困扰你数年，而探索一个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。他们不仅是在应对风险，也是在应对时尚。不合时宜的问题被低估了价值。 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 "不合时宜的问题 "是人们认为已经被充分发掘，但其实还没有被充分发掘的问题。伟大的作品往往利用已经存在的事物，展示其潜在的潜力。杜勒和瓦特都做到了这一点。因此，如果你对某个领域感兴趣，而其他人认为这个领域已经被挖掘殆尽，那么不要被他们的怀疑态度所吓倒。在这方面，人们往往是错的。 Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And there's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted. 解决一个不合时宜的问题可能会让人非常愉悦。没有炒作，也不急于求成。机会主义者和批评家都忙于别处。现有的工作往往具有老派的稳固性。而且，在培养创意的过程中，会有一种令人满意的节约感，否则这些创意就会被浪费掉。 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. 但是，最常见的一种被忽视的问题并不是明显的不合时宜。它只是看起来并不重要，而实际上却很重要。如何发现这些问题？通过自我放纵--让你的好奇心随波逐流，至少暂时抛开你脑中那个说你只应该研究 "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. 你确实需要解决一些重要问题，但几乎每个人都对哪些问题过于保守。如果你的周围有一个重要但被忽视的问题，它很可能已经在你的潜意识雷达屏幕上了。所以，试着问问自己：如果你要从 "严肃 "的工作中抽出时间来做一件事，只是因为它真的很有趣，你会怎么做？答案可能比想象中更重要。 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. 选择问题的独创性似乎比解决问题的独创性更重要。这正是发现全新领域的人的与众不同之处。因此，看似只是最初的一步--决定研究什么--在某种意义上却是整个游戏的关键。 Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. 很少有人能理解这一点。人们对新思想最大的误解之一，是其构成中问题与答案的比例。人们认为大创意就是答案，但真正的见解往往在问题中。 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学校使用问题的方式。在学校里，问题往往只是在得到答案之前短暂存在，就像不稳定的粒子一样。但真正的好问题远不止于此。一个真正的好问题是一个局部的发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体坠落地球的力与使行星保持在其轨道上的力是否相同？即使提出这样的问题，你也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. 随身携带未解之谜会让人感到不舒服。但是，你带着的问题越多，你就越有可能注意到问题的解决方法，或者更令人兴奋的是，你可能会注意到两个未解之谜是一样的。 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，你会带着一个问题很久。伟大的作品往往来自于你多年前--甚至在你的童年时代--第一次注意到的问题，并且无法停止思考。人们常说要保持年轻时的梦想，但保持年轻时的问题同样重要。[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印象中的专业知识差别最大的地方之一。在大众的印象中，专家是确定无疑的。但实际上，只要(a) 你困惑的事情很重要，(b) 别人也不理解，那么你越困惑就越好。 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，正在发生什么。拥有足够专业知识的人往往对某些事情感到困惑。这意味着，原创性部分地包含了困惑--迷惑！你必须对这个充满困惑的世界有足够的适应性，你愿意看到它们，但又不能太适应，以至于不想去解决它们。[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. 富于未解之谜是一件好事。这也是 "富者愈富 "的一种情况，因为获得新问题的最佳途径就是尝试回答现有的问题。问题不仅会带来答案，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. 最好的问题是在回答中成长起来的。你会发现有一根线从当前的范式中伸出来，然后试着去拉它，它就会变得越来越长。因此，在尝试回答问题之前，不要要求问题明显很大。你很少能预测到这一点。连注意到这根线都很难，更不用说预测如果你拉扯这根线，会解开多少了。 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. 最好是充满好奇心--在很多线头上拉一点，看看会发生什么。大事始于小事。大事的最初版本往往只是实验、副项目或会谈，然后发展成更大的事情。所以，要从很多小事做起。 Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones. [21] 多产被低估了。尝试的东西越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。但要明白，尝试越多，就意味着尝试了越多不成功的东西。有很多好点子，也会有很多坏点子。[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. 虽然一开始就研究以前做过的所有事情听起来更负责任，但尝试一下会让你学得更快，也更有趣。而且，当你看到以前的作品时，你会对它有更好的理解。所以，还是从头开始吧。如果开始意味着从小事做起，那就更容易了；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. 如何从小做起，做成大事？通过不断推出新版本。伟大的事物几乎总是在不断的版本中诞生的。你从小处着手，不断改进，最终的版本会比你计划中的任何版本都更聪明、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. 当你为人们制作东西时，制作连续的版本特别有用--可以迅速在他们面前呈现一个最初的版本，然后根据他们的反应进行修改。 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，尝试最简单的方法。出乎意料的是，它往往会奏效。如果行不通，这至少可以让你开始尝试。 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进太多新内容。第一个版本和第二个版本都有这样做的原因（发布时间太长），但这只是一个更普遍原则的例子。 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。人们这么做是个好兆头。这意味着它具备了新创意所需的一切，除了规模，而规模往往会随之而来。[22] The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going to try x and see what happens." And it is more organized; it just doesn't work as well. 除了从小事做起并不断改进之外，另一个办法就是事先计划好要做什么。计划通常看起来是更负责任的选择。说 "我们要做 x，然后 y，然后 z "比 "我们要尝试 x，看看会发生什么 "听起来更有条理。这样做的确更有条理，只是效果不佳。 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，但它是必要之恶，是对无情条件的一种回应。你不得不这样做，是因为你使用的是不灵活的媒体，或者是因为你需要协调很多人的工作。如果你的项目规模不大，并使用灵活的媒体，你就不需要做太多的计划，你的设计反而可以不断发展。 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. 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，因此不要追求稳赚不赔，而要追求高预期价值的赌注。如果你不是偶尔失败，那可能是你太保守了。 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. 虽然保守主义通常与老年人联系在一起，但年轻人才容易犯这种错误。经验不足让他们惧怕风险，但正是年轻的时候最能承受风险。 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. 即使是失败的项目，也可能是有价值的。在项目进行的过程中，你会越过很少有人见过的领域，遇到很少有人问过的问题。而问题的最佳来源，可能莫过于你在尝试做一件稍嫌困难的事情时遇到的问题。 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. 当你拥有青春的优势时，要利用青春的优势，一旦你拥有了青春的优势，就要利用年龄的优势。年轻的优势是精力、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后者的一些优势，在年老时保持前者的一些优势。 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. 老年人的优势还在于他们知道自己拥有哪些优势。年轻人往往在不知不觉中就拥有了这些优势。最大的优势可能是时间。年轻人不知道他们的时间有多富裕。将时间转化为优势的最好办法就是把它用在一些略显无聊的方面：出于好奇去了解一些你不需要了解的东西，或者尝试建造一些东西，只是因为这样做很酷，或者在某些方面变得异常出色。 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] "稍微 "是一个重要的限定词。年轻的时候要挥霍时间，但不要简单地浪费时间。做一件你担心可能会浪费时间的事和做一件你知道肯定会浪费时间的事之间有很大的区别。前者至少是一个赌注，而且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，或者更准确地说，缺乏经验，最微妙的优势在于你能以全新的眼光看待一切。当你的大脑第一次接受一个想法时，有时两者并不能完美地结合在一起。通常问题出在你的大脑上，但偶尔也会出在想法上。当你思考时，它的某个部分会笨拙地伸出来，刺痛你的心。习惯了这种想法的人已经学会了忽略它，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. 因此，当你第一次学习某项知识时，要注意那些看起来不对或遗漏的地方。你会很想忽略它们，因为有 99% 的可能问题出在你自己身上。为了继续进步，你可能不得不暂时放下你的疑虑。但不要忘记它们。当你深入研究这个主题后，回来看看它们是否还在。如果它们在你目前的知识水平下仍然可行，那么它们很可能代表了一种未被发现的想法。 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，就是知道什么是不用担心的。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，他们对所有事情都同样担心，而他们应该对少数几件事情担心得更多，对其他事情则几乎不担心。 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. 但你不知道的事情只是缺乏经验问题的一半。另一半问题是你知道的东西并非如此。成年后的你满脑子都是胡言乱语--你养成的坏习惯和别人教给你的错误的东西--除非你至少清除了你想做的任何类型的工作中的胡言乱语，否则你就无法完成出色的工作。 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. 你脑子里的许多胡言乱语都是学校留下的。我们太习惯学校了，以至于不自觉地把上学与学习等同起来，但事实上，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，学校会诱发被动性。从你小时候开始，就有一个权威在教室前面告诉你们必须学什么，然后衡量你们是否做到了。但无论是上课还是考试，都不是学习的本质；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. 越早克服这种被动性越好。如果你还在上学，试着把你的教育当成你的项目，把你的老师当成为你工作的人，而不是相反。这似乎有点夸张，但这不仅仅是一个奇怪的思想实验。在经济上，这是事实，在最好的情况下，在智力上也是事实。最好的老师并不想成为你的老板。他们更希望你勇往直前，把他们当作建议的来源，而不是被他们牵着鼻子走。 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. 学校也会让你对工作产生误解。在学校里，他们会告诉你问题是什么，而这些问题几乎总是可以用你目前所学到的知识来解决。而在现实生活中，你必须找出问题所在，而且往往根本不知道问题是否可以解决。 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. 但学校对你做的最糟糕的事情，也许就是训练你通过破解考试来取胜。这样做是不可能取得好成绩的。你无法欺骗上帝。所以，不要再寻找这种捷径了。战胜系统的方法是专注于别人忽视的问题和解决方案，而不是吝啬于工作本身。 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. 不要把自己看成是某个守门人给你 "重大突破 "的依赖。即使这是真的，最好的办法也是专注于做好工作，而不是追逐有影响力的人。 And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of a feedback loop, and very few are. 不要把委员会的拒绝放在心上。给招生官和评奖委员会留下深刻印象的素质与完成出色工作所需的素质截然不同。遴选委员会的决定只有在其成为反馈循环的一部分时才有意义，而很少有反馈循环。 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. 初入某一领域的人往往会抄袭已有的作品。这本身并没有什么不好。没有比尝试复制更好的学习方法了。抄袭也不一定会使你的作品失去原创性。原创性是新想法的存在，而不是旧想法的缺失。 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] 抄袭有好坏之分。如果要抄袭，就光明正大地抄袭，而不是偷偷摸摸地抄袭，更糟糕的是无意识地抄袭。这就是著名的 "伟大的艺术家偷窃 "这句话的含义。真正危险的抄袭，也就是让抄袭背上恶名的那种抄袭，是在不知不觉中完成的，因为你只不过是一列在别人铺设的轨道上行驶的火车。但在另一个极端，抄袭可能是一种优越而非从属的象征。[25] In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you're first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two cases are more similar than they seem. 在许多领域，你的早期工作在某种意义上都会以他人的工作为基础，这几乎是不可避免的。项目很少在真空中产生。它们通常是对之前工作的反应。刚起步的时候，你没有任何前人的作品；如果你要对某些东西做出反应，那就必须是别人的作品。一旦站稳脚跟，你就可以对自己的作品做出反应。虽然前者被称为衍生品，而后者没有，但从结构上看，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. 说来也怪，最新奇的想法的新颖性有时会使它们起初看起来更像是衍生品。即使是新发现的发现者，最初也不得不把新发现看作是现有事物的变体，因为当时还没有概念词汇来表达它们。 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. 不过，抄袭肯定会有一些危险。其一，你会倾向于抄袭旧事物--那些在当时处于知识前沿的事物，但现在已不再是了。 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，不要复制它的所有功能。如果你这样做，有些人会让你觉得可笑。例如，如果你只有 18 岁，就不要模仿 50 岁知名教授的举止，也不要模仿几百年后文艺复兴时期诗歌的成语。 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. 你所钦佩的事物的某些特征就是它们成功的缺陷。事实上，最容易模仿的特征最有可能就是缺陷。 This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it. 行为方面尤其如此。有些有才华的人很混蛋，这有时会让缺乏经验的人觉得混蛋是有才华的一部分。其实不然，有才华只是他们逍遥法外的一种方式。 One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. 最有效的复制方式之一就是从一个领域复制到另一个领域。历史上充满了这类偶然的发现，因此我们不妨通过有意识地学习其他类型的工作，给偶然性以帮助。你可以从相当遥远的领域中汲取灵感，如果你让它们成为隐喻的话。 Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing. 反面教材和正面教材一样能给人启发。事实上，有时从做得不好的事情中学到的东西比从做得好的事情中学到的东西更多。 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精英都聚集在一个地方，通常去拜访一段时间是个不错的主意。这会增强你的雄心壮志，也会让你知道这些人也是人，从而增强你的自信心。[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. 如果你是认真的，你可能会受到比想象中更热烈的欢迎。大多数在某方面非常出色的人都乐于与任何真正感兴趣的人交谈。如果他们对自己的工作真的很在行，那么他们很可能对自己的工作抱有业余爱好，而业余爱好者总是愿意谈论自己的爱好。 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. 不过，要找到真正优秀的人可能还需要一些努力。在某些地方，尤其是大学，出色的工作具有很高的声望，以至于有一种礼貌性的虚构，认为每个人都在从事这项工作。但事实远非如此。大学里的人不能公开这么说，但不同院系的工作质量差别很大。有些院系有人在做伟大的工作；有些院系过去有人在做伟大的工作；有些院系从来没有人在做伟大的工作。 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。有很多项目不是一个人就能完成的，即使你正在做一个可以完成的项目，有其他人鼓励你并与你交流想法也是件好事。 Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. 同事不仅会影响你的工作，还会影响你自己。因此，要与你想成为的人一起工作，因为你会成为他们的榜样。 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. 对于同事来说，质量比数量更重要。有一两个优秀的同事总比一整栋楼都是优秀的同事要好。事实上，这不仅是更好，而且是必要的，从历史经验来看：伟大工作的集群程度表明，一个人是否能做出伟大的工作，同事往往起着决定性的作用。 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。也就是说，如果你不确定，你可能就不知道。但也许可以给出比这更具体的答案。以下是一个尝试：足够优秀的同事能提供令人惊讶的见解。他们能看到和做到你看不到的东西。因此，如果你有几个足够优秀的同事，能让你在这个意义上保持警惕，那么你很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] 我们中的大多数人都能从与同事的合作中获益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人员，而启动这样的项目并不适合每一个人。如果你想管理这样的项目，你就必须成为一名管理者，而做好管理工作和其他工作一样，需要能力和兴趣。如果你不具备这些条件，就没有中间道路可走：要么强迫自己把管理作为第二语言来学习，要么避免参与此类项目。[27] Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism. 丈夫的士气。当你从事雄心勃勃的项目时，士气是一切的基础。你必须像培养生命有机体一样培养和保护它。 Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim. 士气始于你的人生观。如果你是一个乐观主义者，你就更有可能做出出色的工作；如果你认为自己是幸运儿，就比认为自己是受害者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. 事实上，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，那么它的困难本身就会成为日常生活困难的避难所。如果说这是一种逃避现实的行为，那么它是一种非常有成效的形式，历史上一些最伟大的思想家都曾使用过这种形式。 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. 士气是通过工作产生的：高昂的士气有助于做好工作，而高昂的士气又会提高你的士气，帮助你做得更好。但是，这种循环也有反作用：如果你工作不力，就会打击士气，使你更难做好工作。既然这个循环朝着正确的方向运行非常重要，那么当你陷入困境时，换一种轻松的工作方式不失为一个好主意，这样你就会开始有所收获。 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. 雄心勃勃的人所犯的最大错误之一就是让挫折像气球破裂一样一下子摧毁他们的士气。你可以明确地将挫折视为过程的一部分，从而避免这种情况的发生。解决棘手的问题总是要走一些回头路。 Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again. 做伟大的工作是一种深度优先搜索，其根节点是 "渴望"。因此，"如果一开始没有成功，那就尝试，再尝试 "并不完全正确。应该是如果一开始没有成功，要么再试一次，要么倒回去再试一次。 "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 "也不太对。显然，有时弹射是正确的选择。更准确的说法应该是永远不要让挫折让你惊慌失措，从而走回头路。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. 如果工作很吃力，并不一定是坏兆头，就像跑步时气喘吁吁也不是坏兆头一样。这取决于你跑得有多快。因此，要学会区分好的疼痛和坏的疼痛。好的疼痛是努力的表现，坏的疼痛是受损的表现。 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. 观众是士气的重要组成部分。如果你是学者，你的听众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，你的听众可能是传统意义上的观众。无论哪种方式，观众都不需要太多。受众的价值不会随着受众人数的增加而线性增长。如果你已经成名，这将是个坏消息，但如果你刚刚起步，这将是个好消息，因为这意味着少量但忠实的观众就足以支撑你的事业。如果有少数人真心喜欢你的作品，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] 尽可能避免让中间人介入你和受众之间。在某些类型的作品中，这种情况不可避免，但摆脱这种情况是一种极大的自由，因此，如果能让你直接进行创作，你最好转到相邻类型的作品中去。[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. 与你朝夕相处的人也会对你的士气产生很大影响。你会发现有些人会增加你的能量，有些人会减少你的能量，而有些人所产生的影响并不总是你所期望的。寻找那些能增加你能量的人，避开那些会降低你能量的人。当然，如果有人需要你照顾，那就优先考虑。 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. 不要嫁给不理解你需要工作的人，或者把你的工作看作是对你注意力的竞争。如果你有雄心壮志，你就需要工作；这几乎就像一种病症；因此，不让你工作的人要么不理解你，要么理解你却不在乎。 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] 归根结底，士气就是身体。你用身体思考，所以照顾好身体很重要。这意味着要经常锻炼身体，吃好睡好，避免服用危险性较高的药物。跑步和散步是特别好的锻炼方式，因为它们有利于思考。[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. 工作出色的人不一定比其他人更快乐，但他们比不工作的人更快乐。事实上，如果你既聪明又有雄心壮志，不工作是很危险的。那些聪明、有抱负却没有什么成就的人往往会变得痛苦。 It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise. 想给别人留下好印象是可以的，但要选对人。你尊重的人的意见就是信号。名声，是更大群体的意见，你可能尊重，也可能不尊重，只是增加了噪音。 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跟踪指标，有时甚至是完全错误的。如果你把任何事情做得足够好，你就会让它声名远播。因此，对于一个工种，要问的问题不是它的声望有多高，而是它能做得多好。 Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder. 竞争可以成为一种有效的动力，但不要让竞争为你选择问题；不要因为别人在追逐什么，自己就被吸引去追逐什么。事实上，除了更加努力地工作之外，不要让竞争对手让你做任何更具体的事情。 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。你的好奇心从不说谎，它比你更清楚什么值得关注。 Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on "curiosity." 注意这个词出现的频率。如果你问一个神谕者做伟大工作的秘诀，而神谕者只回答了一个词，我打赌他一定会说 "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。光有好奇心是不够的，而且无论如何，你也无法命令自己有好奇心。但你可以培养它，让它驱动你。 Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity. 好奇心是完成伟大工作的所有四个步骤的关键：它会为你选择领域，带你进入前沿，让你注意到其中的差距，并驱使你去探索它们。整个过程就是与好奇心共舞的过程。 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，我试图让这篇文章尽可能简短。但它的长度至少意味着它起到了过滤器的作用。如果你能走到这一步，你一定有兴趣做伟大的工作。如果是这样，你已经比你可能意识到的走得更远了，因为愿意这样做的人并不多。 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? 做伟大工作的因素是字面数学意义上的因素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。运气顾名思义就是你无能为力，所以我们可以忽略不计。如果你确实想做出伟大的事业，我们可以假设你付出了努力。因此，问题归根结底在于能力和兴趣。你能找到一种工作，让你的能力和兴趣结合起来，产生爆炸性的新想法吗？ 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. 我们有理由感到乐观。有许多不同的方式可以完成出色的工作，甚至还有更多的方式尚未被发现。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，你最适合的那一种可能是非常接近的。可能是非常接近。问题只是能否找到它，以及你的能力和兴趣能把你带入其中多深。而这只能通过尝试来回答。 Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question. 想做大事的人比想做大事的人多得多。阻碍他们的是谦虚和恐惧。想成为牛顿或莎士比亚似乎很冒昧。这似乎也很困难；如果你尝试这样的事情，你肯定会失败。据推测，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。但潜意识里就是这样，他们对这个问题避而不谈。 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，我要偷偷地骗你一下。你到底想不想做伟大的工作？现在你必须有意识地做出决定。很抱歉我不会对普通观众这么做的但我们已经知道你感兴趣了 Don't worry about being presumptuous. You don't have to tell anyone. And if it's too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have worse problems than that. In fact you'll be lucky if it's the worst problem you have. 别担心会冒昧。你不必告诉任何人。如果太难了，你失败了，那又怎样？很多人都有比这更糟糕的问题。事实上，如果这是你遇到的最糟糕的问题，你就很幸运了。 Yes, you'll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to work hard. And if you're working on something you find very interesting, which you necessarily will if you're on the right path, the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your peers'. 是的，你必须努力工作。但同样，很多人都要努力工作。而且，如果你从事的工作是你觉得非常有趣的，如果你走的是正确的道路，你一定会觉得非常有趣，那么你的工作可能会比你的许多同龄人感觉轻松一些。 The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you? 发现就在那里，等待着我们去发现。为什么不是你？ 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. [1] 我不认为你可以给什么是伟大的工作下一个精确的定义。伟大的工作是指把一件重要的事情做得如此出色，以至于拓展了人们的想象空间。但重要性并没有门槛。这是一个程度问题，而且往往很难在当时做出判断。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。只要努力做一些了不起的事情，至于你是否成功，就留给后人去评说吧。 [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] 很多段子喜剧都是以注意到日常生活中的反常现象为基础的。"你有没有注意到......？新创意来自于对非小事的观察。这或许有助于解释为什么人们对新想法的反应往往是笑的前半部分：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. [3] 第二个修饰词至关重要。如果你对大多数权威人士都不屑一顾的事情感到兴奋，但除了 "他们不懂 "之外，你无法给出更准确的解释，那么你就开始进入 "怪人 "的行列了。 [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] 找到要解决的问题并不是简单地在当前版本的你和已知问题列表之间找到匹配。你往往必须与问题共同发展。这就是为什么有时很难找出要解决的问题。搜索空间是巨大的。它是所有可能的工作类型（包括已知的和尚未发现的）与所有可能的未来版本的乘积。 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. 你不可能搜索到整个空间，所以你必须依靠启发式方法在其中生成有希望的路径，并希望最佳匹配能够集中在一起。但并不总是这样；不同类型的作品被收集在一起，既有历史的偶然性，也有内在的相似性。 [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. [5] 好奇心强的人更有可能做出伟大的工作，原因有很多，但其中一个更微妙的原因是，通过广撒网，他们更有可能在一开始就找到合适的工作。 [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]为那些你觉得不如你成熟的观众制作作品也是很危险的，因为这会导致你对他们说三道四。如果你以足够愤世嫉俗的方式去做，你可以赚很多钱，但这并不是通往伟大作品的道路。使用这种方法的人不会在乎这些。 [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] 我是从哈代的《数学家的道歉》一书中了解到这一观点的，我向任何领域有志于从事伟大工作的人推荐这本书。 [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] 正如我们高估了自己一天所能做的事情而低估了自己几年所能做的事情一样，我们高估了拖延一天所造成的损害而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. [9] 通常情况下，你不可能完全按照自己的想法去做事，尤其是在创业初期。有两种选择：做接近你想要的工作获得报酬，并希望能把它推得更近；或者做完全不同的工作获得报酬，并兼职做自己的项目。这两种方法都可行，但都有缺点：第一种方法是你的工作默认会受到影响，第二种方法是你必须争取时间去做。 [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. [10] 如果你把生活安排得当，它就会自动实现 "专注-放松 "循环。最完美的设置就是你在办公室里工作，并步行往返。 [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. [11]也许有一些非常不谙世事的人，会不自觉地做出伟大的事业。如果你想把这条规则扩展到这种情况，它就变成了：除了最好的，不要试图成为任何东西。 [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] 在表演等工作中，这种情况会变得更加复杂，因为表演的目的是为了塑造一个虚假的角色。但即使在这种情况下，也有可能受到影响。或许，此类领域的规则应该是避免无意的表演。 [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]当且仅当信仰是不可证伪的时候，你才会认为它是安全的。例如，"法律应该平等对待每个人 "的原则是安全的，因为句子中的 "应该 "并不是对世界的真实陈述，因此很难被推翻。如果没有证据可以推翻你的某项原则，那么你就不可能为了维护它而忽略任何事实。 [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] 感情用事比智力不诚实更容易治愈。感情用事往往是年轻人的缺点，随着时间的推移会逐渐消失，而智力上的不诚实则更像是一种性格缺陷。 [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，你不一定非要在有这个想法的时候工作，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] 有人说精神药物也有类似的效果。我对此持怀疑态度，但也几乎完全不了解它们的效果。 [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，你可以给第 n 个最重要的主题 (m-1)/m^n 的注意力，对于某个 m > 1。当然，你不可能如此精确地分配你的注意力，但这至少给出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. [18] 界定宗教的原则必须是错误的。否则，任何人都可以接受这些原则，宗教信徒与其他人也就没有什么区别了。 [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] 试着写下你年轻时想知道的一系列问题，也许是个不错的练习。你可能会发现自己现在有能力为其中的一些问题做些什么。 [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] 独创性与不确定性之间的联系导致了一种奇怪的现象：由于墨守成规的人比独立思考的人更有把握，这往往会让他们在争论中占上风，尽管他们一般都比较愚蠢。 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] 源自莱纳斯-鲍林（Linus Pauling）的 "如果你想有好的想法，你就必须有很多想法"。 [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. [22] 把一个项目抨击为 "玩具"，就好比把一个声明抨击为 "不恰当"。它的意思是，再实质性的批评也无法让人信服。 [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个方法就是问你是在生产还是在消费。写电脑游戏比玩电脑游戏更不可能浪费时间，而玩游戏时创造东西比不创造东西更不可能浪费时间。 [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，如果你还没有公开说过什么，你就不会偏向于支持你先前结论的证据。只要足够正直，你就能在这方面永葆青春，但很少有人能做到这一点。对大多数人来说，以前发表过的观点会产生类似于意识形态的效果，只是在数量上有所不同。 [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] 1630年代初，丹尼尔-迈腾斯（Daniel Mytens）画了一幅亨利埃塔-玛丽亚（Henrietta Maria）向查理一世递送桂冠花环的画。 [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] 我对 "地点 "的定义故意含糊其辞。截至本文撰写时，在同一个物理场所具有难以复制的优势，但这可能会改变。 [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] 当其他人必须做的工作非常有限时，这种说法就是错误的，比如 SETI@home 或比特币。通过定义类似的受限协议，让节点有更大的行动自由，也许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：建立一个能让人们绕过中介机构，直接与受众接触的平台也许是个好主意。 [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. [29]总是走或跑同一条路线可能会有帮助，因为这样可以解放思考的注意力。我觉得是这样，而且有一些历史证据可以证明这一点。 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. |