如何做出伟大的事业

How to Do Great Work

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.
如果您收集了在许多不同领域取得出色工作的技术列表，那么交集会是什么样子？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."
我的部分目标是创建一个可供任何领域工作的人使用的指南。但我也对十字路口的形状感到好奇。这个练习表明的一件事是它确实有一个明确的形状；这不仅仅是一个标有“努力工作”的点。

The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
以下食谱假设您非常雄心勃勃。

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.
第一步是决定要做什么。你选择的工作需要具备三个品质：它必须是你有天赋的东西，你对此有浓厚的兴趣，并且提供了完成伟大工作的空间。

In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1]
实际上，您不必太担心第三个标准。雄心勃勃的人对此已经过于保守了。因此，您需要做的就是找到您有天赋并且非常感兴趣的东西。 [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，但通常非常困难。当你年轻的时候，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不知道不同种类的工作是什么样的。你最终要做的某些工作可能还不存在。因此，虽然有些人知道自己 14 岁时想做什么，但大多数人都必须弄清楚。

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.
弄清楚要做什么的方法就是通过工作。如果您不确定要做什么，请猜测。但选择一些东西然后开始吧。有时你可能会猜错，但这没关系。了解多种事物是件好事；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.
养成从事自己项目的习惯。不要让“工作”意味着别人告诉你要做的事情。如果有一天你确实能做出出色的工作，那很可能是在你自己的一个项目上。它可能在一些更大的项目中，但你将推动你的部分。

What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.
你的项目应该是什么？任何在你看来令人兴奋的雄心勃勃的事情。随着年龄的增长和对项目的品味的变化，令人兴奋和重要的事情将会融合在一起。 7 岁的时候，用乐高搭建巨大的东西似乎是令人兴奋的雄心勃勃，然后 14 岁的时候自学微积分，直到 21 岁开始探索物理学中尚未解答的问题。但始终保持兴奋。

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，它既是伟大工作的引擎，也是伟大工作的舵。它不仅会驱动你，而且如果你顺其自然，它也会告诉你应该做什么。

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
你对什么过度好奇——好奇到让大多数人感到厌烦的程度？这就是您要寻找的。

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.
一旦你发现了你非常感兴趣的东西，下一步就是充分了解它，让你到达知识的前沿之一。知识呈分形扩展，从远处看，它的边缘看起来很光滑，但一旦你学到了足够多的知识，接近一个边缘，就会发现它们充满了间隙。

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，因为你的大脑想要忽略这些差距，以便建立一个更简单的世界模型。许多发现都来自于对其他人认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。伟大的作品常常带有一丝陌生的味道。从绘画到数学你都能看到这一点。尝试制造它会受到影响，但如果它出现，就拥抱它。

Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. [3]
大胆地追寻离奇的想法，即使其他人对此不感兴趣——事实上，尤其是如果他们不感兴趣的话。如果你对其他人都忽略的某种可能性感到兴奋，并且你有足够的专业知识来准确说出他们都忽略的事情，那么这就是你会发现的最好的选择。 [3]

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
四个步骤：选择一个领域，学习足够的知识以达到前沿，注意到差距，探索有前途的领域。实际上，从画家到物理学家，每个做出伟大工作的人都是这样做的。

Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could.
第二步和第四步需要努力。也许无法证明你必须努力工作才能做伟大的事情，但经验证据的规模与死亡率的证据相当。这就是为什么从事你非常感兴趣的事情是至关重要的。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.
三个最强大的动机是好奇心、快乐和想做一些令人印象深刻的事情的愿望。有时它们会融合在一起，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.
最大的奖励是发现一个新的分形芽。你注意到知识表面有一条裂缝，把它撬开，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]
让我们多谈谈弄清楚要做什么的复杂事情。其困难的主要原因是，除非亲自去做，否则你无法辨别大多数类型的工作是什么样的。这意味着这四个步骤是重叠的：你可能需要在某件事上工作多年才能知道你有多喜欢它或者你有多擅长它。与此同时，你并没有做，因此也没有学习大多数其他类型的工作。因此，在最坏的情况下，您会根据非常不完整的信息选择延迟。 [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，一种是先于对某个主题的兴趣，另一种是由对该主题产生的兴趣。大多数出色工作的人都是混合的，而且前者越多，就越难决定做什么。

The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.
大多数国家的教育系统都假装这很容易。他们希望你早在知道某个领域到底是什么样子之前就投入其中。因此，一个处于最佳轨道上的雄心勃勃的人经常会将系统视为破坏的例子。

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那就更好了——如果他们承认这个系统不仅不能帮助你弄清楚该做什么，而且它的设计假设你在青少年时期会以某种方式神奇地猜测。他们不会告诉你，但我会告诉你：当谈到弄清楚要做什么时，你得靠自己。有些人很幸运，确实猜对了，但其他人会发现自己在假设每个人都这样做的情况下沿着对角线爬行。

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、有抱负但不知道该做什么，你该怎么办？你不应该做的是被动地随波逐流，假设问题会自行解决。你需要采取行动。但没有可以遵循的系统程序。当你阅读那些做出了伟大工作的人的传记时，你会发现其中涉及到多少运气。他们通过一次偶然的机会，或者通过读一本他们偶然拿起的书来发现要做什么。所以你需要让自己成为一个幸运的大目标，而做到这一点的方法就是保持好奇心。尝试很多事情，认识很多人，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.
如有疑问，请针对兴趣进行优化。当您了解更多领域时，领域就会发生变化。例如，数学家所做的事情与你在高中数学课上所做的事情非常不同。所以你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会来展示它们是什么样的。但当你对某个领域了解得越多时，它就会变得越来越有趣。如果没有，它可能不适合你。

Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.
如果您发现自己对与其他人不同的事物感兴趣，请不要担心。你的兴趣爱好越陌生越好。奇怪的品味往往很强烈，而强烈的工作品味意味着你会富有成效。如果您正在寻找以前很少有人关注过的地方，那么您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.
您适合某种工作的一个标志是，您甚至喜欢其他人认为乏味或令人恐惧的部分。

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.
但田野不是人，而是田野。你不欠他们任何忠诚。如果在做一件事的过程中你发现另一件事更令人兴奋，不要害怕改变。

If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience.
如果你要为人们做一些东西，请确保这是他们真正想要的东西。做到这一点的最好方法就是做一些你自己想要的东西。写下你想读的故事；构建您想要使用的工具。由于您的朋友可能有相似的兴趣，这也将为您带来最初的受众。

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，最令人兴奋的故事将是您想读的故事。我之所以明确提及这个案例，是因为很多人都误解了。他们没有制作他们想要的东西，而是尝试制作一些想象中的、更复杂的观众想要的东西。一旦你沿着这条路走下去，你就会迷路。 [6]

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.
当你试图弄清楚要做什么时，有很多力量会让你误入歧途。自命不凡、时尚、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、显着的欺诈。但如果你坚持做你真正感兴趣的事情，你就会战胜所有这些。如果你有兴趣，你就不会迷失方向。

Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness.
追随你的兴趣可能听起来像是一种相当被动的策略，但实际上，这通常意味着追随你的兴趣，克服各种障碍。你通常必须冒被拒绝和失败的风险。所以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.
但是，虽然您需要勇气，但通常不需要太多计划。在大多数情况下，做好工作的秘诀很简单：在令人兴奋的雄心勃勃的项目上努力工作，并且会带来好的结果。您只需尝试保留某些不变量，而不是制定计划然后执行它。

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。你可以通过小时候的决定并顽强地追求这个目标来赢得金牌或致富，但你无法通过这种方式发现自然选择。

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it.
我认为对于大多数想要做好工作的人来说，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，并为你的未来提供最好的选择。我将这种方法称为“保持上风”。大多数做出伟大工作的人似乎都是这样做的。

Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't like that.
即使你发现了一些令人兴奋的事情可以做，但做起来并不总是那么简单。有时，一些新想法会让你早上从床上跳起来直接开始工作。但也有很多时候事情并非如此。

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.
你不只是扬起风帆，被灵感吹向前方。这里有逆风、洋流和隐藏的浅滩。所以工作是有技巧的，就像航海有技巧一样。

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，你会发现你的回报递减：疲劳会让你变得愚蠢，最终甚至损害你的健康。工作收益递减的点取决于工作类型。一些最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，这些时间是连续的。尽你所能，尝试安排你的生活，这样你就有大量的时间可以工作。如果你知道自己可能会被打扰，你就会回避艰巨的任务。

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才能跨过最初的门槛。不用担心这个；这是工作的本质，而不是你性格上的缺陷。工作有一种激活能量，无论是每天还是每个项目。由于这个阈值是假的，因为它高于继续前进所需的能量，所以可以告诉自己相应大小的谎言来克服它。

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，对自己撒谎通常是错误的，但这是极少数情况并非如此的情况之一。当我早上不愿意开始工作时，我经常欺骗自己说：“我会读一下到目前为止所读到的内容。”五分钟后，我发现了一些似乎错误或不完整的东西，然后我就离开了。

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?"
类似的技术也适用于启动新项目。例如，在一个项目需要多少工作量上对自己撒谎是可以的。许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.
这是年轻人具有优势的一个例子。他们更加乐观，尽管他们乐观的根源之一是无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时可以击败知识。

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.
不过，尝试完成你开始做的事情，即使结果比你预期的要多。完成事情不仅仅是一种整洁或自律的练习。在许多项目中，许多最好的工作都发生在最后阶段。

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，至少在你自己看来是这样。如果这能帮助你发现新的东西，那么它可能根本就不是谎言。 [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]
由于开始工作有两种感觉——每天和每个项目——所以拖延也有两种形式。每个项目的拖延要危险得多。你年复一年地推迟启动这个雄心勃勃的项目，因为时间不太合适。当你以年为单位拖延时，你可能会做很多事情没有完成。 [8]

One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.
每个项目的拖延如此危险的原因之一是它通常将自己伪装成工作。你不只是坐在那里无所事事；你正在勤奋地做其他事情。因此，按项目拖延不会像按天拖延那样引发警报。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：我正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，这种情况会变得越来越危险。 [9]

Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.
伟大的工作通常需要在一个问题上花费对大多数人来说似乎不合理的时间。你不能把这个时间当成成本，不然会显得太高了。你必须发现这项工作在发生时足够有吸引力。

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.
在某些工作中，你可能必须在你讨厌的事情上勤奋工作数年才能获得好的部分，但这并不是伟大工作的发生方式。伟大的工作是通过始终专注于你真正感兴趣的事情而发生的。当你停下来盘点时，你会惊讶于自己已经走了多远。

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
我们感到惊讶的原因是我们低估了工作的累积效应。每天写一页听起来不多，但如果你每天都这样做，一年就可以写一本书。这就是关键：一致性。做伟大事情的人并不是每天都能完成很多事情。他们有所作为，而不是无所作为。

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.
如果你做复合性的工作，你就会获得指数级的增长。大多数这样做的人都是无意识的，但值得停下来思考一下。例如，学习就是这种现象的一个例子：你对某事物了解得越多，就越容易学到更多。增加观众是另一回事：你拥有的粉丝越多，他们就会为你带来越多的新粉丝。

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，曲线一开始感觉平坦。事实并非如此；它仍然是一条美妙的指数曲线。但我们无法直观地理解这一点，因此我们低估了早期的指数增长。

Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.
呈指数级增长的东西会变得非常有价值，以至于值得付出非凡的努力来开始它。但由于我们早期低估了指数增长，这也大多是无意识地完成的：人们在学习新事物的最初、无回报的阶段中坚持下去，因为他们从经验中知道学习新事物总是需要最初的推动，或者他们让观众成为粉丝一次因为他们没有更好的事情可做。如果人们有意识地意识到他们可以投资于指数级增长，那么就会有更多人这样做。

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.
工作不会在你努力的时候发生。当你走路、洗澡或躺在床上时，你会产生一种非常强大的无向思维。通过让你的思绪稍微游离一下，你通常会解决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。你不能只是到处走走做白日梦。白日梦必须与那些为其提出问题的深思熟虑的工作交织在一起。 [10]

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)
每个人都知道在工作中避免分心，但在周期的另一半中避免分心也很重要。当你让你的思绪游离时，它就会飘到你当时最关心的事情上。因此，要避免那种让你的工作失去优势的干扰，否则你就会把这种宝贵的思考浪费在干扰上。 （例外：不要回避爱。）

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.
有意识地培养你对自己领域工作的品味。除非您知道哪一个是最好的以及是什么让它如此，否则您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，因为如果你不努力成为最好的，你就不会优秀。许多不同领域的许多人都做出了这一观察，因此可能值得思考为什么它是正确的。这可能是因为野心是一种现象，几乎所有的错误都在一个方向上——几乎所有未击中目标的炮弹都因未能达到目标而错过。或者可能是因为“成为最好的”的野心与“成为优秀的人”的野心有本质上的不同。或者，也许“善良”这个标准太模糊了。也许这三个都是真的。 [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。虽然看起来你会因为努力成为最好而承担沉重的负担，但实际上你常常最终会取得净领先。这很令人兴奋，也有一种奇怪的解放感。它简化了事情。在某些方面，努力成为最好的人比仅仅努力成为优秀的人更容易。

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.
实现远大目标的一种方法是尝试做出一百年后人们会关心的东西。并不是因为他们的观点比同时代人的观点更重要，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.
不要尝试以独特的风格工作。尽力把工作做到最好；你将无法帮助以一种独特的方式来做这件事。

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尝试。尝试就是做作。

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. [12]
装腔作势实际上是假装是别人在做这项工作，而不是你。你采用了一个令人印象深刻但虚假的角色，虽然你对这种印象很满意，但作品中却表现出了虚假。 [12]

The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.
对于年轻人来说，成为别人的诱惑是最大的。他们常常感觉自己无名小卒。但你永远不需要担心这个问题，因为如果你从事足够雄心勃勃的项目，它是可以自行解决的。如果你在一个雄心勃勃的项目上取得了成功，那么你就不再是一个无名小卒；而是一个无名小卒。你就是做这件事的人。因此，只要做好工作，你的身份就会水到渠成。

"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices.
就目前而言，“避免矫揉造作”是一条有用的规则，但你会如何积极地表达这个想法呢？你会如何说应该做什么，而不是不应该做什么？最好的回答是认真的。如果你真诚，你不仅可以避免做作，还可以避免一整套类似的恶习。

The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?
认真的核心是理智上的诚实。我们从小就被教导要诚实，这是一种无私的美德，也是一种牺牲。但事实上它也是一种力量的来源。要看到新的想法，你需要有一双敏锐的眼睛来发现真相。你正试图看到比其他人迄今为止看到的更多的真相。如果你在智力上不诚实，你怎么能有敏锐的洞察力呢？

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]
避免智力欺诈的一种方法是在相反方向保持轻微的正压力。积极主动地承认自己的错误。一旦你承认自己在某件事上犯了错误，你就自由了。到那时你必须携带它。 [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的。非正式性比其语法上否定的名称所暗示的重要得多。这不仅仅是缺少某些东西。这意味着专注于重要的事情，而不是不重要的事情。

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd.
拘谨和矫揉造作的共同点是，除了工作之外，你还试图在工作中表现出某种特定的方式。但任何影响你外表的能量都来自于善良。这就是书呆子在完成出色工作时具有优势的原因之一：他们很少花精力在外表上。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.
书呆子有一种天真的勇气，这正是你完成伟大工作所需要的。这不是学来的；它是从童年就保存下来的。所以坚持下去。成为一个把事情摆出来的人，而不是一个袖手旁观并对其提出听起来复杂的批评的人。 “批评很容易”这句话从字面上看是对的，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.
在某些工作中，愤世嫉俗和悲观可能是一种优势，但如果你想做好工作，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。有一种反其道而行之的古老传统。旧约说最好保持安静，以免看起来像个傻瓜。但这是显得聪明的建议。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，而另一些人则需要有意识的努力。任何一种认真就足够了。但我怀疑，如果不认真，就不可能做出伟大的工作。即使你是这样，也很难做到。你没有足够的容错余地来适应因受影响、智力上的不诚实、正统、时尚或酷而带来的扭曲。 [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.
伟大的作品不仅与完成它的人一致，而且与它本身一致。通常都是一个整体。因此，如果你在做某件事的过程中面临一个决定，问问哪个选择更一致。

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?
你可能不得不扔掉一些东西并重做它们。你不一定必须这样做，但你必须愿意这样做。这可能需要一些努力；当你需要重做某些事情时，现状偏见和懒惰会让你否认它。为了解决这个问题，请问：如果我已经做出了改变，我是否想恢复到现在的状态？

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.
有信心去剪。不要仅仅因为一些不合适的东西让你感到自豪，或者因为它花费了你很多努力而保留它。

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.
事实上，在某些工作中，剥离你正在做的事情的本质是件好事。结果会更集中；你会更好地理解它；你无法欺骗自己是否存在真实的东西。

Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant" applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math.
数学的优雅听起来可能只是一个源自艺术的隐喻。当我第一次听到“优雅”一词应用于证明时，我就是这么想的。但现在我怀疑它在概念上是先验的——艺术优雅的主要成分是数学优雅。无论如何，它是一个远远超出数学范围的有用标准。

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.
不过，优雅可以是一个长期的赌注。费力的解决方案往往会在短期内获得更高的威望。它们花费了大量的精力，而且很难理解，但这两点都给人留下了深刻的印象，至少是暂时的。

Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.
然而，一些最好的作品看起来似乎花费了相对较少的努力，因为它在某种意义上已经存在了。它不必建造，只需观看即可。当很难说你是在创造某些东西还是在发现它时，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.
当你从事的工作既可以被视为创造，也可以被视为发现时，宁可犯探索的错误。试着把自己想象成一个简单的渠道，通过这个渠道，想法自然形成。

(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case it's more like creating something. In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it.)
（奇怪的是，一个例外是选择要解决的问题的问题。这通常被视为搜索，但在最好的情况下，它更像是创建一些东西。在最好的情况下，您在探索它的过程中创建了该字段。 ）

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，如果您想构建一个强大的工具，请使其不受限制。一个强大的工具几乎从定义上讲就会以您意想不到的方式使用，所以最好宁可消除限制，即使您不知道这样做会带来什么好处。

Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas.
伟大的作品往往就像工具一样，是其他人构建的基础。因此，如果您正在创造其他人可以使用的想法，或者提出其他人可以回答的问题，那么这是一个好兆头。最好的想法在许多不同领域都有影响。

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended.
如果你以最一般的形式表达你的想法，它们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，真实本身还不够。伟大的想法必须是真实的和新颖的。即使您已经学到了足够多的知识以达到知识的前沿之一，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，我们给这种能力起一些名字，比如原创性、创造力和想象力。给它一个单独的名称似乎是合理的，因为它在某种程度上似乎确实是一种单独的技能。有可能在其他方面拥有很多能力——拥有很多通常被称为“技术能力”的东西——但在这方面却没有太多。

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“创意过程”这个词。这似乎有误导性。原创不是一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。原创思想家对他们关注的任何事物都会抛出新的想法，就像角磨机抛出火花一样。他们无能为力。

If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understand very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear.
如果他们关注的事情是他们不太理解的事情，那么这些新想法可能不好。我认识的一位最具原创性的思想家在离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解与一般 15 岁的人大致相同，而且约会的结果也非常丰富多彩。但看到原创性与专业知识如此分离，它的本质就变得更加清晰。

I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but there are definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. For example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. [15]
我不知道是否有可能培养原创性，但肯定有方法可以充分利用你所拥有的一切。例如，当你在做某事时，你更有可能产生原创想法。原创想法并不是来自尝试拥有原创想法。它们来自于尝试构建或理解一些稍微困难的东西。 [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。当你试图把想法变成文字时，一个缺失的想法会产生一种真空，将你的想法从你身上吸走。确实，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]
改变你的背景会有帮助。如果你去一个新地方，你经常会发现那里有新的想法。旅程本身常常让他们感到流离失所。但您可能不需要走很远就能获得这种好处。有时候，只是去散步就足够了。 [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.
它还有助于在主题空间中旅行。如果您探索许多不同的主题，您将会有更多的新想法，部分原因是它为角磨机提供了更多的工作空间，部分原因是类比是新想法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，不要将你的注意力平均分配到许多主题上，否则你的注意力就会分散。你想根据更像幂律的东西来分配它。 [17] 对一些主题保持职业好奇，并对更多主题保持闲散好奇。

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.
好奇心和原创性密切相关。好奇心通过给予新的工作机会来滋养原创性。但关系比这更密切。好奇心本身就是一种原创性；粗略地说，问题的原创性就是答案的原创性。由于问题在最好的情况下是答案的重要组成部分，因此好奇心在最好的情况下是一种创造力。

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?
产生新想法是一种奇怪的游戏，因为它通常包括看到就在你眼皮子底下的东西。一旦你看到一个新想法，它往往看起来很明显。为什么以前没有人想到这一点？

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明显时，它可能是一个好想法。

Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction? It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard.
看到明显的东西听起来很容易。然而，凭经验获得新想法是很困难的。这种明显矛盾的根源是什么？看到新想法通常需要你改变看待世界的方式。我们通过既帮助又限制我们的模型来看待世界。当你修复损坏的模型时，新的想法就会变得显而易见。但发现并修复损坏的模型是很困难的。这就是为什么新想法既显而易见又难以发现：在你做了一些困难的事情之后，它们很容易被发现。

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.
发现损坏模型的一种方法是比其他人更严格。破碎的世界模型留下了与现实相悖的线索。大多数人不想看到这些线索。轻描淡写地说，他们依附于当前的模式。这就是他们的想法；因此，他们往往会忽略其破损留下的线索，无论事后看来多么明显。

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.
为了找到新的想法，你必须抓住破损的迹象，而不是移开视线。这就是爱因斯坦所做的。他能够看到麦克斯韦方程组的巨大含义，与其说是因为他在寻找新的想法，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.
您需要的另一件事是愿意打破规则。尽管听起来很矛盾，但如果你想修复你的世界模型，成为那种乐于打破规则的人会有所帮助。从包括你在内的每个人最初共享的旧模型的角度来看，新模型通常至少会打破隐含的规则。

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，就会显得更加保守。一旦你使用他们带来的新世界模型，他们看起来就完全合理了。但他们当时并没有这么做；日心说模型花了大半个世纪才被普遍接受，甚至在天文学家中也是如此，因为它感觉非常错误。

Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.
事实上，如果你仔细想想，一个好的新想法对大多数人来说一定是糟糕的，否则就有人已经探索过它了。所以你要寻找的是看似疯狂的想法，但却是正确的疯狂。你如何认识这些？你不能肯定。通常看似糟糕的想法实际上是糟糕的。但真正疯狂的想法往往会令人兴奋。它们蕴含着丰富的含义；而仅仅糟糕的想法往往会令人沮丧。

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.
有两种方法可以让你轻松地打破规则：享受打破规则的乐趣，以及对规则漠不关心。我将这两种情况称为主动独立思想和被动独立思想。

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.
具有积极独立思想的人是顽皮的人。规则不仅不能阻止它们，而且还能阻止它们。打破规则会给他们额外的能量。对于这类人来说，对一个项目的纯粹大胆感到高兴有时会提供足够的激活能量来开始它。

The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs. Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.
打破规则的另一种方法是不关心它们，甚至不知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和局外人经常会有新的发现；他们对某个领域的假设的无知是暂时被动独立思想的根源。阿斯皮似乎对传统信仰也有一定的免疫力。我认识的几个人说这有助于他们产生新想法。

Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination. In popular culture they're opposed. But popular culture has a broken model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking are opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict.
严格加上违反规则听起来是一个奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，他们是反对的。但流行文化在这方面的模式已经被打破。它隐含地假定问题是琐碎的，在琐碎的事情上反对严格和破坏规则。但在真正重要的问题上，只有打破规则的人才能真正严格。

An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.
一个被忽视的想法往往直到半决赛才输。你确实在潜意识中看到了它，但你潜意识的另一部分却将其否决，因为它太奇怪、太冒险、太多工作、太有争议。这表明了一个令人兴奋的可能性：如果你可以关闭此类过滤器，你可以看到更多新想法。

One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.
一种方法是询问其他人有什么好的想法可以探索。那么你的潜意识就不会为了保护你而击落它们。

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.
您还可以通过朝另一个方向努力来发现被忽视的想法：从掩盖它们的事物开始。每一个被珍视但被错误的原则都被有价值的想法的死区所包围，这些想法因为与原则相矛盾而未被探索。

Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type. [18]
宗教是珍贵但错误的原则的集合。因此，任何可以从字面上或隐喻上描述为宗教的事物，都将在其阴影下蕴藏着有价值的、未经探索的思想。哥白尼和达尔文都做出了此类发现。 [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?
在你的领域里，人们对什么有宗教信仰，即过于执着于某些可能并不像他们想象的那么不言自明的原则？如果你放弃它，会发生什么？

People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
人们在解决问题时比在决定解决哪些问题时表现出更多的独创性。即使是最聪明的人在决定做什么时也会出人意料地保守。那些从来没有梦想以任何其他方式变得时尚的人会沉迷于解决时尚问题。

One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But even so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems are undervalued.
人们在选择问题而不是解决方案时更加保守的原因之一是，问题是更大的赌注。一个问题可能会花费你数年的时间，而探索解决方案可能只需要几天的时间。但即便如此我认为大多数人都过于保守。他们不仅要应对风险，还要应对时尚。不流行的问题被低估了。

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.
最有趣的一种不流行的问题是人们认为已经被充分探索但实际上还没有的问题。伟大的作品往往需要一些已经存在的东西并展示其潜在的潜力。丢勒和瓦特都做到了这一点。因此，如果你对别人认为已经开发出来的领域感兴趣，不要让他们的怀疑阻止你。人们在这一点上常常是错误的。

Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And there's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted.
解决一个不流行的问题可能会非常令人愉快。没有炒作或匆忙。机会主义者和批评家都忙于别处。现有的作品通常具有老式的坚固性。培养原本会被浪费的创意，会带来一种令人满意的节约感。

But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these? By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way, and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on "important" problems.
但最常见的被忽视的问题并不是从过时的意义上来说明显不时尚。它看起来并不像实际那么重要。你如何找到这些？通过自我放纵——让你的好奇心发挥作用，至少暂时忽略你头脑中那个说你应该只研究“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.
你确实需要解决重要的问题，但几乎每个人对于什么算作“一”都过于保守。如果您的社区存在一个重要但被忽视的问题，它可能已经出现在您的潜意识雷达屏幕上。所以试着问问自己：如果你打算从“严肃”的工作中休息一下，去做某件事，只是因为它真的很有趣，你会怎么做？答案可能比看起来更重要。

Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game.
选择问题的独创性似乎比解决问题的独创性更重要。这就是发现全新领域的人的独特之处。因此，看似只是第一步——决定做什么——在某种意义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.
很少有人明白这一点。对新想法最大的误解之一是其作文中问题与答案的比例。人们认为伟大的想法就是答案，但真正的洞察力往往存在于问题之中。

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是它们在学校中的使用方式。在学校里，它们往往只存在很短的时间，然后就得到答案，就像不稳定的粒子一样。但一个真正好的问题可以远不止于此。一个真正好的问题是部分发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体坠落地球的力与使行星保持在其轨道上的力相同吗？即使问了这样的问题，你就已经进入了令人兴奋的新领域。

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.
随身携带未解答的问题可能会让您感到不舒服。但你携带的东西越多，发现解决方案的机会就越大——或者更令人兴奋的是，发现两个未解答的问题是相同的。

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]
有时你会带着一个问题很长时间。伟大的工作往往来自于回到你几年前第一次注意到的问题——甚至在你的童年——并且无法停止思考。人们经常谈论保持年轻时的梦想的重要性，但保持年轻时的问题也同样重要。 [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流行图片最不同的地方之一。在流行的图景中，专家们是肯定的。但实际上，你越困惑越好，只要（a）你困惑的事情很重要，（b）其他人也没有理解它们。

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]
想想在发现新想法之前此刻正在发生什么。具有足够专业知识的人常常会对某些事情感到困惑。这意味着原创性部分地包含着困惑——混乱！你必须对这个充满谜题的世界感到足够舒服，以至于你愿意看到它们，但又不能太舒服以至于你不想解决它们。 [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.
拥有大量未解答的问题是一件很棒的事情。这是富人变得更富的情况之一，因为获得新问题的最好方法就是尝试回答现有问题。问题不仅会带来答案，还会引发更多问题。

The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict that. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.
最好的问题在回答中成长。你注意到一条线从当前的范式中伸出，并尝试拉动它，它只会变得越来越长。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。连注意到这根线都已经够困难的了，更不用说预测如果你拉动它会散开多少。

It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.
最好保持好奇心——在很多线索上稍微拉一点，看看会发生什么。大事从小事做起。大事情的最初版本通常只是实验、副项目或谈话，然后发展成为更大的事情。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。你尝试的不同事物越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。但要明白，尝试很多事情就意味着尝试很多行不通的事情。你不可能在拥有很多好想法的同时也有很多坏想法。 [21]

Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything that's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun by trying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when you do look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like two puzzle pieces.
虽然从研究以前做过的所有事情开始听起来更负责任，但通过尝试你会学得更快并且获得更多乐趣。当你真正看到以前的作品时，你会更好地理解它。所以最好还是开始吧。当开始意味着从小事做起时，哪一个更容易？这两个想法就像两块拼图一样组合在一起。

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.
如何从小事做起，成就大事？通过制作连续的版本。伟大的事物几乎总是由连续的版本制成的。你从小事开始，不断发展它，最终的版本比你计划的任何东西都更聪明、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.
当你为人们做一些东西时，制作连续的版本特别有用——快速地在他们面前提供一个初始版本，然后根据他们的反应来改进它。

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、可行的方法。令人惊讶的是，事实往往如此。如果没有，这至少会让您开始。

Don't try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. There are names for doing this with the first version (taking too long to ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these are both merely instances of a more general principle.
不要试图在任一版本中塞入太多新内容。对于第一个版本（发布时间太长）和第二个版本（第二个系统效果）有一些名称，但这些都只是更普遍原则的实例。

An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a toy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it has everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow. [22]
新项目的早期版本有时会被视为玩具而被抛弃。当人们这样做时，这是一个好兆头。这意味着它拥有新想法所需的一切，除了规模之外，而规模往往会随之而来。 [22]

The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going to try x and see what happens." And it is more organized; it just doesn't work as well.
从小事开始并不断发展的另一种选择是提前计划你要做什么。计划通常看起来确实是更负责任的选择。说“我们要做 x，然后是 y，然后是 z”，这听起来比“我们要尝试 x，看看会发生什么”更有条理。而且更有组织性；它只是不太有效。

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。有时这是必要的，但它是一种必要的罪恶——对无情条件的反应。这是你必须做的事情，因为你正在与不灵活的媒体合作，或者因为你需要协调很多人的努力。如果您保持项目较小并使用灵活的媒体，则无需进行太多计划，并且您的设计可以不断发展。

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.
承担尽可能多的风险。在有效市场中，风险与回报成正比，因此不要寻求确定性，而要寻求具有高预期价值的赌注。如果你不是偶尔失败，那么你可能太保守了。

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，但年轻人往往会犯这个错误。缺乏经验让他们害怕风险，但年轻的时候才是最能承受风险的。

Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked. And there's probably no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying to do something slightly too hard.
即使一个失败的项目也可能是有价值的。在研究的过程中，你会跨越很少有人见过的领域，并遇到很少有人问过的问题。可能没有比你在尝试做稍微困难的事情时遇到的问题更好的来源了。

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.
当你拥有年轻的优势时，就利用它；当你拥有这些优势时，就利用年龄的优势。年轻的优势是精力、时间、乐观、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，并在年老时保留前者的一些。

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.
老年人还有一个好处，就是知道自己有哪些优势。年轻人常常在没有意识到的情况下拥有它们。最大的可能是时间。年轻人不知道自己的时间有多丰富。把这段时间变成优势的最好方法是以稍微无聊的方式来利用它：学习一些你不需要知道的东西，只是出于好奇，或者尝试构建一些东西只是因为它很酷，或者为了变得异常擅长某事。

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]
这个“稍微”是一个重要的限定条件。年轻时要大肆挥霍时间，但不要简单地浪费它。做一些你担心可能会浪费时间的事情和做一些你肯定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，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]
年轻的最微妙的优势，或者更准确地说，缺乏经验的最微妙的优势是，你可以用新鲜的眼光看待一切。当你的大脑第一次接受一个想法时，有时两者并不完美地结合在一起。通常问题出在你的大脑上，但有时问题出在想法上。当你想到它的时候，它的一块笨拙地伸出来，刺痛你。习惯了这个想法的人已经学会了忽视它，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，当您第一次学习某些东西时，请注意那些看起来错误或缺失的内容。您可能会想忽略它们，因为 99% 的可能性问题出在您身上。你可能必须暂时放下疑虑才能继续进步。但不要忘记他们。当您进一步了解该主题后，请回来检查它们是否仍然存在。如果根据您目前的知识它们仍然可行，那么它们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什么是你不必担心的。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，而实际上，他们应该更多地担心几件事，而几乎不担心其他事情。

But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience. The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do.
但你不知道的只是缺乏经验问题的一半。另一半是你所知道的，但事实并非如此。当你成年时，你的脑子里充满了废话——你养成的坏习惯和你被教导的错误的东西——除非你至少清除掉这些废话，否则你将无法做出伟大的工作。您想做的工作类型。

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.
你脑子里留下的大部分废话都是学校留下的。我们已经习惯了学校，以至于不知不觉中把上学和学习等同起来，但事实上，学校有各种奇怪的品质，扭曲了我们对学习和思维的看法。

For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child, there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed.
例如，学校会导致消极性。当你还是个小孩子时，班级前面就有一位权威告诉你们所有人必须学习什么，然后衡量你们是否做到了。但课程和考试都不是学习的本质；它们都不是学习的本质。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。如果您还在上学，请尝试将您的教育视为您的项目，并将您的老师视为为您工作，而不是反之亦然。这似乎有点夸张，但这不仅仅是一些奇怪的思想实验。这在经济上是真理，在最好的情况下，在理智上也是真理。最好的老师不想成为你的老板。他们更喜欢你继续前进，将他们作为建议的来源，而不是被他们拉着通过材料。

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，而且这些问题几乎总是可以用你目前所学的内容来解决。在现实生活中，你必须弄清楚问题是什么，但你常常不知道它们是否可以解决。

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.
但也许学校对你做的最糟糕的事情就是训练你通过破解考试来获胜。这样做你不可能做出伟大的工作。你无法欺骗上帝。所以不要再寻找那种捷径了。击败系统的方法是专注于其他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.
不要认为自己依赖某个看门人给你“大突破”。即使这是真的，实现这一目标的最好方法就是专注于做好工作，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。给招生官员和评奖委员会留下深刻印象的品质与出色工作所需的品质有很大不同。选拔委员会的决定只有在它们成为反馈循环的一部分时才有意义，而很少有这样的决定。

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经常会抄袭现有的作品。这本身并没有什么坏处。要了解某事物是如何工作的，没有比尝试重现它更好的方法了。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]
复制有一种好方法，也有一种坏方法。如果你要复制某些东西，请公开地进行，而不是偷偷地进行，或者更糟糕的是，无意识地进行。这就是著名的错误说法“伟大的艺术家偷窃”的含义。真正危险的抄袭，也就是给抄袭带来坏名声的抄袭，是在没有意识到的情况下进行的，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，抄袭可能是优越而非从属的标志。 [25]

In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you're first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two cases are more similar than they seem.
在许多领域，你的早期工作在某种意义上几乎不可避免地会基于其他人的工作。项目很少是凭空出现的。它们通常是对以前工作的反应。当你刚开始工作时，你之前没有任何工作；如果你要对某件事做出反应，那它必须是别人的。一旦你确定了，你就可以对自己的反应做出反应。但是，虽然前者被称为衍生品，而后者则不然，从结构上讲，这两种情况比看起来更相似。

Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimes makes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things, even by their discoverers, because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.
奇怪的是，最新颖的想法的新颖性有时会让它们乍一看比实际情况更具衍生性。新发现通常必须最初被设想为现有事物的变体，即使是它们的发现者，因为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，复制肯定存在一些危险。一是你会倾向于复制旧的东西——那些在当时处于知识前沿的东西，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.
当你复制某些东西时，不要复制它的每一个功能。如果你这样做，有些人会让你感到可笑。例如，如果你 18 岁，就不要模仿 50 岁著名教授的举止，或者数百年后文艺复兴时期诗歌的习语。

Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.
你所欣赏的事物的某些特征是尽管有缺陷但它们仍然成功了。事实上，最容易模仿的特征最有可能是缺陷。

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.
对于行为来说尤其如此。有些有才华的人是混蛋，这有时会让没有经验的人觉得混蛋也是有才华的一部分。事实并非如此；有才华只是他们逃脱惩罚的方式。

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.
最强大的复制方式之一是将某些内容从一个领域复制到另一个领域。历史上充满了这种类型的偶然发现，因此可能值得通过刻意学习其他类型的工作来帮助机会。如果你让它们成为隐喻，你就可以从相当遥远的领域获取想法。

Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing.
反面例子和正面例子一样鼓舞人心。事实上，有时你可以从做得不好的事情中学到比做得好的事情更多的东西；有时只有当缺少什么时才清楚需要什么。

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]
如果您所在领域的许多最优秀的人都聚集在一个地方，那么访问一段时间通常是个好主意。它会增加你的野心，并且通过向你展示这些人是人，增加你的自信心。 [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.
如果您真诚，您可能会受到比您想象的更热烈的欢迎。大多数非常擅长某件事的人都乐意与任何真正感兴趣的人谈论它。如果他们真的很擅长自己的工作，那么他们可能会有业余爱好者的兴趣，而业余爱好者总是想谈论他们的爱好。

It may take some effort to find the people who are really good, though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places, particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyone is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.
不过，可能需要付出一些努力才能找到真正优秀的人。出色的工作具有很高的声望，以至于在某些地方，特别是大学，有一种礼貌的说法，认为每个人都在从事这项工作。但这远非事实。大学内部的人不能公开这么说，但不同部门所做工作的质量差异很大。有些部门的员工工作出色，有些部门的员工工作出色；其他人过去曾有过；其他人从来没有。

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完成的项目，有其他人鼓励你并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.
不过，同事不仅会影响你的工作，还会影响你的工作。他们也会影响你。因此，与你想成为的人一起工作，因为你会的。

Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.
同事的质量比数量更重要。拥有一两个优秀的人比拥有一栋充满相当好的人的建筑要好。事实上，从历史来看，这不仅更好，而且是必要的：伟大的工作在集群中发生的程度表明，一个人的同事往往会决定是否做伟大的工作。

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.
你怎么知道你是否拥有足够优秀的同事？根据我的经验，当你这样做时，你就知道了。这意味着如果您不确定，您可能就不确定。但也许可以给出比这更具体的答案。这是一种尝试：足够优秀的同事提供令人惊讶的见解。他们可以看到并做你看不到的事情。因此，如果你有几个同事足以让你在这个意义上保持警惕，那么你可能已经跨过了门槛。

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的合作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人员，而启动其中一个项目并不适合所有人。如果你想管理这样的项目，你就必须成为一名经理，而像任何其他类型的工作一样，良好的管理需要天赋和兴趣。如果你没有它们，就没有中间道路：你必须强迫自己学习管理作为第二语言，或者避免此类项目。 [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.
老公你的士气。当您从事雄心勃勃的项目时，它是一切的基础。你必须像一个活的有机体一样培育和保护它。

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，那么你更有可能做得很好，而不是如果你认为自己是受害者。

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，工作可以在某种程度上保护你免受问题的困扰。如果你选择纯粹的工作，它的困难就会成为你逃避日常生活困难的避难所。如果这就是逃避现实，那么它就是一种非常富有成效的形式，并且已经被历史上一些最伟大的思想家所使用。

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：高昂的士气可以帮助你做好工作，从而提高你的士气并帮助你做得更好。但这个循环也会向另一个方向运作：如果你没有做好工作，这会让你士气低落，让工作变得更加困难。由于这个周期朝着正确的方向运行非常重要，因此当你陷入困境时，转向更轻松的工作可能是一个好主意，这样你就可以开始完成某件事。

One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always involves some backtracking.
雄心勃勃的人犯的最大错误之一就是让挫折一下子摧毁他们的士气，就像气球爆炸一样。您可以通过明确地将挫折视为流程的一部分来使自己免受这种影响。解决难题总是涉及一些回溯。

Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.
出色的工作是深度优先搜索，其根节点是愿望。所以“如果一开始你没有成功，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，要么原路返回，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”也不太正确。显然，有时候弹出是正确的选择。更精确的版本是：永远不要让挫折让你惊慌失措，让你回溯到不必要的程度。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.
如果工作是一场斗争，这并不一定是一个坏兆头，就像跑步时气喘吁吁并不是一个坏兆头一样。这取决于你跑得有多快。所以要学会区分好的疼痛和坏的疼痛。好的疼痛是努力的标志；好的疼痛是努力的标志。剧烈的疼痛是损伤的迹象。

An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar, your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big. The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.
观众是士气的重要组成部分。如果你是学者，你的听众可能是你的同行；在艺术上，可能是传统意义上的观众。不管怎样，它不需要很大。观众的价值不会随其规模线性增长。如果你很有名，这就是个坏消息，但如果你刚刚起步，这就是个好消息，因为这意味着少量但专注的观众足以支撑你。如果有少数人真正喜欢你所做的事情，那就足够了。

To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable, but it's so liberating to escape it that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct. [28]
尽可能避免让中间人介入您和观众之间。在某些类型的工作中，这是不可避免的，但逃避它是如此自由，如果可以让你直接进行，你最好切换到相邻的类型。 [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.
与你共度时光的人也会对你的士气产生重大影响。你会发现有些人会增加你的能量，有些人会减少你的能量，而有些人所产生的效果并不总是你所期望的。寻找那些能增加你能量的人，避开那些减少你能量的人。当然，如果有人需要你照顾，那就优先。

Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.
不要嫁给一个不明白你需要工作，或者认为你的工作是对你注意力的竞争的人。如果你有野心，你需要努力；这几乎就像一种健康状况；所以不让你工作的人要么不理解你，要么理解你但不在乎。

Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking. [29]
最终，士气是身体上的。你用你的身体思考，所以照顾好它很重要。这意味着定期锻炼、良好饮食和睡眠，并避免使用更危险的药物。跑步和步行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，但他们会比不工作时更快乐。事实上，如果你聪明又雄心勃勃，那么不高效就会很危险。聪明而有野心但没有取得多大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.
想给别人留下深刻印象是可以的，但要选择合适的人。你尊重的人的意见是信号。名声，即你可能尊重也可能不尊重的更大群体的意见，只会增加噪音。

The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.
一种工作的声望充其量只是一个跟踪指标，有时甚至是完全错误的。如果你把一件事做得足够好，你就会让它享有声望。因此，对于一种工作，要问的问题不是它有多少声望，而是它能做得如何。

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；不要因为别人追逐某样东西而让自己陷入其中。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。你的好奇心永远不会说谎，它比你更了解什么是值得关注的。

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."
请注意这个词出现的频率。如果你向神谕询问完成伟大工作的秘诀，而神谕只回答了一个词，我的赌注就是“好奇心”。

That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you.
这并不能直接转化为建议。仅仅有好奇心是不够的，而且你无论如何也无法控制好奇心。但你可以培养它并让它驱动你。

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，带你到达前沿，让你注意到其中的差距，并驱使你探索它们。整个过程就像是一种好奇心的舞蹈。

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.
不管你相信与否，我试图让这篇文章尽可能简短。但它的长度至少意味着它可以起到过滤器的作用。如果你做到了这一步，你一定有兴趣去做伟大的工作。如果是这样，你已经比你想象的走得更远了，因为愿意这样做的人很少。

The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?
做出伟大工作的因素是字面和数学意义上的因素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。运气的定义是你无能为力，所以我们可以忽略它。如果你确实想做好工作，我们可以假设你付出了努力。所以问题归结为能力和兴趣。你能找到一种将你的能力和兴趣结合起来并产生大量新想法的工作吗？

Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying.
这里有理由乐观。完成伟大工作的方法有很多，甚至还有更多尚未被发现。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，您最适合的工作可能是非常接近的。可能是一场滑稽的势均力敌的比赛。问题只是找到它，以及你的能力和兴趣能带你走多远。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.
可以尝试做伟大工作的人比实际做的人多得多。阻碍他们的是谦虚和恐惧的结合。试图成为牛顿或莎士比亚似乎是自以为是。看起来也很难；当然，如果你尝试类似的事情，你就会失败。据推测，计算很少是明确的。很少有人有意识地决定不尝试去做伟大的工作。但这就是潜意识里发生的事情；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.
所以我要对你玩个鬼把戏。你想做出伟大的工作吗？现在你必须有意识地做出决定。对于那个很抱歉。我不会对普通观众这样做。但我们已经知道您感兴趣。

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.
不用担心自己冒昧。你不必告诉任何人。如果太难而你失败了，那又怎样？很多人都有比这更严重的问题。事实上，如果这是你遇到的最严重的问题，那你就很幸运了。

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。但话又说回来，很多人都必须努力工作。如果你正在做一些你觉得非常有趣的事情，如果你走在正确的道路上，你必然会这样做，那么这项工作可能会比你的许多同龄人感觉不那么繁重。

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?
这些发现就在那里，等待着人们去发现。为什么不由你呢？

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] 我认为你无法对什么是伟大的工作给出准确的定义。出色的工作意味着将重要的事情做得很好，从而扩展人们对可能性的想法。但重要性没有门槛。这是一个程度问题，而且当时通常很难判断。所以我宁愿人们专注于发展自己的兴趣，而不是担心它们是否重要。尝试做一些令人惊奇的事情，并让子孙后代来评判你是否成功。

[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] 许多单口喜剧都是基于注意到日常生活中的异常现象。 “你有没有注意到……？”新的想法来自于对不平凡的事情这样做。这可能有助于解释为什么人们对新想法的反应往往是前半部分大笑：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] 第二场预选赛至关重要。如果你对大多数权威人士都忽视的东西感到兴奋，但你无法给出比“他们不明白”更精确的解释，那么你就开始陷入怪人的领域。

[4] Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding a match between the current version of you and a list of known problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible future versions of you.
[4] 找到需要解决的问题并不仅仅是在你当前的版本和一系列已知问题之间找到匹配的问题。你常常必须与问题共同发展。这就是为什么有时很难弄清楚该做什么。搜索空间巨大。它是所有可能的工作类型（已知的和尚未发现的）以及所有可能的未来版本的笛卡尔积。

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.
您无法搜索整个空间，因此您必须依靠启发式方法来生成有希望的路径，并希望能够聚集最佳匹配。但他们不会永远如此；不同类型的作品之所以被聚集在一起，既是由于历史的偶然性，也是由于它们之间的内在相似性。

[5] There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place.
[5] 好奇的人更有可能做出出色的工作，原因有很多，但其中一个更微妙的原因是，通过广泛撒网，他们更有可能在一开始就找到正确的事情。

[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] 为你认为不如你成熟的观众制作东西也可能是危险的，如果这会导致你居高临下地与他们交谈。如果你以一种足够愤世嫉俗的方式去做的话，你可以赚很多钱，但这并不是通往伟大工作的道路。并不是说有人使用这个 m.o.会关心的。

[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] 这个想法是我从哈代的《数学家的道歉》中学到的，我向任何有志于在任何领域做出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] 正如我们高估一天能做的事情，低估几年能做的事情一样，我们高估了拖延一天造成的损害，低估了拖延几年造成的损害。

[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] 你通常无法因为完全按照自己的意愿去做而获得报酬，尤其是在早期。有两种选择：通过做接近你想要的事情并希望更接近你想要的事情来获得报酬，或者通过完全做其他事情来获得报酬并兼职做你自己的项目。两者都可以工作，但都有缺点：在第一种方法中，默认情况下你的工作会受到影响，而在第二种方法中，你必须争取时间来完成它。

[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] 如果你的生活安排得当，它会自动实现专注-放松的循环。完美的环境是您工作、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] 可能有一些非常不谙世事的人在没有有意识地努力的情况下做出了伟大的工作。如果你想扩展这条​​规则来涵盖这种情况，它就会变成：除了最好之外，不要试图成为任何人。

[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] 这在表演等工作中变得更加复杂，其目标是采用假角色。但即使在这里也可能受到影响。也许这些领域的规则应该是避免无意识的矫揉造作。

[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] 当且仅当它们也是不可证伪的时，你认为无可置疑的信念才是安全的。例如，遵循法律面前人人平等的原则是安全的，因为带有“应该”的句子实际上并不是关于世界的陈述，因此很难反驳。如果没有证据可以反驳你的一项原则，那么你就不需要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] 矫揉造作比理智上的不诚实更容易治愈。矫揉造作往往是年轻人的一个缺点，随着时间的推移就会消失，而理智上的不诚实则更多的是一种性格缺陷。

[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，你不必在产生想法的那一刻开始工作，但你可能最近才开始工作。

[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。我对此表示怀疑，但也几乎完全不知道它们的影响。

[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，您可能会给出您注意力的第 n 个最重要的主题 (m-1)/m^n，对于某些 m > 1。当然，您无法如此精确地分配您的注意力，但这至少给出了合理分配的想法。

[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] 定义宗教的原则一定是错误的。否则任何人都可能采用它们，那么就没有什么可以将宗教信徒与其他人区分开来。

[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] 尝试写下你年轻时想知道的问题清单可能是一个很好的练习。您可能会发现您现在可以对其中一些问题采取一些措施。

[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种奇怪的现象：因为传统思维的人比独立思维的人更有确定性，这往往使他们在争论中占据上风，尽管他们通常更愚蠢。
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    最好的人缺乏信念，而最差的人
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    都充满了热情的强度。
    
[21] Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas."
[21] 源自莱纳斯·鲍林的“如果你想有好想法，你必须有很多想法”。

[22] Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking a statement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantial criticism can be made to stick.
[22] 将项目攻击为“玩具”类似于将声明攻击为“不适当”。这意味着不能再提出更多实质性的批评了。

[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询问你是否在生产或消费。编写电脑游戏比玩电脑游戏更不可能浪费时间，而玩你自己创造的游戏比玩你不创造的游戏更不可能浪费时间。

[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任何话，你就不会偏向支持你之前结论的证据。只要有足够的正直，你就可以在这方面实现永葆青春，但很少有人能做到。对于大多数人来说，之前发表过的观点具有与意识形态类似的效果，只是数量为 1。

[25] In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted his own version to show how much better he was.
[25] 1630 年代初，丹尼尔·迈滕斯 (Daniel Mytens) 创作了一幅亨丽埃塔·玛丽亚 (Henrietta Maria) 向查理一世 (Charles I) 递上月桂花环的画作。范戴克 (Van Dyck) 随后画了自己的版本，以显示自己的进步有多大。

[26] I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As of this writing, being in the same physical place has advantages that are hard to duplicate, but that could change.
[26] 我故意对“地方”一词含糊其辞。截至撰写本文时，处于同一个物理位置具有难以复制的优势，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] 当其他人必须做的工作非常有限时，就像 SETI@home 或比特币一样，这是错误的。通过定义类似的限制协议并在节点中提供更多的行动自由度，可以扩大错误的范围。

[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：建立一些能让人们绕过中介并直接与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] 始终走或跑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。我有这种感觉，并且有一些历史证据可以证明这一点。

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