如何做出偉大的工作 — Paul Graham

保羅葛拉漢，著名新創加速器 Y Combinator 的創辦人，其他不多作介紹，最近在他個人的網站新的一篇文章 "How to Do Great Work" ，本文用 AI 翻譯，微校正。

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.
如果您收集了在很多不同領域完成出色工作的技巧清單，那麼交會點會是什麼樣子？我決定透過執行來找出答案。

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.”
我的部分目標是創建一個可供任何領域工作的人使用的指南。但我也很好奇十字路口的形狀。這個練習表明的一件事是它確實有一個明確的形狀;這不僅僅是一個被貼上“努力工作”標籤的觀點。

The following recipe assumes you’re very ambitious.
下面的訣竅是假設在你非常雄心勃勃。

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.
第一步是決定要做什麼。你選擇的工作需要具備三種品質：它必須是你有天賦的東西，你對它有濃厚的興趣，並且提供做偉大工作的空間。

In practice you don’t have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in. [1]
在實踐中，您不必擔心第三個標準。野心勃勃的人已經太保守了。所以你需要做的就是找到一些你有能力和非常感興趣的東西。[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.
這聽起來很簡單，但通常非常困難。當你年輕的時候，你不知道自己擅長什麼，也不知道不同類型的工作是什麼樣的。你最終做的某些工作甚至可能還不存在。因此，雖然有些人在14歲時就知道自己想做什麼，但大多數人必須弄清楚。

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.
弄清楚要做什麼的方法是透過工作。如果您不確定要做什麼，請猜測。但是選擇一些東西然後開始。有時你可能會猜錯，但這沒關係。瞭解多件事是件好事;一些最大的發現來自於注意到不同領域之間的聯繫。

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.
養成在自己的專案上工作的習慣。不要讓“工作”意味著別人告訴你要做的事情。如果你有一天確實做了偉大的工作，它可能會在你自己的專案中。它可能在一些更大的專案中，但你將推動你的部分。

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.
您的項目應該是什麼？在你看來，無論什麼都令人興奮地雄心勃勃。隨著年齡的增長和您對專案的品味的發展，令人興奮和重要將會融合。7歲時，用樂高積木建造巨大的東西似乎令人興奮，然後在14歲時自學微積分，直到21歲時，你開始探索物理學中未解決的問題。但始終保持興奮。

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.
有一種興奮的好奇心，它既是偉大工作的引擎，也是偉大工作的舵。它不僅會驅使你，而且如果你讓它順其自然，也會告訴你要做什麼。

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for.
你對什麼過度好奇 — — 好奇到會讓大多數人感到厭煩的程度？這就是你要找的。

Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.
一旦你找到了你過度感興趣的東西，下一步就是對它有足夠的瞭解，讓你進入知識的前沿之一。知識是分形擴展的，從遠處看，它的邊緣看起來很光滑，但是一旦你學到了足夠多的東西，接近一個，它們就會變得充滿空白。

The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. [2]
下一步是注意它們。這需要一些技巧，因為你的大腦想要忽略這些差距，以便建立一個更簡單的世界模型。許多發現都來自於對其他人認為理所當然的事情提出問題。[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.
如果答案看起來很奇怪，那就更好了。偉大的作品往往有一種奇怪的酊劑。從繪畫到數學，你都能看到這一點。試圖製造它會受到影響，但如果它出現，請接受它。

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]
大膽地追逐異常的想法，即使其他人對它們不感興趣 — — 事實上，特別是如果他們不感興趣。如果你對其他人都忽略的一些可能性感到興奮，並且你有足夠的專業知識來準確地說出他們都忽略了什麼，那麼這是一個不錯的選擇。[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.
四個步驟：選擇一個領域，學到足夠的知識才能到達前沿，注意到差距，探索有前途的差距。從畫家到物理學家，幾乎每個做過偉大工作的人都是這樣做到的。

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艱苦的工作。可能無法證明你必須努力工作才能做偉大的事情，但經驗證據與死亡率的證據相當。這就是為什麼從事您非常感興趣的事情至關重要的原因。興趣會驅使你比單純的勤奮更努力地工作。

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
三個最強大的動機是好奇心、喜悅和做一些令人印象深刻的事情的願望。有時它們會融合在一起，這種組合是最強大的。

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.
最大的獎品是發現一個新的分形芽。你注意到知識表面的裂縫，撬開它，裡面有一個完整的世界。

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]
讓我們多談談弄清楚要做什麼的複雜業務。它很難的主要原因是，除了做它們之外，你無法判斷大多數類型的工作是什麼樣的。這意味著這四個步驟是重疊的：你可能必須在某件事上工作多年，然後才能知道你有多喜歡它或你有多擅長它。與此同時，你沒有做，因此也沒有學習大多數其他類型的工作。因此，在最壞的情況下，您根據非常不完整的資訊選擇延遲。[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.
野心的本質加劇了這個問題。野心有兩種形式，一種是在對主題的興趣之前，另一種是從主題中產生的。大多數做得很好的人都有混合，你對前者越多，就越難決定做什麼。

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.
大多數國家的教育系統都假裝這很容易。他們希望你在知道一個領域到底是什麼樣子之前很久就致力於這個領域。因此，一個雄心勃勃的人處於最佳軌跡上，通常會將系統視為破損的實例。

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.
如果他們至少承認這一點會更好 — — 如果他們承認這個系統不僅不能做太多事情來説明你弄清楚要做什麼，而且設計時假設你會在十幾歲時以某種方式神奇地猜測。他們不會告訴你，但我會告訴你：當涉及到弄清楚要做什麼時，你靠自己。有些人很幸運，確實猜對了，但其他人會發現自己在假設每個人都這樣做的軌道上對角線地爭先恐後。

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]
如果你年輕而有抱負，但不知道該做什麼，你應該怎麼做？你不應該做的是被動地隨波逐流，假設問題會自行解決。你需要採取行動。但是沒有可以遵循的系統程式。當你閱讀那些做過偉大工作的人的傳記時，你會發現其中有多少運氣。他們透過一次偶然的相遇，或者透過閱讀他們碰巧拿起的書來發現要做什麼。所以你需要讓自己成為運氣的大目標，而做到這一點的方法就是保持好奇心。嘗試很多事情、結識很多人、讀很多書、問很多問題。[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.
如有疑問，請優化趣味性。欄位會隨著您瞭解有關欄位的詳細資訊而更改。例如，數學家所做的與你在高中數學課上所做的非常不同。所以你需要給不同類型的工作一個機會，向你展示它們是什麼樣子的。但是，隨著您對某個領域的了解越來越多，它應該變得越來越有趣。如果沒有，它可能不適合你。

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.
如果您發現自己對與其他人不同的事情感興趣，請不要擔心。你的趣味越陌生越好。奇怪的品味往往是強烈的，對工作的強烈品味意味著你會很有成效。而且，如果您正在尋找以前很少有人看過的地方，您更有可能發現新事物。

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.
你適合從事某種工作的一個跡象是，當你甚至喜歡別人覺得乏味或可怕的部分時。

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.
但領域不是人;你不欠他們任何忠誠。如果在做一件事的過程中，你發現了另一件更令人興奮的事情，不要害怕切換。

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.
如果你正在為人們做一些東西，請確保這是他們真正想要的東西。最好的方法是製作你自己想要的東西。寫下你想讀的故事;構建要使用的工具。由於您的朋友可能有相似的興趣，這也將為您提供最初的受眾。

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]
這應該遵循興奮性規則。顯然，最令人興奮的故事將是你想讀的故事。我明確提到這個案例的原因是很多人弄錯了。他們不是製作他們想要的東西，而是試圖製作一些想像中的、更複雜的觀眾想要的東西。一旦你沿著這條路走下去，你就迷路了。[6]

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you’re trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people’s wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.
當你試圖弄清楚要做什麼時，有很多力量會讓你誤入歧途。自命不凡、時尚、恐懼、金錢、政治、他人的願望、傑出的欺詐行為。但是，如果你堅持你覺得真正有趣的東西，你就會成為反對所有這些的證據。如果你有興趣，你就不會誤入歧途。

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.
追隨你的興趣可能聽起來像是一種相當被動的策略，但在實踐中，這通常意味著跟隨他們克服各種障礙。你通常不得不冒被拒絕和失敗的風險。所以這確實需要很大的勇氣。

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，雖然你需要勇氣，但你通常不需要太多的計劃。在大多數情況下，做偉大工作的秘訣很簡單：在雄心勃勃的專案上努力工作，就會有好的結果。與其制定計劃然後執行它，不如嘗試保留某些不變量。

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.
計劃的問題在於，它只適用於您可以提前描述的成就。你可以透過小時候決定贏得金牌或致富，然後頑強地追求這個目標，但你不能以這種方式發現自然選擇。

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.
我認為對於大多數想要做偉大工作的人來說，正確的策略是不要計劃太多。在每個階段，做任何看起來最有趣的事情，併為您提供未來的最佳選擇。我稱這種方法為“保持逆風”。大多數做過偉大工作的人似乎都是這樣做的。

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.
即使你發現了一些令人興奮的工作，工作並不總是那麼簡單。有時候，一些新想法會讓你早上從床上跳起來，直接開始工作。但也有很多時候事情不是那樣的。

You don’t just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there’s a technique to working, just as there is to sailing.
你不只是放下你的帆，被靈感吹向前。有逆風、水流和隱藏的淺灘。所以有一種工作技巧，就像航海一樣。

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，雖然你必須努力工作，但工作太努力是可能的，如果你這樣做，你會發現你得到的回報越來越少：疲勞會讓你變得愚蠢，最終甚至損害你的健康。工作產生收益遞減的點取決於類型。一些最難的類型，你可能每天只能做四、五個小時。

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.
理想情況下，這些時間將是連續的。盡你所能，試著安排你的生活，這樣你就有很大的時間可以工作。如果你知道你可能會被打斷，你會迴避艱巨的任務。

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.
開始工作可能比繼續工作更難。您經常不得不欺騙自己才能超過初始閾值。不要擔心這個;這是工作的本質，而不是你性格中的缺陷。工作有一種啟動能量，無論是每天還是每個專案。由於這個閾值是假的，因為它高於繼續前進所需的能量，所以可以告訴自己一個相應大小的謊言來克服它。

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.
如果你想做偉大的工作，對自己撒謊通常是一個錯誤，但這是罕見的情況之一。當我不願意在早上開始工作時，我經常欺騙自己說：“我只是讀一遍我目前所掌握的內容。五分鐘后，我發現了一些似乎錯誤或不完整的東西，然後我離開了。

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?”
類似的技術適用於啟動新專案。例如，對自己撒謊說一個專案需要多少工作是可以的。許多偉大的事情都是從有人說「這有多難？

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.
這是年輕人有優勢的一個案例。他們更樂觀，儘管他們樂觀的來源之一是無知，但在這種情況下，無知有時會勝過知識。

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.
但是，嘗試完成您開始的工作，即使結果比您預期的要多。完成事情不僅僅是整理或自律的練習。在許多專案中，許多最好的工作都發生在最後階段。

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]
另一個允許的謊言是誇大你正在做的事情的重要性，至少在你自己的腦海中是這樣。如果這能説明你發現新的東西，那麼它可能終究不是謊言。[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]
由於開始工作有兩種意義 — — 每天和每個專案 — — 也有兩種形式的拖延。每個專案的拖延要危險得多。你年復一年地推遲啟動這個雄心勃勃的專案，因為時機不太合適。當你以年為單位拖延時，你可能會得到很多沒有完成的事情。[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.
每個專案的拖延如此危險的一個原因是，它通常把自己偽裝成工作。你不只是坐在那裡無所事事;你正在勤奮地做別的事情。因此，每個專案的拖延不會像每天拖延那樣引發警報。你太忙了，沒有注意到它。

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]
擊敗它的方法是偶爾停下來問問自己：我是否在做我最想做的事情？當你年輕的時候，如果答案有時是否定的，那也沒關係，但隨著年齡的增長，這變得越來越危險。[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.
偉大的工作通常需要在一個問題上花費在大多數人看來不合理的時間。你不能把這段時間看作是一個成本，否則它看起來太高了。你必須發現工作在發生時足夠吸引人。

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.
可能有些工作，你必須在你討厭的事情上勤奮工作多年，然後才能達到好的部分，但這不是偉大的工作發生的方式。偉大的工作是通過始終專注於你真正感興趣的事情來實現的。當你停下來盤點時，你會驚訝於你已經走了多遠。

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.
我們感到驚訝的原因是我們低估了工作的累積效應。一天寫一頁聽起來並不多，但如果你每天都這樣做，你一年就會寫一本書。這就是關鍵：一致性。做偉大事情的人不會每天都做很多事情。他們做了一些事情，而不是什麼都沒有。

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.
如果你做複合的工作，你會得到指數級的增長。大多數這樣做的人都是無意識的，但值得停下來思考。例如，學習就是這種現象的一個例子：你對某件事瞭解得越多，就越容易學到更多。增加觀眾是另一回事：你擁有的粉絲越多，他們給你帶來的新粉絲就越多。

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.
指數增長的問題在於曲線在開始時感覺很平坦。不是;這仍然是一個美妙的指數曲線。但我們無法直觀地理解這一點，所以我們低估了早期階段的指數增長。

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.
呈指數級增長的東西可以變得如此有價值，以至於值得付出非凡的努力來開始它。但是，由於我們早期低估了指數增長，這在很大程度上也是無意識的：人們通過學習新事物的初始，無回報的階段，因為他們從經驗中知道學習新事物總是需要最初的推動力，或者他們一次增加一個粉絲，因為他們沒有更好的事情要做。如果人們有意識地意識到他們可以投資於指數級增長，那麼更多的人會這樣做。

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.
工作不只是在你嘗試的時候發生。當你走路、洗澡或躺在床上時，你會有一種無方向的思考，這種思維可能非常強大。通過讓你的思緒稍微遊蕩一下，你通常會解決正面攻擊無法解決的問題。

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]
但是，您必須以正常方式努力工作才能從這種現象中受益。你不能只是走來走去做白日夢。白日夢必須與刻意的工作交織在一起，為它提供問題。[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.)
每個人都知道在工作中避免分心，但在週期的另一半避免分心也很重要。當你讓你的思緒飄蕩時，它會徘徊到你當時最關心的任何事情上。因此，避免那種將你的工作推到首位的分心，否則你會把這種有價值的思維浪費在分心上。（例外：不要迴避愛。

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.
有意識地培養你在你所從事的工作中的品味。在你知道哪個是最好的以及是什麼讓它如此之前，你不知道你的目標是什麼。

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]
這就是你的目標，因為如果你不努力做到最好，你甚至不會成為好人。在許多不同的領域，有這麼多人已經提出了這一觀察結果，以至於可能值得思考為什麼它是真的。這可能是因為野心是一種現象，幾乎所有的錯誤都在一個方向上 — — 幾乎所有錯過目標的炮彈都因失敗而錯過。或者可能是因為成為最好的野心與成為好的野心在性質上是不同的。或者，也許優秀是一個太模糊的標準。可能這三個都是真的。[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.
幸運的是，這裡有一種規模經濟。雖然看起來你會因為努力做到最好而承擔沉重的負擔，但在實踐中，你經常最終會領先。這令人興奮，也令人奇怪地解放。它簡化了事情。在某些方面，努力做到最好比僅僅努力成為好人更容易。

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.
志存高遠的一種方法是嘗試製作一百年後人們會關心的東西。不是因為他們的意見比你同時代的人更重要，而是因為一百年後看起來仍然好的東西更有可能是真正的好東西。

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.
不要試圖以獨特的風格工作。只要盡力做到最好;您將無法以獨特的方式説明做到這一點。

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.
風格是以獨特的方式做事，而不是試圖這樣做。嘗試是感情。

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]
感情實際上是假裝你以外的人在做這項工作。你採用了一個令人印象深刻但虛假的角色，雖然你對令人印象深刻的印象感到滿意，但虛假是作品中的表現。[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.
成為別人的誘惑對年輕人來說是最大的。他們常常覺得自己像個無名小卒。但是你永遠不需要擔心這個問題，因為如果你從事足夠雄心勃勃的專案，它就是自我解決的。如果你在一個雄心勃勃的專案中取得成功，你就不是一個無名小卒;你是那個人做的。所以只要做這項工作，你的身份就會自己照顧好。

“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.
到目前為止，「避免感情」是一個有用的規則，但你會如何積極表達這個想法？你會怎麼說該成為什麼，而不是不該成為什麼？最好的答案是認真的。如果你是認真的，你不僅要避免感情，還要避免一整套類似的惡習。

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?
認真的核心是理智上的誠實。我們小時候被教導要誠實，這是一種無私的美德 — — 作為一種犧牲。但事實上，它也是力量的源泉。要看到新的想法，你需要對真相有異常敏銳的眼光。你試圖看到比其他人迄今為止看到的更多的真相。如果你在智力上不誠實，你怎麼能對真相有敏銳的眼光呢？

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]
避免智力不誠實的一種方法是在相反的方向上保持輕微的正向壓力。積極主動地承認你錯了。一旦你承認你對某件事有誤，你就自由了。在那之前，你必須攜帶它。[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.
認真的另一個更微妙的組成部分是非正式。非正式性比其語法否定名稱所暗示的要重要得多。這不僅僅是缺少某些東西。這意味著專注於重要的事情，而不是不重要的事情。

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you’re trying to seem a certain way as you’re doing it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That’s one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that’s basically the definition of a nerd.
形式和情感的共同點是，除了做工作之外，你在做工作時試圖以某種方式看起來。但是，任何影響你外表的能量都來自善良。這就是書在做偉大工作方面具有優勢的原因之一：他們幾乎不花力氣去看任何東西。事實上，這基本上就是書的定義。

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.
書呆子有一種天真的勇氣，這正是你做偉大工作所需要的。它不是學習的;它從童年時期就保存下來。所以堅持住它。做一個把事情放在那裡的人，而不是一個坐下來對它們提出聽起來很複雜的批評的人。“批評很容易”在最字面的意義上是正確的，通往偉大工作的道路從來都不是一帆風順的。

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.
可能有些工作憤世嫉俗和悲觀是一種優勢，但如果你想做偉大的工作，樂觀是一個優勢，即使這意味著你有時會看起來像個傻瓜。有一個古老的傳統，就是做相反的事情。舊約說最好保持沉默，以免看起來像個傻瓜。但這是對看起來很聰明的建議。如果你真的想發現新事物，最好冒險告訴別人你的想法。

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]
有些人天生認真，而另一些人則需要有意識的努力。任何一種認真都足夠了。但我懷疑，如果不認真，就有可能做偉大的工作。即使你是，也很難做到。你沒有足夠的犯錯餘地來適應因受到影響、智力不誠實、正統、時尚或酷而引入的扭曲。[14]

Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It’s usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.
偉大的工作不僅與誰做，而且與它本身一致。這通常是一塊。因此，如果您在做某事的過程中面臨一個決定，請問問哪個選擇更一致。

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?
您可能不得不扔掉東西並重做它們。你不一定必須這樣做，但你必須願意。這可能需要一些努力;當你需要重做一些事情時，現狀偏見和懶惰會結合起來，讓你否認它。為了解決這個問題：如果我已經進行了更改，我會想恢復到現在的狀態嗎？

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.
有信心切割。不要僅僅因為你為此感到自豪，或者因為它花費了你很多精力而保留不適合的東西。

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.
事實上，在某些類型的工作中，剝離你正在做的事情的本質是件好事。結果會更加集中;你會更好地理解它;而且你將無法對自己撒謊，說那裡是否有真實的東西。

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.
數學的優雅可能聽起來像是一個隱喻，來自藝術。當我第一次聽到“優雅”一詞應用於證明時，我就是這麼想的。但現在我懷疑這在概念上是先驗的 — — 藝術優雅的主要成分是數學上的優雅。無論如何，這是一個有用的標準，遠遠超出了數學。

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.
不過，優雅可能是一個長期的賭注。費力的解決方案通常會在短期內更有聲望。它們花費了很多精力，而且很難理解，這兩者都給人們留下了深刻的印象，至少是暫時的。

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.
而一些最好的作品似乎花費了相對較少的努力，因為它在某種意義上已經存在。它不必建造，只是看到。當很難說你是在創造還是發現它時，這是一個非常好的信號。

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.
當你在做可能被視為創造或發現的工作時，在發現方面犯錯。試著把自己想像成一個管道，通過這個管道，想法自然成形。

(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case it’s more like creating something. In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it.)
（奇怪的是，一個例外是選擇要處理的問題。這通常被視為搜索，但在最好的情況下，它更像是創建一些東西。在最好的情況下，您可以在瀏覽欄位的過程中創建欄位。

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.
同樣，如果你試圖構建一個強大的工具，讓它無端地不受限制。幾乎根據定義，一個強大的工具將以您意想不到的方式使用，因此即使您不知道好處是什麼，也要在消除限制方面犯錯誤。

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.
偉大的工作往往是工具般的，就像其他人所依賴的東西一樣。因此，如果你正在創造其他人可以使用的想法，或者暴露其他人可以回答的問題，這是一個好兆頭。最好的想法在許多不同的領域都有影響。

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they’ll be truer than you intended.
如果你用最一般的形式表達你的想法，它們會比你預期的更真實。

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.
當然，僅僅真實是不夠的。偉大的想法必須是真實的和新的。而且，即使你已經學到了足夠的知識，可以達到知識的前沿之一，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.
在英語中，我們給這種能力起了原創性、創造力和想像力等名稱。給它一個單獨的名字似乎是合理的，因為它在某種程度上似乎確實是一種單獨的技能。有可能在其他方面擁有很多能力 — — 擁有很多通常被稱為「技術能力」的能力 — — 但這些能力卻不多。

I’ve never liked the term “creative process.” It seems misleading. Originality isn’t a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can’t help it.
我從來不喜歡「創作過程」這個詞。這似乎具有誤導性。原創不是一個過程，而是一種思維習慣。原創思想家對他們關注的任何事情都會提出新的想法，就像角磨機甩出火花一樣。他們忍不住。

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.
如果他們關注的事情是他們不太瞭解的東西，這些新想法可能並不好。我認識的一位最有原創性的思想家在離婚後決定專注於約會。他對約會的瞭解大致與平均15歲的孩子一樣多，結果非常豐富多彩。但是，看到原創性與這樣的專業知識分離，使其性質更加清晰。

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養原創性，但肯定有辦法充分利用你所擁有的東西。例如，當你在做某事時，你更有可能有原創的想法。原創想法不是來自試圖擁有原創想法。它們來自試圖構建或理解一些稍微太困難的東西。[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.
談論或寫下你感興趣的事情是產生新想法的好方法。當你試圖把想法用語言表達出來時，一個缺失的想法會產生一種真空，把它從你身上拉出來。的確，有一種思維只能通過寫作來完成。

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]
改變你的上下文會有所説明。如果你訪問一個新地方，你經常會發現你在那裡有新的想法。旅程本身經常使他們流離失所。但是您可能不必走很遠就能獲得此好處。有時只是去散步就足夠了。[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.
它還有助於在主題空間中旅行。如果您探索許多不同的主題，您將有更多的新想法，部分原因是它為角磨機提供了更多的表面積，部分原因是類比是新想法的特別富有成效的來源。

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.
但是，不要將注意力平均分散在許多主題之間，否則您會分散得太薄。你想根據更像冪律的東西來分配它。[17] 對一些話題保持專業好奇心，對更多話題保持好奇。

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.
好奇心和原創性密切相關。好奇心通過賦予原創性新的東西來餵養原創性。但關係遠不止於此。好奇心本身就是一種獨創性;大致是要問，答案的原創性是什麼。由於最好的問題是答案的重要組成部分，因此好奇心最好是一種創造力。

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?
擁有新想法是一個奇怪的遊戲，因為它通常包括看到眼皮底下的東西。一旦你看到了一個新想法，它往往看起來很明顯。為什麼以前沒有人想到這一點？

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it’s probably a good one.
當一個想法看起來既新穎又明顯時，它可能是一個好主意。

Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What’s the source of this apparent contradiction? It’s that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through models that both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That’s how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they’re easy to see after you do something hard.
看到明顯的東西聽起來很容易。然而，憑經驗提出新想法是很困難的。這種明顯矛盾的根源是什麼？而是看到新想法通常需要你改變你看待世界的方式。我們通過既説明又約束我們的模型來看待世界。當您修復損壞的模型時，新的想法變得顯而易見。但是注意到並修復損壞的模型是很困難的。這就是新想法既明顯又難以發現的原因：在你做一些困難的事情之後，它們很容易被看到。

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don’t want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they’re attached to their current model; it’s what they think in; so they’ll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous it may seem in retrospect.
發現破損模型的一種方法是比其他人更嚴格。破碎的世界模型留下了一連串的線索，它們與現實相抨擊。大多數人都不想看到這些線索。說他們依附於當前的模型是輕描淡寫的;這是他們的想法;因此，他們往往會忽略其破碎留下的線索痕跡，無論回想起來多麼顯眼。

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.
要找到新的想法，你必須抓住破損的跡象，而不是把目光移開。這就是愛因斯坦所做的。他能夠看到麥克斯韋方程組的狂野含義，與其說是因為他在尋找新的想法，不如說是因為他更嚴格。

The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps to be the sort of person who’s comfortable breaking rules. From the point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.
你需要的另一件事是願意打破規則。聽起來很矛盾，如果你想修復你的世界模型，成為那種樂於打破規則的人會有所説明。從包括你在內的每個人最初共用的舊模型的角度來看，新模型通常至少會打破隱含的規則。

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.
很少有人瞭解打破規則的程度，因為新想法一旦成功，似乎就會更加保守。一旦你使用他們帶來的世界新模型，它們看起來就完全合理。但他們當時沒有;日心說模型花了大半個世紀的時間才被普遍接受，甚至在天文學家中也是如此，因為它感覺太錯誤了。

Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you’re looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can’t with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they’re rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.
事實上，如果你仔細想想，一個好的新想法對大多數人來說一定是壞的，否則有人早就探索過了。所以你正在尋找的是看起來很瘋狂的想法，但正確的瘋狂。你如何識別這些？你不能肯定。通常，看起來很糟糕的想法是壞的。但是，正確的瘋狂想法往往令人興奮;它們具有豐富的含義;而那些只是糟糕的想法往往是令人沮喪的。

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.
有兩種方法可以樂於打破規則：享受打破規則，以及對規則漠不關心。我把這兩種情況稱為激進和被動的獨立思想。

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.
思想積極獨立的人是頑皮的人。規則不僅無法阻止它們;打破規則會給他們帶來額外的能量。對於這類人來說，對專案的大膽感到高興有時會提供足夠的啟動能量來啟動它。

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.
打破規則的另一種方法是不關心它們，甚至可能知道它們的存在。這就是為什麼新手和局外人經常有新的發現;他們對一個領域的假設的無知是暫時被動獨立思想的來源。間諜似乎也對傳統信仰有一種免疫力。我認識的幾個人說，這有助於他們有新的想法。

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.
嚴格加上打破規則聽起來像是一個奇怪的組合。在流行文化中，他們是反對的。但流行文化在這方面有一個破碎的模式。它含蓄地假定問題是微不足道的，在瑣碎的問題上，嚴格和破壞規則是反對的。但在真正重要的問題上，只有破壞規則的人才能真正嚴格。

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.
一個被忽視的想法往往直到半決賽才會輸掉。你確實在潛意識中看到了它，但隨後你潛意識的另一部分把它擊落了，因為它太奇怪了，太冒險了，工作太多了，太有爭議了。這表明瞭一種令人興奮的可能性：如果你能關閉這樣的篩檢程式，你可以看到更多新的想法。

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.
一種方法是問問別人探索的好主意。那麼你的潛意識就不會為了保護你而擊落它們。

You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other direction: by starting from what’s obscuring them. Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.
你也可以通過向另一個方向努力來發現被忽視的想法：從掩蓋它們的東西開始。每一個珍視但錯誤的原則都被一個有價值的想法的死區所包圍，這些想法沒有被探索，因為它們與它相矛盾。

Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type. [18]
宗教是珍視但錯誤原則的集合。因此，任何可以從字面上或隱喻上描述為宗教的東西，都會在其陰影下有有價值的未探索的想法。哥白尼和達爾文都做出了這種類型的發現。[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?
你所在領域的人是關於什麼的，在某種過於執著於一些可能不像他們想像的那麼不言而喻的原則的意義上？如果你丟棄它，會發生什麼？

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.
人們在解決問題時表現出更多的獨創性，而不是決定解決哪些問題。即使是最聰明的人在決定做什麼時也會出人意料地保守。那些從未夢想過以任何其他方式成為時尚的人會被捲入解決時尚問題。

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.
人們在選擇問題而不是解決方案時更保守的一個原因是，問題是更大的賭注。一個問題可能會佔用您數年，而探索解決方案可能只需要幾天時間。但即便如此，我認為大多數人都太保守了。他們不僅要應對風險，還要應對時尚。不合時宜的問題被低估了。

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.
最有趣的不合時宜的問題之一是人們認為已經充分探索但尚未探索的問題。偉大的工作往往需要已經存在的東西，並顯示出它的潛在潛力。丟勒和瓦特都這樣做了。因此，如果你對別人認為被挖掘出來的領域感興趣，不要讓他們的懷疑阻止你。人們在這一點上往往是錯誤的。

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.
解決一個不合時宜的問題可能會非常令人愉快。沒有炒作或匆忙。機會主義者和批評家都在別處被佔領。現有的工作往往具有老派的堅固性。在培養否則會被浪費的想法時，有一種令人滿意的節約感。

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.
但是，最常見的被忽視問題類型並不是在過時的意義上明確不合時宜。它似乎並不像實際那麼重要。你如何找到這些？通過自我放縱 — — 讓你的好奇心順其自然，並至少暫時忽略你腦海中那個說你應該只處理“重要”問題的小聲音。

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.
你確實需要處理重要的問題，但幾乎每個人都對什麼是一個問題過於保守。如果你的鄰居有一個重要但被忽視的問題，它可能已經在你的潛意識雷達螢幕上了。所以試著問問自己：如果你打算從「嚴肅」的工作中休息一下，去做某件事，只是因為它真的很有趣，你會怎麼做？答案可能比看起來更重要。

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.
選擇問題的獨創性似乎比解決問題的獨創性更重要。這就是發現全新領域的人的區別所在。因此，從某種意義上說，似乎只是第一步 — — 決定要做什麼 — — 才是整個遊戲的關鍵。

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.
很少有人能理解這一點。關於新想法的最大誤解之一是關於其構成中問題與答案的比例。人們認為大的想法就是答案，但真正的洞察力往往在於問題。

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.
我們低估問題的部分原因是它們在學校的使用方式。在學校裡，它們往往只在被回答之前短暫存在，就像不穩定的粒子一樣。但一個真正好的問題可能遠不止於此。一個非常好的問題是部分發現。新物種是如何產生的？使物體落到地球上的力與使行星保持在軌道上的力相同嗎？即使問這樣的問題，你已經進入了令人興奮的新奇領域。

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you’re carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.
未回答的問題可能是隨身攜帶的不舒服的事情。但是，你攜帶的越多，注意到解決方案的機會就越大 — — 或者更令人興奮的是，注意到兩個未解決的問題是一樣的。

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]
有時你會長時間提出一個問題。偉大的工作往往來自於回到你幾年前第一次注意到的問題 — — 甚至在你的童年時期 — — 並且無法停止思考。人們經常談論保持年輕夢想的重要性，但保持年輕問題的重要性同樣重要。[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.
這是實際專業知識與流行圖片最不同的地方之一。在流行的圖片中，專家是肯定的。但實際上你越困惑越好，只要（a）你對事情感到困惑的事情很重要，（b）也沒有其他人理解它們。

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]
想想在發現新想法之前正在發生的事情。通常，具有足夠專業知識的人會對某些事情感到困惑。這意味著原創性部分由困惑 — — 困惑組成！你必須對這個充滿謎題的世界感到足夠舒服，你願意看到它們，但又不能舒服到不想解決它們。[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.
在未回答的問題是一件好事。這是富人變得更富有的情況之一，因為獲得新問題的最好方法是嘗試回答現有問題。問題不僅會帶來答案，還會帶來更多的問題。

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.
最好的問題在回答中成長。你注意到一條從當前範式中突出的線，並嘗試拉動它，它只會變得越來越長。因此，在嘗試回答問題之前，不要要求問題明顯很大。你很少能預測到這一點。甚至很難注意到這條線，更不用說預測如果你拉動它會解開多少。

It’s better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.
最好是混雜的好奇心 — — 拉一點點很多線，看看會發生什麼。大事從小事做起。大事情的最初版本通常只是實驗，或副專案，或談話，然後發展成更大的東西。所以開始很多小事。

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]
多產被低估了。你嘗試的不同事物越多，發現新事物的機會就越大。但是，要明白，嘗試很多事情將意味著嘗試很多不起作用的事情。你不能有很多好主意，也不可能有很多壞主意。[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.
雖然從學習以前做過的所有事情開始聽起來更負責任，但通過嘗試東西，你會學得更快，更有趣。當你看到它時，你會更好地理解以前的工作。所以在開始方面犯錯。當開始意味著從小處著手時，哪個更容易;這兩個想法像兩塊拼圖一樣結合在一起。

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.
你如何從小事做起做大事？通過製作連續版本。偉大的東西幾乎總是在連續的版本中做出來。你從小事開始，然後發展它，最終版本比你計劃的任何東西都更聰明，也更有野心。

It’s particularly useful to make successive versions when you’re making something for people — to get an initial version in front of them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.
當你為人們做一些東西時，製作連續的版本特別有用 — — 快速獲得一個初始版本，然後根據他們的反應進行改進。

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.
首先嘗試可能可行的最簡單的事情。令人驚訝的是，它經常如此。如果沒有，這至少會讓你開始。

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.
不要試圖在任何一個版本中塞進太多新東西。第一個版本（發佈時間太長）和第二個版本（第二個系統效應）有一些名稱，但這兩個版本都只是更一般原則的實例。

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]
新專案的早期版本有時會被視為玩具。當人們這樣做時，這是一個好兆頭。這意味著它擁有新想法所需的一切，除了規模，而且往往會隨之而來。[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.
從小事開始並不斷發展的另一種方法是提前計劃你要做什麼。計劃通常看起來是更負責任的選擇。說“我們要做x，然後y，然後z”聽起來更有條理，而不是“我們要嘗試x，看看會發生什麼”。而且更有條理;它只是效果不佳。

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.
規劃本身並不好。這有時是必要的，但這是一種必要的邪惡 — — 對無情條件的回應。這是你必須做的事情，因為你正在使用不靈活的媒體，或者因為你需要協調很多人的努力。如果您保持專案較小並使用靈活的媒體，則不必進行太多計劃，並且您的設計可以不斷發展。

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.
承擔盡可能多的風險。在有效的市場中，風險與回報成正比，所以不要尋求確定性，而是尋找具有高預期價值的賭注。如果你不是偶爾失敗，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.
雖然保守主義通常與老年人聯繫在一起，但年輕人往往會犯這個錯誤。缺乏經驗讓他們害怕風險，但當你年輕的時候，你最能負擔得起。

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.
即使是失敗的專案也可能很有價值。在研究它的過程中，你會跨越其他人很少看到的領域，並遇到其他人很少問過的問題。可能沒有比你在嘗試做一些稍微太難的事情時遇到的問題更好的問題來源了。

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.
當你擁有年輕的優勢時，利用它們，一旦你擁有這些優勢，就利用年齡的優勢。青春的好處是精力、時間、樂觀和自由。年齡的優勢是知識、效率、金錢和權力。通過努力，您可以在年輕時獲得一些後者，並在年老時保留一些前者。

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.
老年人還具有知道自己具有哪些優勢的優勢。年輕人經常在不知不覺中擁有它們。最大的可能是時間。年輕人不知道他們隨著時間的推移有多富有。利用這段時間的優勢的最好方法是以稍微輕浮的方式使用它：學習一些你不需要知道的東西，只是出於好奇，或者僅僅因為它很酷而嘗試構建一些東西，或者變得非常擅長某事。

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]
“稍微”是一個重要的限定條件。在年輕的時候花很多時間，但不要簡單地浪費它。做一些你擔心可能會浪費時間的事情和做一些你知道肯定會浪費時間的事情有很大的區別。前者至少是一個賭注，而且可能比你想像的要好。[23]

The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience, is that you’re seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don’t fit together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but occasionally it’s with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not to. [24]
年輕，或者更準確地說是缺乏經驗的最微妙的好處是，你用新鮮的眼光看待一切。當你的大腦第一次接受一個想法時，有時兩者並不完美地結合在一起。通常問題出在你的大腦上，但偶爾出在想法上。其中一塊笨拙地伸出來，當你想到它時會刺痛你。習慣了這個想法的人已經學會了忽略它，但你有機會不這樣做。[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，當你第一次學習某件事時，要注意那些看起來不對或缺失的東西。你會很想忽略它們，因為有99%的可能性問題出在你身上。你可能不得不暫時放下你的疑慮來繼續進步。但不要忘記它們。當你進一步瞭解這個主題時，回來檢查它們是否還在那裡。如果根據你目前的知識，它們仍然可行，它們可能代表了一個未被發現的想法。

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.
你從經驗中獲得的最有價值的知識之一就是知道你不必擔心什麼。年輕人知道所有可能重要的事情，但不知道它們的相對重要性。因此，他們同樣擔心一切，而他們應該更多地擔心一些事情，而幾乎不擔心其餘的事情。

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經驗問題的一半。另一半是你所知道的，不是這樣。你成年後滿腦子都是胡說八道 — — 你養成的壞習慣和你被教導的虛假的東西 — — 除非你至少清除了你想做的任何類型的工作的廢話，否則你將無法做偉大的工作。

Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools. We’re so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to school as identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts of strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.
你腦子裡留下的大部分廢話都是學校留下的。我們已經習慣了學校，以至於我們無意識地將上學視為學習，但實際上學校具有各種奇怪的品質，扭曲了我們對學習和思考的看法。

For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child, there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they’re just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed.
例如，學校誘發被動。從你還是個小孩的時候起，班上有一個權威告訴你大家你必須學什麼，然後衡量你是否學到了。但是，無論是課程還是測試都不是學習的本質;它們只是學校通常設計方式的產物。

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.
越早克服這種被動越好。如果你還在上學，試著把你的教育看作是你的專案，把你的老師看作是為你工作，反之亦然。這似乎有點牽強，但這不僅僅是一些奇怪的思想實驗。這是經濟上的真理，在最好的情況下，在最好的情況下，這也是理智上的真理。最好的老師不想成為你的老闆。如果你繼續前進，他們更喜歡它，將它們用作建議的來源，而不是被他們拉著通過材料。

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.
學校也會給你一個誤導性的印象，讓你對工作是什麼樣的。在學校里，他們會告訴你問題是什麼，而且他們幾乎總是使用不超過你迄今為止所教的。在現實生活中，你必須弄清楚問題是什麼，而你往往不知道它們是否可解決。

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.
但也許學校對你做的最糟糕的事情就是訓練你通過駭客考試來獲勝。你不能通過這樣做來做偉大的工作。你不能欺騙上帝。所以不要再尋找那種捷徑了。擊敗系統的方法就是專注於別人忽略的問題和解決方案，而不是吝嗇工作本身。

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.
不要認為自己依賴於某個看門人給你一個「大突破」。即使這是真的，最好的方法也是專注於做好工作，而不是追逐有影響力的人。

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.
不要把委員會的拒絕放在心上。給招生官和獎項委員會留下深刻印象的品質與出色工作所需的品質完全不同。遴選委員會的決定只有在它們是反饋迴圈的一部分時才有意義，而且很少有。

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.
剛接觸某個領域的人通常會複製現有工作。這本身並沒有什麼不好的。沒有比嘗試重現它更好的方法來瞭解某物的工作原理了。臨摹也不一定會使你的作品失去原創性。原創性是新想法的存在，而不是舊想法的缺失。

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]
複製有好方法，也有壞方法。如果你要複製一些東西，那就公開地做，而不是偷偷摸摸地做，或者更糟的是，無意識地做。這就是著名的錯誤短語「偉大的藝術家偷竊」的含義。真正危險的複製，那種給複製一個壞名聲的複製，是那種沒有意識到的，因為你只不過是一列在別人鋪設的軌道上行駛的火車。但在另一個極端，複製可能是優越而不是從屬的標誌。[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.
在許多領域，你的早期工作在某種意義上幾乎不可避免地會基於其他人的工作。專案很少在真空中出現。它們通常是對以前工作的反應。當你剛開始時，你沒有任何以前的工作;如果你要對某件事做出反應，那必須是別人的。一旦你建立起來，你就可以對自己的做出反應。但是，雖然前者被稱為導數，而後者則不然，但從結構上講，這兩種情況比看起來更相似。

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，最新穎的想法的新穎性有時使它們乍一看似乎比實際更衍生。新發現通常最初必須被設想為現有事物的變體，即使是它們的發現者，因為還沒有概念詞彙來表達它們。

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.
不過，複製肯定存在一些危險。一個是你會傾向於複製舊的東西 — — 那些在知識前沿的東西，但現在不再是了。

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.
當你複製某些東西時，不要複製它的每一個功能。如果你這樣做，有些人會讓你變得荒謬。例如，如果你18歲，不要模仿一位50歲傑出教授的方式，或者幾百年後文藝復興時期的一首詩的成語。

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.
你欽佩的事物的一些特徵是他們成功的缺陷，儘管他們成功了。事實上，最容易模仿的特徵最有可能是缺陷。

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.
對於行為尤其如此。有些有才華的人是混蛋，這有時會讓沒有經驗的人覺得混蛋是有才華的一部分。不是;才華橫溢只是他們僥倖逃脫的方式。

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.
最強大的複製類型之一是將某些內容從一個字段複製到另一個字段。歷史上充滿了這種類型的偶然發現，以至於通過刻意學習其他類型的工作來嘗試機會可能是值得的。你可以從很遙遠的領域獲取想法，如果你讓它們成為隱喻。

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.
消極的例子可以像積極的例子一樣鼓舞人心。事實上，你有時可以從做得不好的事情中學到更多，而不是從做得好的事情中學到更多;有時，只有當它丟失時，它才會變得清晰。

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]
如果你所在領域的許多最優秀的人都聚集在一個地方，那麼參觀一段時間通常是個好主意。它會增加你的野心，而且，通過向你展示這些人是人，增加你的自信。[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.
如果你很認真，你可能會得到比你想像的更熱烈的歡迎。大多數非常擅長某事的人都樂於與任何真正感興趣的人談論它。如果他們真的很擅長自己的工作，那麼他們可能對此有業餘愛好者的興趣，業餘愛好者總是想談論他們的愛好。

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.
不過，要找到真正優秀的人可能需要一些努力。做偉大的工作有如此高的聲望，以至於在某些地方，特別是大學里，有一種禮貌的虛構，每個人都在參與其中。這遠非事實。大學里的人不能這麼公開地說，但不同部門所做的工作質量差異很大。有些部門有人做得很好;其他人過去有;其他人從來沒有。

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.
尋找最好的同事。有很多專案不能單獨完成，即使你正在做一個可以完成的專案，有其他人鼓勵你並提出想法也是件好事。

Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.
不過，同事不僅會影響您的工作;它們也會影響你。所以和你想成為的人一起工作，因為你會的。

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.
在同事中，品質比數量更重要。擁有一兩個很棒的建築比充滿相當不錯的建築要好。事實上，從歷史來看，這不僅更好，而且是必要的：偉大的工作在集群中發生的程度表明，一個人的同事往往在做偉大的工作與不做偉大的工作之間產生差異。

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.
你怎麼知道什麼時候你有足夠好的同事？根據我的經驗，當你這樣做時，你知道。這意味著如果你不確定，你可能不知道。但也許可以給出比這更具體的答案。這裡有一個嘗試：足夠好的同事提供令人驚訝的見解。他們可以看到和做你不能做的事情。因此，如果你有幾個足夠好的同事讓你在這個意義上保持警惕，你可能已經超過了門檻。

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]
我們大多數人都可以從與同事的合作中受益，但有些專案需要更大規模的人員，而啟動其中一個專案並不適合所有人。如果你想運行這樣的專案，你必須成為一名經理，而良好的管理就像任何其他類型的工作一樣需要能力和興趣。如果你沒有它們，就沒有中間道路：你必須強迫自己學習管理作為第二語言，或者避免這樣的專案。[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.
丈夫你的士氣。當您從事雄心勃勃的專案時，它是一切的基礎。你必須像一個活的有機體一樣培育和保護它。

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.
士氣始於你的人生觀。如果你是一個樂觀主義者，你更有可能做偉大的工作，如果你認為自己是幸運的，而不是你認為自己是受害者，你更有可能這樣做。

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.
事實上，工作可以在一定程度上保護你免受問題的影響。如果你選擇純粹的工作，它的困難將成為日常生活困難的避難所。如果這是逃避現實，那麼它是一種非常富有成效的形式，並且已被歷史上一些最偉大的思想家使用過。

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.
士氣通過工作而複合：高昂的士氣可以説明你做好工作，從而提高你的士氣，説明你做得更好。但這個迴圈也朝著另一個方向運作：如果你沒有做好工作，這會讓你士氣低落，使你更難做到。由於這個週期朝著正確的方向運行非常重要，因此當您遇到困難時，切換到更輕鬆的工作可能是個好主意，這樣您就可以開始完成某些事情。

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錯誤之一就是讓挫折一下子摧毀他們的士氣，就像氣球破裂一樣。您可以通過明確地將挫折視為流程的一部分來預防這種情況。解決難題總是需要一些回溯。

Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” isn’t quite right. It should be: If at first you don’t succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again.
做好工作是深度優先的搜索，其根節點是願望。所以“如果一開始你沒有成功，試試，再試一次”不太對。它應該是：如果一開始你沒有成功，要麼再試一次，要麼回溯，然後再試一次。

“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.
“永不放棄”也不太對。顯然，有時彈出是正確的選擇。更精確的版本是：永遠不要讓挫折讓你驚慌失措，讓你回溯得比你需要的更多。推論：永遠不要放棄根節點。

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.
如果工作是一場鬥爭，這不一定是一個壞兆頭，就像跑步時氣喘吁吁是一個壞兆頭一樣。這取決於你跑得有多快。所以學會區分好的痛苦和壞的痛苦。好的疼痛是努力的標誌;劇烈疼痛是損傷的標誌。

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.
觀眾是士氣的重要組成部分。如果你是一名學者，你的聽眾可能是你的同齡人;在藝術上，它可能是傳統意義上的觀眾。無論哪種方式，它都不需要很大。受眾的價值不會隨著其規模而線性增長。如果你出名了，這是個壞消息，但如果你剛剛起步，這是個好消息，因為這意味著一個小而專注的觀眾足以維持你的生活。如果少數人真的喜歡你正在做的事情，那就足夠了。

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]
盡可能避免讓中間人出現在你和你的觀眾之間。在某些類型的工作中，這是不可避免的，但是逃避它是如此自由，如果這樣可以讓你直接去，你最好切換到相鄰的類型。[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.
與你共度時光的人也會對你的士氣產生重大影響。你會發現有些人會增加你的能量，有些人會減少它，而某人的效果並不總是你所期望的。尋找增加能量的人，避免減少能量的人。當然，如果您需要照顧某人，則優先。

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.
不要嫁給一個不明白你需要工作的人，或者把你的工作看作是對你注意力的競爭。如果你雄心勃勃，你需要工作;這幾乎就像一種醫療狀況;所以一個不讓你工作的人要麼不理解你，要麼在乎你，也不在乎。

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]
歸根結底，士氣是身體上的。你用你的身體思考，所以照顧它很重要。這意味著定期鍛煉，飲食和睡眠良好，並避免更危險的藥物。跑步和步行是特別好的運動形式，因為它們有利於思考。[29]

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they’re happier than they’d be if they didn’t. In fact, if you’re smart and ambitious, it’s dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don’t achieve much tend to become bitter.
做偉大工作的人不一定比其他人更快樂，但他們比不這樣做的人更快樂。事實上，如果你聰明而雄心勃勃，那麼沒有生產力是危險的。聰明而有野心但成就不多的人往往會變得痛苦。

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.
想要給別人留下深刻印象是可以的，但要選擇合適的人。你尊重的人的意見是信號。名聲，這是你可能尊重也可能不尊重的更大群體的意見，只會增加噪音。

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.
一種工作的聲望充其量只是一個尾隨指標，有時完全錯誤。如果你把任何事情做得足夠好，你就會讓它聲望。因此，關於一類工作要問的問題不是它有多大的聲望，而是它能做得有多好。

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don’t let it choose the problem for you; don’t let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don’t let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder.
競爭可以成為有效的激勵因素，但不要讓它為你選擇問題;不要讓自己僅僅因為別人就被吸引去追逐某樣東西。事實上，不要讓競爭對手讓你做任何比努力工作更具體的事情。

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.
好奇心是最好的嚮導。你的好奇心從不說謊，它比你更了解什麼是值得關注的。

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.”
注意這個詞出現的頻率。如果你問神諭做偉大工作的秘訣，神諭只回答一個字，我的賭注是“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.
這並不能直接轉化為建議。僅僅保持好奇心是不夠的，反正你也無法命令好奇心。但你可以培養它，讓它驅動你。

Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.
好奇心是做好偉大工作的所有四個步驟的關鍵：它會為你選擇領域，帶你到達前沿，讓你注意到其中的差距，並驅使你去探索它們。整個過程是一種帶著好奇心的舞蹈。

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.
信不信由你，我試圖使這篇文章盡可能簡短。但它的長度至少意味著它充當篩檢程式。如果你走到了這一步，你一定對做偉大的工作感興趣。如果是這樣，你已經比你意識到的走得更遠了，因為願意想要的人很少。

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?
做偉大工作的因素是字面上、數學意義上的因素，它們是：能力、興趣、努力和運氣。根據定義，運氣你無能為力，所以我們可以忽略它。我們可以假設努力，如果你真的想做偉大的工作。所以問題歸結為能力和興趣。你能找到一種工作，讓你的能力和興趣結合起來，產生新想法的爆炸嗎？

Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types of work, the one you’re most suited for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close match. It’s just a question of finding it, and how far into it your ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by trying.
在這方面，我們有理由感到樂觀。有很多不同的方法可以做偉大的工作，甚至還有更多方法尚未被發現。在所有這些不同類型的工作中，你最適合的工作可能是一個非常接近的匹配。可能是一場滑稽的接近比賽。這隻是一個找到它的問題，以及你的能力和興趣能帶你走多遠。你只能通過嘗試來回答這個問題。

Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you’d fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that’s what’s going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question.
更多的人可以嘗試做偉大的工作，而不是做。阻礙他們的是謙虛和恐懼的結合。試圖成為牛頓或莎士比亞似乎很冒昧。這似乎也很難;當然，如果你嘗試過這樣的事情，你會失敗的。據推測，計算很少是明確的。很少有人有意識地決定不嘗試做偉大的工作。但這就是潛意識裡發生的事情;他們迴避這個問題。

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.
所以我要對你進行一個鬼鬼祟祟的把戲。你想做偉大的工作，還是不想？現在你必須有意識地決定。對此感到抱歉。我不會對普通觀眾這樣做。但我們已經知道您對此感興趣。

Don’t worry about being presumptuous. You don’t have to tell anyone. And if it’s too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have worse problems than that. In fact you’ll be lucky if it’s the worst problem you have.
不要擔心放肆。你不必告訴任何人。如果太難了，你失敗了，那又怎樣？很多人都有比這更糟糕的問題。事實上，如果這是你遇到的最糟糕的問題，你會很幸運。

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，你必須努力工作。但同樣，很多人必須努力工作。如果你正在做一些你覺得非常有趣的事情，如果你走在正確的道路上，你一定會這樣做，這項工作可能會比你的許多同齡人覺得負擔要輕。

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?
發現就在那裡，等待著我們做出。為什麼不是你？

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] 我不認為你能給出一個準確的定義，什麼才算是偉大的工作。做偉大的工作意味著把重要的事情做好，這樣你就可以擴展人們對可能性的看法。但是重要性沒有門檻。這是一個程度的問題，無論如何，當時往往很難判斷。所以我寧願人們專注於發展他們的興趣，而不是擔心他們是否重要。試著做一些了不起的事情，然後留給後代說你是否成功了。

[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] 許多單口喜劇都是基於對日常生活中的異常現象的注意。“你有沒有注意到…？”新的想法來自對非平凡的事情的這樣做。這可能有助於解釋為什麼人們對新想法的反應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]第二個限定詞至關重要。如果你對大多數權威人士打折的東西感到興奮，但你不能給出比“他們不明白”更準確的解釋，那麼你開始陷入怪胎的領域。

[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] 找到要處理的東西不僅僅是在當前版本的你和已知問題列表之間找到匹配的問題。你經常需要與問題共同發展。這就是為什麼有時很難弄清楚要做什麼。搜索空間很大。它是所有可能的工作類型的笛卡爾產物，包括已知的和尚未被發現的，以及你所有可能的未來版本。

There’s no way you could search this whole space, so you have to rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be; different types of work have been collected together as much by accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.
你無法搜索整個空間，所以你必須依靠啟發式方法來生成有希望的路徑，並希望最佳匹配將被聚集在一起。他們不會總是這樣;不同類型的作品被收集在一起，既是歷史的偶然，也是它們之間內在的相似性。

[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] 好奇的人更有可能做偉大的工作有很多原因，但其中一個更微妙的是，通過廣撒網，他們更有可能首先找到合適的工作。

[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]為你覺得不如你老練的觀眾製作東西也可能是危險的，如果這導致你與他們交談。如果你以足夠憤世嫉俗的方式這樣做，你可以賺很多錢，但這不是通往偉大工作的途徑。並不是說任何使用這個 m.o. 的人都會在乎。

[7] This idea I learned from Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any field.
[7] 這個想法是我從哈代的《數學家的道歉》中學到的，我把它推薦給任何有志於在任何領域做偉大工作的人。

[8] Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.
[8] 正如我們高估了一天能做什麼，低估了幾年來能做什麼一樣，我們高估了拖延一天所造成的傷害，低估了拖延幾年造成的傷害。

[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] 你通常不會因為做你想做的事而獲得報酬，尤其是在早期。有兩種選擇：通過做接近你想要的工作而獲得報酬，並希望將其推向更近，或者因為完全做其他事情而獲得報酬，並在旁邊做自己的專案。兩者都可以工作，但都有缺點：在第一種方法中，您的工作預設會受到損害，而在第二種方法中，您必須爭取時間去做。

[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] 如果你把你的生活安排得對，它會自動提供專注-放鬆的迴圈。完美的設置是您工作的辦公室，您可以步行往返。

[11] There may be some very unworldly people who do great work without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to cover that case, it becomes: Don’t try to be anything except the best.
[11] 可能有一些非常不世故的人，他們做偉大的工作，卻沒有有意識地嘗試。如果你想擴展這個規則來涵蓋這種情況，它就變成了：除了最好的之外，不要試圖成為任何東西。

[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]這在像表演這樣的工作中變得更加複雜，因為表演的目標是採用一個虛假的角色。但即使在這裡，也有可能受到影響。也許這些領域的規則應該是避免無意的影響。

[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] 當你認為是不容置疑的信念時，當且僅當它們也是不可證偽的時，這是安全的。例如，每個人都應該在法律下得到平等對待的原則是安全的，因為帶有“應該”的句子並不是關於世界的陳述，因此很難反駁。如果沒有證據可以反駁你的一個原則，你就不需要為了保護它而忽略任何事實。

[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] 情感比智力上的不誠實更容易治癒。感情往往是年輕人的缺點，隨著時間的推移而燃燒殆盡，而智力上的不誠實則更像是一種性格缺陷。

[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] 顯然，你不必在你有了想法的那一刻工作，但你可能最近一直在工作。

[16] Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I’m skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.
[16] 有人說精神活性藥物也有類似的效果。我持懷疑態度，但也幾乎完全不知道它們的影響。

[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，你可以給出你注意力的第n個最重要的話題（m-1）/m^n，對於一些m>1。當然，你不能如此精確地分配你的注意力，但這至少給出了一個合理分佈的想法。

[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] 定義宗教的原則一定是錯誤的。否則，任何人都可能採用它們，並且沒有什麼可以將該宗教的信徒與其他人區分開來。

[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] 嘗試寫下你年輕時想知道的問題清單可能是一個很好的練習。您可能會發現您現在可以對其中一些做點什麼。

[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] 原創性和不確定性之間的聯繫導致了一個奇怪的現象：因為傳統思想的人比獨立思想的人更確定，這往往會讓他們在爭議中占上風，儘管他們通常更愚蠢。

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

[21] Derived from Linus Pauling’s “If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas.”
[21] 源自萊納斯·鮑林（Linus Pauling）的“如果你想有好的想法，你必須有很多想法。

[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]攻擊一個專案是“玩具”，類似於攻擊一個聲明是“不恰當的”。這意味著不能再提出實質性的批評了。

[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] 判斷你是否在浪費時間的一種方法是問你是在生產還是在消費。編寫電腦遊戲比玩電腦遊戲更不可能浪費時間，而玩你創造東西的遊戲比玩你沒有創造東西的遊戲更不可能浪費時間。

[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] 另一個相關的好處是，如果你還沒有公開說過什麼，你就不會偏向於支援你早期結論的證據。只要有足夠的正直，你就可以在這方面獲得永恆的青春，但很少有人能做到。對於大多數人來說，以前發表過意見的效果類似於意識形態，只是數量為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]在1630年代早期，丹尼爾·邁滕斯（Daniel Mytens）畫了一幅亨麗埃塔·瑪麗亞（Henrietta Maria）將月桂花環遞給查理斯一世的畫，然後畫了自己的版本，以顯示他有多好。

[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] 我故意模糊一個地方是什麼。在撰寫本文時，在同一個物理位置具有難以複製的優勢，但這可能會改變。

[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]當其他人必須做的工作非常有限時，這是錯誤的，就像SETI@home或比特幣一樣。可以通過定義類似的受限協定來擴展它為假的區域，在節點中具有更大的行動自由度。

[28] Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably a good idea.
[28] 推論：構建一些使人們能夠繞過仲介並直接與受眾互動的東西可能是一個好主意。

[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] 總是走或跑同一條路可能會有所幫助，因為這可以釋放注意力進行思考。我有這種感覺，而且有一些歷史證據。

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Pam Graham, Tom Howard, Patrick Hsu, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Henry Lloyd-Baker, Bob Metcalfe, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, Michael Neilsen, Courtenay Pipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts.