July 2023

2023年7月

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot
of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided
to find out by making it.

如果你收集了很多不同领域内做出卓越工作的技巧清单，它们的交集会是什么样子？我决定通过实践来找出答案。

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone
working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the
intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does
have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."

部分原因是我想创作一份适用于任何领域工作者的指南。但我也很好奇这个交集的形状。而这次实践表明，它确实有一个明确的形状；它不仅仅是一个标有“努力工作”的点。

The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

以下方法假定你非常有抱负。

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.

第一步是决定做什么工作。你选择的工作需要具备三个特质：它必须是你天生擅长的，你对此有深厚兴趣，并且为做出卓越工作提供空间。

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，你不需要太担心第三个标准。如果有的话，有抱负的人已经对此过于保守了。所以你只需要找到你既擅长又非常感兴趣的事情。
[1]

That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When
you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different
kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not
even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at
14, most have to figure it out.

这听起来很简单，但实际上往往很难。年轻时，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不知道不同类型的工作是什么样的。有些工作甚至可能还不存在。因此，虽然有些人在14岁时就知道自己想做什么，但大多数人必须慢慢摸索。

The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not
sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.
You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's
good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries
come from noticing connections between different fields.

弄清楚该做什么工作的方法是去做。如果不确定该做什么，就猜一个。但要选一个开始行动。你可能会猜错，但这没关系。了解多种事物是好事；一些最伟大的发现来自注意到不同领域之间的联系。

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work"
mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do
great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.
It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your
part of it.

养成自己动手做项目的习惯。不要让“工作”意味着别人让你做的事。如果有一天你确实做出了伟大的工作，那很可能是一个你自己的项目。它可能属于某个更大的项目，但你会是其中你负责部分的驱动力。

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？任何你觉得充满激情、雄心勃勃的事情。随着你年龄增长，对项目的品味也在演变，激动人心和重要的事情会逐渐重合。7岁时，用乐高建造巨大的东西可能看起来激动人心且雄心勃勃；14岁时，可能是自学微积分；到了21岁，你开始探索物理学中未解答的问题。但永远保持那份激动人心。

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，也是舵。它不仅能驱动你，而且如果你顺其自然，它也会告诉你要做什么。

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——好奇到让大多数其他人感到无聊的程度？这就是你要寻找的。

Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the
next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the
frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a
distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get
close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

一旦你找到了自己过分感兴趣的东西，下一步就是学习足够多的知识，以便到达知识的前沿。知识是分形扩张的，从远处看，它的边界似乎是平滑的，但一旦你学得足够多，靠近它时，就会发现其实充满了空白。

The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because
your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler
model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions
about things that everyone else took for granted.
[2]

下一步是注意到这些空白。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑倾向于忽略这些空白，以便构建更简单的世界模型。许多发现都源于对众人习以为常的事情提出疑问。[2]

If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often
has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math.
It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears,
embrace it.

如果答案看起来很奇怪，那就更好了。伟大的作品往往带着一丝奇异。从绘画到数学，你都能看到这一点。刻意制造这种奇异会显得做作，但如果它自然出现，那就拥抱它。

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]

勇敢地追逐离群的想法，即使别人不感兴趣——实际上，尤其是当他们不感兴趣时。如果你对某个被他人忽略的可能性感到兴奋，并且有足够的专业知识准确指出他们忽略了什么，那这就是你能找到的最好的赌注。[3]

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier,
notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone
who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

四个步骤：选择一个领域，学习到足够进入前沿，注意空白，探索有前景的空白。这几乎是所有做出伟大成就的人的做法，从画家到物理学家。

Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible
to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the
empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.
That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply
interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere
diligence ever could.

第二步和第四步需要付出艰苦的努力。也许无法证明你必须努力工作才能做出伟大的事情，但经验证据的规模堪比关于死亡率的证据。这就是为什么做你深感兴趣的事情至关重要。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.

好奇心、乐趣和做令人印象深刻之事的渴望是三种最强大的动机。有时它们会汇聚，而那种组合则是所有力量中最强大的。

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.

最大的收获是发现一个新的分形芽。你在知识的表面注意到一条裂缝，将其撬开，里面竟是一个完整的世界。

Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring
out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't
tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which
means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for
years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at
it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning
about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose
late based on very incomplete information.
[4]

我们来多谈谈弄清楚该做什么工作这件复杂的事。之所以困难，主要原因是除非亲身去做，否则你无法了解大多数工作是什么样的。这意味着这四个步骤是重叠的：你可能需要在一件事上工作多年才能知道自己有多喜欢它或有多擅长。而在此期间，你没有去做其他大部分工作，因此也无法了解它们。所以最坏的情况是，你在信息非常不完整的情况下做出迟来的选择。[4]

The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in
two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that
grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the
more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what
to do.

野心的本质加剧了这个问题。野心有两种形式：一种先于对主题的兴趣，另一种则从中生长出来。大多数做出伟大成就的人两者兼有，而前者越多，决定做什么就越困难。

The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They
expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what
it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal
trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.

大多数国家的教育体系假装这很容易。它们期望你在真正了解某个领域之前就早早做出承诺。结果，一个处于最佳轨道上的雄心勃勃的人，往往会被系统视为一个故障案例。

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.

如果它们至少承认这一点会更好——承认这个体系不仅无法帮你太多去弄清楚该做什么工作，而且其设计前提就是假设你会在青少年时期神奇地猜对。它们不会告诉你，但我会：当涉及到弄清楚该做什么工作时，你只能靠自己。有些人运气好，确实猜对了，但其余的人会发现自己正斜向穿越那些假设每个人都能猜对而铺设的轨道。

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know
what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively,
assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action.
But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read
biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how
much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result
of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up.
So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to
do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people,
read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
[5]

如果你年轻有为却不知道应该做什么工作，该怎么办？你不应该做的就是随波逐流，以为问题会自动解决。你需要采取行动。但并没有一个系统的程序可以遵循。当你阅读那些做出伟大成就的人的传记时，你会发现其中充满了多少运气因素。他们往往是通过一次偶然的会面，或者偶然读到一本书，才发现自己该做什么。所以，你需要让自己成为运气的大目标，而要做到这一点，就要保持好奇心。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.

不确定时，优先选择有趣的事情。随着学习的深入，领域本身也会变化。例如，数学家实际做的工作与你在高中数学课上学的截然不同。所以，你需要给不同类型的工作机会，让它们展示自己的真实面貌。但一个领域应该随着你了解得越多而变得越有趣。如果不是这样，那它可能不适合你。

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.

如果你发现自己感兴趣的东西和别人不同，不必担心。你的趣味越奇特，反而越好。奇特的趣味往往更强烈，而对工作的强烈趣味意味着你会富有成效。而且，在你之前很少有人涉足的地方寻找，更可能发现新事物。

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.

适合某项工作的一个标志是，你甚至喜欢别人觉得乏味或可怕的部分。

But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in the
course of working on one thing you discover another that's more
exciting, don't be afraid to switch.

但是领域不是人，你不必对它们忠诚。如果在从事某件事的过程中发现了更令人兴奋的另一件事，不要害怕转换。

If you're making something for people, make sure it's something
they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something
you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool
you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests,
this will also get you your initial audience.

如果你在为别人创造东西，确保那是他们真正想要的。最好的方法是创造你自己想要的东西。写你想读的故事，造你想用的工具。因为你的朋友很可能有相似的兴趣，这也会为你带来最初的受众。

This should follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the most
exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason
I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong.
Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some
imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down
that route, you're lost.
[6]

这应当遵循兴奋法则。显然，最令人兴奋的写作内容就是你最想读的。我特别提及这一情况，是因为太多人搞错了。他们不去创作自己真正想要的东西，反而试图迎合某个想象中的、更高级的受众。一旦走上这条路，你就迷失了方向。[6]

There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're
trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion,
fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But
if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof
against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.

当你试图决定该做什么时，会有很多力量将你引入歧途：装腔作势、时尚潮流、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的愿望、声名显赫的骗子。但如果你坚持自己真正感兴趣的事情，就能抵御所有这些因素。只要你感兴趣，就不会误入歧途。

Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,
but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of
obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it
does take a good deal of boldness.

追随兴趣听起来可能是一种相当被动的策略，但实际上它往往意味着要跨越各种障碍。你通常必须冒着被拒绝和失败的风险。因此，这确实需要相当大的勇气。

But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning.
In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard
on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of
it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try
to preserve certain invariants.

虽然你需要勇气，但通常并不需要太多计划。在大多数情况下，做出伟大工作的秘诀就是：在激动人心且雄心勃勃的项目上努力奋斗，好结果自然会随之而来。与其制定计划然后执行，不如尝试保持某些不变条件。

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，它只适用于那些你能预先描述的目标。你可以通过从小立志并坚持不懈地追求，来赢得金牌或变得富有，但无法通过这种方式发现自然选择。

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy
is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most
interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call
this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done
great work seem to have done it.

我认为对于大多数想要做出伟大工作的人来说，正确的策略不是过度计划。在每个阶段，做最有趣且能为你未来提供最佳选择的事情。我称这种方法为“保持顺风”。这似乎是大多数做出伟大工作的人的做法。

Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on
it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new
idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to
work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't
like that.

即使你找到了令人兴奋的工作，做起来也未必总是顺风顺水。有时，一个新想法会让你清晨一跃而起，立刻投入工作。但很多时候，情况并非如此。

You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.
There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a
technique to working, just as there is to sailing.

你并非只需扬起风帆，灵感就会推着你前行。还有逆风、暗流和隐藏的暗礁。所以，工作有技巧，就像航行一样。

For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too
hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns:
fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health.
The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the
type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for
four or five hours a day.

例如，尽管你必须努力工作，但也可能过度工作，如果那样，你会发现回报递减：疲劳会让你变得愚蠢，最终甚至损害健康。工作产生递减回报的点取决于类型。有些最困难的工作，你可能一天只能做四五个小时。

Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try
to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in.
You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.

理想情况下，这些时间应该是连续的。尽可能安排你的生活，以便有大量连续的工作时间。如果你知道自己可能会被打断，你就会回避困难的任务。

It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working.
You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial
threshold. Don't worry about this; it's the nature of work, not a
flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both
per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the
sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's
ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over
it.

开始工作可能比持续工作更难。你常常需要欺骗自己才能跨过那道初始门槛。别担心；这是工作的本质，不是你性格的缺陷。工作有一种激活能量，无论是每天还是每个项目。而且，由于这道门槛是虚假的——它比持续工作所需的能量更高——为了跨过它，对自己撒一个相应程度的谎也是可以的。

It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great
work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm
reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by
saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes
later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and
I'm off.

如果你想做出伟大的工作，对自己撒谎通常是错误的，但这是少数例外之一。当我早上不愿开始工作时，我常常欺骗自己说：“我就看看我已经写好的内容。”五分钟后，我就会发现一些似乎有误或不完整的地方，然后我就开始工作了。

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?"

类似技巧也适用于启动新项目。比如，对自己隐瞒一个项目需要多少工作量是可以的。许多伟大的事情始于某人说：“这能有多难？”

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.

这是年轻人占据优势的一种情况。他们更乐观，尽管他们乐观的来源之一是无知，但在这种情况下，无知有时能胜过知识。

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，要努力完成你开始的事情，即使最终的工作量超出预期。完成事情不仅仅是为了整洁或自律的练习。在许多项目中，大量最好的工作都发生在原本计划中的最后阶段。

Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what
you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you
discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after
all.
[7]

另一个可以允许的谎言是夸大你正在做的事情的重要性，至少在你自己的心目中。如果这能帮助你发现新东西，结果可能证明它根本不是谎言。
[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含义——按天和按项目——因此也有两种形式的拖延。按项目拖延危险得多。你年复一年地推迟开始那个雄心勃勃的项目，因为时机总是不太合适。当你以年为单位拖延时，你可以有很多事情没做完。
[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.

按项目拖延如此危险的一个原因是它通常伪装成工作。你并不是闲坐着什么都不做；你正在勤奋地做其他事。因此，按项目拖延不会像按天拖延那样拉响警报。你太忙了，以至于没注意到它。

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：我正在做的是我最想做的事吗？年轻时，有时回答“不是”也没关系，但随着年龄增长，这会变得越来越危险。[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花费大多数人认为不合理的时间在一个问题上。你不能把这段时间视为成本，否则会显得代价太高。你必须在这个过程中找到足够的吸引力。

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years
at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not
how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently
on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take
stock, you're surprised how far you've come.

有些工作可能需要在讨厌的事情上勤奋多年才能进入好阶段，但这不是伟大工作的方式。伟大工作是通过持续专注于你真正感兴趣的事情而实现的。当你停下来回顾时，你会惊讶于自己走了多远。

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative
effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but
if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key:
consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every
day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

我们惊讶的原因是低估了工作的累积效果。每天写一页听起来不多，但如果每天都做，一年就能写出一本书。关键在于坚持。做出伟大成就的人并不会每天做很多事，而是有所作为，而非无所作为。

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.

如果你做的是能够产生复利效应的工作，就会获得指数级增长。大多数人无意识地这样做，但值得停下来思考。例如，学习就是这种现象的一个实例：你对某事了解得越多，就越容易学习更多。培养受众是另一个例子：你的粉丝越多，他们带来的新粉丝也越多。

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.

指数增长的问题在于，曲线在初期感觉很平缓。其实并非如此；它仍然是一条美妙的指数曲线。但我们无法凭直觉理解这一点，所以在指数增长的早期阶段往往会低估它。

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.

呈指数级增长的事物会变得极其珍贵，值得我们付出非凡的努力去启动它。但由于我们在早期常常低估指数级增长，这种努力也大多是无意识地完成的：人们会坚持度过学习新事物初期没有回报的阶段，因为他们从经验中知道学习新事物总是需要一个初始的推动力；或者他们一个粉丝一个粉丝地积累受众，只因为没别的事可做。如果人们有意识地认识到他们可以投资于指数级增长，会有更多的人这样做。

Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of
undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying
in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a
little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by
frontal attack.

工作并非只在你有意尝试时才会发生。当你散步、洗澡或躺在床上时，会有一种非定向的思考，这种思考可能非常强大。让思绪稍微游荡，你往往能解决那些正面进攻无法解决的问题。

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]

然而，你必须以正常方式努力工作，才能从这种现象中受益。你不能只是四处晃悠做白日梦。白日梦必须与有意识的、能为其提供问题的专注工作交替进行。
[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要避免分心，但在循环的另一半中避免分心也同样重要。当你让思绪游荡时，它会游荡到你此刻最关心的事情上。所以要避免那些把你的工作从首位挤下去的分心事物，否则你会把这种宝贵的思考浪费在分心的事情上。（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.

有意识地培养自己在所在领域工作中的品味。除非你知道什么是最好的以及为什么最好，否则你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]

那正是你的目标，因为如果你不努力成为最好的，你甚至不会变得优秀。许多来自不同领域的人都曾有过这样的观察，这或许值得思考为什么它是真的。可能是因为抱负是一种几乎所有误差都朝一个方向偏离的现象——几乎所有未中靶心的弹壳都因落点太近而脱靶。也可能是因为立志成为最好与立志表现优秀是性质不同的两件事。又或者，“优秀”本身就是一个过于模糊的标准。很可能以上三点都成立。
[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，这里存在某种规模经济。虽然看起来你试图做到最好会承担沉重的负担，但在实践中，你往往最终会处于领先地位。这令人兴奋，也奇怪地让人感到解放。它简化了事情。在某些方面，试图做到最好比仅仅试图做得好的更容易。

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.

一个高远目标的方法是尝试做出在一百年后人们仍然看重的东西。不是因为他们的意见比同代人的更重要，而是因为一百年后仍然看起来不错的东西更可能是真正的好东西。

Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best
job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive
way.

不要试图用独特的风格工作。只管尽力做到最好；你自然会以独特的方式去做。

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying
to is affectation.

风格是自然而然以独特方式行事。刻意为之则是矫揉造作。

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is
doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while
you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows
in the work.
[12]

矫揉造作实际上是假装是别人在做这项工作。你采用一个令人印象深刻但虚假的角色，虽然你对这种印象深刻感到满意，但作品中展现的却是虚假。[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.

渴望成为别人的诱惑在年轻人身上最为强烈。他们常常觉得自己是无名小卒。但你永远不必担心这个问题，因为如果你致力于足够雄心勃勃的项目，这个问题会自行解决。如果你在一个雄心勃勃的项目上取得成功，你就不是无名小卒；你是完成它的人。所以只管去做你的工作，你的身份自然会得到关照。

"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how
would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to
be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're
earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar
vices.

“避免矫揉造作”这个规则在某种程度上是有用的，但你如何从正面表达这个想法？你如何说出应该是什么，而不是不应该是什么？最好的答案是真诚。如果你真诚，你不仅能避免矫揉造作，还能避免一系列类似的恶习。

The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're
taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind
of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new
ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're
trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can
you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?

真诚的核心是智识上的诚实。我们从小被教导要诚实，认为这是一种无私的美德——一种牺牲。但实际上，它也是一种力量的源泉。要发现新思想，你需要对真相有异常敏锐的洞察力。你试图看到比前人更多的真相。如果你在智识上不诚实，又怎么能对真相有敏锐的眼光呢？

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]

避免智识不诚实的一种方法是保持一个轻微的正向压力。积极愿意承认自己错了。一旦你承认在某件事上错了，你就自由了。在那之前，你必须背负着它。[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成分是非正式性。非正式性比其语法上否定的名称所暗示的要重要得多。它不仅仅是某种东西的缺失。它意味着专注于真正重要的东西，而不是无关紧要的东西。

What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as
doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing
it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being
good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work:
they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's
basically the definition of a nerd.

正式和矫揉造作的共同点是，在做事的同时，你还在努力表现得像个样子。但任何用于表现自己的精力都会从把事情做好中消耗掉。这就是为什么书呆子在做伟大工作时有优势的原因之一：他们几乎不花精力去表现什么。事实上，这基本上就是书呆子的定义。

Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need
in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood.
So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than
the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms
of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense,
and the route to great work is never easy.

书呆子有一种天真的勇敢，这正是做伟大工作所需要的。这不是学来的，而是从童年保留下来的。所以请保持它。要做那个把东西拿出来展示的人，而不是那个坐在一旁，发出听起来高深的批评的人。“批评很容易”在最字面的意义上是真的，而通往伟大工作的道路从来都不容易。

There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical and
pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage to
be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a
fool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. The
Old Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like a
fool. But that's advice for seeming smart. If you actually want
to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling
people your ideas.

有些工作可能愤世嫉俗和悲观反而有优势，但如果你想做出伟大的工作，乐观是一种优势，尽管这意味着你有时会冒着看起来像个傻瓜的风险。有一种古老的传统是反其道而行之。《旧约》说最好保持沉默，以免显得像个傻瓜。但那是为了看起来聪明的建议。如果你真的想发现新事物，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]

有些人天生认真，而另一些人则需要有意识地努力。任何一种认真都足够了。但我怀疑如果不认真，能否做出伟大的工作。即使你很认真，这也很难。你没有足够的容错空间来承受做作、智力不诚实、正统、时髦或冷酷所带来的扭曲。[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.

伟大的工作不仅与它的创造者一致，而且与其自身一致。它通常是浑然一体的。因此，如果你在工作中途面临一个决定，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重新来过。你不一定非得这样，但你必须愿意这样做。这可能需要一些努力；当有些东西需要重做时，现状偏见和懒惰会让你否认这一点。要克服这一点，问自己：如果我已经做了改变，我是否想回到现在的状态？

Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit
just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of
effort.

要有信心去舍弃。不要因为某样东西让你自豪或花费了你很多精力就保留它，如果它不合适的话。

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，最好将你所做的事情提炼到本质。结果会更集中；你会更好地理解它；而且你无法对自己说谎，无法欺骗自己是否真的有实质内容。

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.

数学上的优雅听起来可能只是一种从艺术中借用的比喻。当我第一次听到用“优雅”来形容一个证明时，我也是这么想的。但现在我怀疑它在概念上更为根本——艺术优雅的主要成分其实是数学的优雅。无论如何，它都是一个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，优雅可能是一种长期押注。费力的解决方案在短期内往往更有威望。它们需要大量努力且难以理解，这两点都会给人留下印象，至少暂时如此。

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.

而一些最杰出的工作看起来却似乎付出的努力较少，因为它们在某种意义上已经存在于那里。它们不必被建造，只需被看见。当你难以判断自己是在创造还是在发现某样东西时，这是一个非常好的迹象。

When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or
discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself
as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.

当你从事既可以视为创造也可以视为发现的工作时，宁可倾向于发现。试着把自己仅仅看作是一个媒介，观念通过你自然成形。

(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，有一个例外：选择要研究的问题。这通常被视为搜索，但在最佳情况下，它更像是创造。在最佳情况下，你在探索领域的过程中创造了这个领域。）

Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it
gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition
will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of
eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit
will be.

同样，如果你试图构建一个强大的工具，让它毫无必要地不受限制。强大的工具几乎从定义上就会被用于你意想不到的方式，所以在消除限制方面宁可过度，即使你不知道会有什么好处。

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.

优秀的作品往往像工具一样，成为他人构建的基础。因此，如果你创造的想法能被他人所用，或者提出的问题能引发他人解答，这通常是个好迹象。最出色的想法往往能在多个不同领域产生影响。

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer
than you intended.

如果你以最一般的形式表达你的想法，它们会比你所预期的更加真实。

True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be
true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new
ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers
of knowledge.

当然，仅靠真实还不够。伟大的想法必须既真实又新颖。而当你积累了足够的知识到达知识前沿后，发现新想法还需要一定的能力。

In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity,
and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name,
because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possible
to have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a great
deal of what's often called technical ability — and yet not have
much of this.

在英语中，我们给这种能力起名为原创性、创造力和想象力。给它一个单独的名字似乎合理，因为它在某种程度上确实是一项独立的技能。一个人可能在其他方面拥有很强的能力——拥有通常所说的技术能力——却未必具备这种能力。

I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading.
Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers
throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle
grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.

我从未喜欢过“创作过程”这个词。它似乎具有误导性。原创性不是一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。原创思想家会不断抛出关于他们关注事物的新想法，就像角磨机迸出火花一样。他们无法克制自己。

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.

如果他们关注的事物是他们不太了解的，这些新想法可能并不好。我认识的一位最具原创性的思想家在离婚后决定专注于研究约会。他对约会的了解大致相当于一个普通的15岁少年，结果相当丰富多彩。但看到原创性与专业知识如此分离，反而更清楚地揭示了它的本质。

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，但肯定有办法最大限度地发挥你拥有的原创性。例如，当你正在做某件事时，你更有可能产生原创想法。原创想法并非来自试图拥有原创想法，而是来自试图构建或理解稍微过难的东西。
[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.

谈论或写作你感兴趣的事物是产生新想法的好方法。当你试图将想法付诸语言时，一个缺失的想法会形成一种真空，把它从你身上吸出来。事实上，有一种思考只能通过写作来完成。

Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll
often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often
dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit.
Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.
[16]

改变你的环境会有所帮助。如果你去一个新地方，你常常会发现那里有了新想法。旅程本身往往会激发它们。但你可能不必走很远就能获得这种好处。有时，去散散步就足够了。
[16]

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas
if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives
the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because
analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

在主题空间中旅行也有帮助。如果你探索许多不同的主题，你会有更多的新想法，部分原因在于这给了角向磨光机更大的工作表面，部分原因在于类比是新想法特别丰富的来源。

Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though,
or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it
according to something more like a power law.
[17]
Be professionally
curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.

不过，不要将注意力均匀地分散在多个主题上，否则你会过于分散。你应该按照类似于幂律的分布来分配注意力。
[17]
对少数几个主题保持专业的好奇心，对更多主题保持随意的好奇心。

Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds
originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship
is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality;
it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since
questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity
at its best is a creative force.

好奇心和原创性密切相关。好奇心通过给原创性提供新的工作素材来滋养它。但关系比这更紧密。好奇心本身就是一种原创性；它之于问题，大致就像原创性之于答案。而且，由于最好的问题往往是答案的重要组成部分，最好的好奇心就是一种创造力。

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特的游戏，因为它通常包含发现就在你眼皮底下的事物。一旦你看到了一个新想法，它往往显得显而易见。为什么以前没人想到这一点呢？

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably
a good one.

当一个想法同时显得新颖又显而易见时，它很可能是个好主意。

Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having
new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction?
It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the
way you look at the world. We see the world through models that
both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas
become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard.
That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover:
they're easy to see after you do something hard.

看到显而易见的东西听起来很容易。然而经验表明，产生新想法很难。这一明显矛盾的根源是什么？在于看到新想法通常需要你改变看待世界的方式。我们通过既帮助又限制我们的模型来看待世界。当你修复了一个有缺陷的模型，新想法就变得显而易见。但注意并修复一个错误的模型很难。这就是新想法如何既显而易见又难以发现：在你完成困难的事情之后，它们就容易看到了。

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other
people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where
they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these
clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached
to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend
to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous
it may seem in retrospect.

发现错误模型的一种方法是比他人更严格。世界的错误模型会留下与现实碰撞的线索痕迹。大多数人不想看到这些线索。说他们依恋现有模型都算轻描淡写；他们用它来思考；所以往往会忽视模型破裂留下的线索痕迹，无论事后看来这些线索多么显眼。

To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead
of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the
wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was
looking for new ideas as because he was stricter.

要发现新想法，你必须抓住破裂的迹象，而不是视而不见。爱因斯坦就是这样做的。他能看到麦克斯韦方程组的惊人含义，与其说是因为他寻找新想法，不如说是因为他更严格。

The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical
as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps
to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. From the
point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially
shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.

你还需要的是愿意打破规则。尽管听起来矛盾，但如果你想修复自己的世界模型，成为那种乐于打破规则的人会有帮助。从旧模型的角度来看（包括你最初在内所有人都共享这个模型），新模型通常至少会打破一些隐含的规则。

Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new
ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem
perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world
they brought with them. But they didn't at the time; it took the
greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally
accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.

很少有人理解创新需要打破多少规则，因为新想法一旦成功，看起来就会保守得多。一旦你开始使用它们带来的新世界观，它们就显得完全合理。但在当时并非如此；日心说模型用了大半个世纪才被普遍接受，甚至在天文学家中也是如此，因为它当时感觉太荒谬了。

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.

事实上，仔细想想，一个好的新想法对大多数人来说必须显得糟糕，否则早就有人探索它了。所以你寻找的是那些看似疯狂，但却是正确类型的疯狂的想法。如何识别它们？你无法确定。通常，看似糟糕的想法确实是糟糕的。但正确类型的疯狂想法往往令人兴奋；它们富含启示；而单纯糟糕的想法则令人沮丧。

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舒适地打破规则：享受打破它们，或者对它们漠不关心。我把这两种情况分别称为激进型和被动型的独立思考。

The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules
don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional
energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of
a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it
started.

激进独立思考者是那些淘气的人。规则不仅仅无法阻止他们；打破规则反而给他们额外的能量。对于这种人，对项目纯粹大胆的欣喜有时能提供足够的启动能量，让它开始。

The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps
even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often
make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts
as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies
also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs.
Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.

打破规则的另一种方式是不在乎它们，甚至可能不知道它们的存在。这就是为什么新手和局外人常常有新发现；他们对领域假设的无知成为了暂时的被动独立思考的来源。阿斯伯格综合征患者似乎也对传统信仰有一种免疫力。我认识的几位说，这帮助他们产生新想法。

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.

严谨加上打破规则听起来像是一种奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，它们是对立的。但流行文化在这方面有一个破碎的模式。它隐含地假设问题是琐碎的，而在琐碎的事情上，严谨和打破规则是对立的。但在真正重要的问题上，只有打破规则者才能真正做到严谨。

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要到半决赛才会输掉。你会下意识地看到它，但随后你潜意识的另一部分会将其否决，因为它太过古怪、风险太大、工作量太大或太有争议。这暗示了一个激动人心的可能性：如果你能关闭这些过滤器，你就能看到更多的新想法。

One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone
else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to
protect you.

实现这一点的一种方法是，思考哪些想法是值得他人探索的。这样，你的潜意识就不会为了保护你而否决它们。

You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other
direction: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished
but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable
ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.

你还可以通过逆向工作来发现被忽视的想法：从那些遮蔽它们的因素入手。每一个备受珍视但错误的原则周围都有一片未被探索的有价值想法的死区，因为这些想法与之相矛盾。

Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So
anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically
as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow.
Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.
[18]

宗教就是一系列备受珍视但错误的原则的集合。因此，任何可以被字面或比喻地描述为宗教的事物，其阴影下都会存在有价值的未探索想法。哥白尼和达尔文都做出了这类发现。[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，人们对哪些事情抱有宗教般的执着——即过于依附于某个可能并不像他们想象的那样不言自明的原则？如果你抛弃它，又会有什么成为可能？

People show much more originality in solving problems than in
deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly
conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream
of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on
fashionable problems.

人们在解决问题时表现出比决定要解决哪些问题时要多得多的原创性。即使是智力最高的人在决定研究什么时也可能出奇地保守。那些在任何其他方面都绝不会追求时尚的人，却被吸引去研究时髦的问题。

One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than
solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy
you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But
even so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely
responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems
are undervalued.

人们在选择问题时比选择解决方案更保守的一个原因是，问题更像一场豪赌。一个问题可能耗费你数年时间，而探索一个解决方案也许只需几天。但即便如此，我认为大多数人还是过于保守。他们不仅是在应对风险，也是在迎合时尚。不受欢迎的问题往往被低估。

One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the
problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't.
Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its
latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're
interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let
their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.

最有趣的一类不受欢迎的问题是那些人们认为已经被充分探索，但实际上并未如此的问题。伟大的工作常常是发掘已有事物的潜在价值。丢勒和瓦特都做到了这一点。所以，如果你对一个别人认为已无潜力的领域感兴趣，不要被他们的怀疑所阻止。人们在这一点上经常犯错。

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.

研究一个不受欢迎的问题可能非常令人愉悦。没有炒作，也没有匆忙。投机者和批评者都忙于别处。现有的工作往往具有老派的扎实感。而培养那些本会被浪费的想法，也带来一种令人满足的经济感。

But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly
unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't
seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these?
By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way,
and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head
that says you should only be working on "important" problems.

但最常见的一类被忽视的问题，并非那种明显过时的问题。它只是看起来没有实际那么重要。如何找到它们？通过自我放纵——让好奇心自由驰骋，并暂时屏蔽内心那个说你只应该研究“重要”问题的声音。

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.

你确实需要研究重要的问题，但几乎每个人对于什么才算重要都过于保守。如果你身边有一个重要却被忽视的问题，它可能已经潜藏在你的潜意识雷达上。所以不妨问问自己：如果你要暂时放下“严肃”工作，去做一件只是因为非常有趣的事情，你会做什么？答案可能比它看起来更重要。

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.

在选择问题上的原创性似乎比解决问题上的原创性更为重要。这正是区分那些发现全新领域的人的关键。因此，看似仅仅是初始步骤的决定要研究什么，在某种意义上却是整个游戏的关键。

Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas
is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition.
People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was
in the question.

很少有人能理解这一点。关于新思想，最大的误解之一在于其构成中问题与答案的比例。人们以为伟大的思想就是答案，但往往真正的洞见在于问题本身。

Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used
in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being
answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can
be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.
How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to
earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By
even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel
territory.

我们低估问题的部分原因在于它们在学校的用法。在学校里，问题往往像不稳定的粒子一样，在被回答之前只能短暂存在。但一个真正好的问题远不止于此。一个真正好的问题是一种部分发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体落向地面的力是否与让行星保持在轨道上的力相同？仅仅是提出这样的问题，你就已经进入了激动人心的新奇领域。

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around
with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of
noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing
that two unanswered questions are the same.

未解答的问题带着身上可能令人不安。但你携带的问题越多，就越有可能注意到解决方案——或者更令人兴奋的是，注意到两个未解答的问题其实是同一个。

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]

有时你会长时间带着一个问题。伟大的工作往往源于重新审视多年前——甚至童年时——你第一次注意到并无法停止思考的问题。人们经常谈论保持年轻梦想的重要性，但保持年轻时期的问题同样重要。
[19]

This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from
the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are
certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long
as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else
understands them either.

这是实际专业知识与大众对其印象差异最大的地方之一。在大众印象中，专家是确定的。但实际上，你越困惑越好，只要（a）你困惑的事情很重要，并且（b）没有其他人能理解它们。

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]

想想新想法被发现前的那一刻。通常，某个拥有足够专业知识的人对某事感到困惑。这意味着原创性部分由困惑——即迷茫——构成！你必须对世界充满谜题感到足够自在，以至于愿意去看到它们，但又不能过于自在以至于不想解决它们。
[20]

It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is
one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best
way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones.
Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

拥有许多未解答的问题是件好事。而在这种情况下，富者愈富，因为获取新问题的最佳方式就是尝试回答现有问题。问题不仅通向答案，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不断成长。你注意到当前范式中伸出一根线头，试着拉扯它，结果它越拉越长。所以，不要等一个问题看起来很大才去回答。你很难预见到这一点。连注意到那根线头都很难，更别说预测拉扯它会导致多少东西解开。

It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on
a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The
initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side
projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start
lots of small things.

最好保持广泛的好奇心——在许多线头上都拉扯一点，看看会发生什么。大事始于小事。大事的初始版本往往只是实验、副业项目或演讲，后来才发展成更大的东西。所以，开始许多小事。

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]

多产的价值被低估了。你尝试的不同事情越多，发现新东西的机会就越大。但要知道，尝试很多事也意味着会尝试很多行不通的事。没有大量坏主意，就不会有大量好主意。[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.

虽然先研究所有前人成果听起来更负责任，但通过尝试来学习会更快、更有趣。而且当你回头研究时，也会对前人成果理解得更深入。所以，宁可开始行动。当开始意味着从小处着手时，开始会更容易；这两个想法就像两块拼图一样契合。

How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By
making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in
successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it,
and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than
anything you could have planned.

如何从小处着手走向成就大事？通过不断迭代。伟大的事物几乎总是通过不断迭代创造出来的。你从小事开始，不断演化，最终版本比任何你能计划出的都更巧妙、更宏大。

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.

当你为他人制作东西时，依次制作多个版本尤其有用——先快速制作一个初始版本，然后根据他们的反馈进行改进。

Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn't, this will at least get
you started.

首先尝试最简单可行的方法。令人惊讶的是，这往往行之有效。如果没有效果，至少也能让你起步。

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.

不要试图在一个版本中塞入太多新东西。对于第一个版本（花费太长时间发布）和第二个版本（第二系统效应），都有专门的术语来描述这种问题，但这都只是更一般原则的体现。

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。当人们这么说时，这是个好兆头。这意味着它拥有新想法所需要的一切，除了规模，而规模往往会随之而来。[22]

The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it
is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does
usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized
to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going
to try x and see what happens." And it is more organized; it just
doesn't work as well.

与从小处着手并逐步改进相反的方法是提前规划好要做什么。而规划通常看起来是更负责任的选择。说“我们先做x，然后y，再z”比说“我们先试试x，看看会发生什么”听起来更有条理。确实更有条理，只是效果没那么好。

Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a
necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something
you have to do because you're working with inflexible media, or
because you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. If
you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to
plan as much, and your designs can evolve instead.

规划本身并非好事。它有时是必要的，但它是必要的恶——是对不宽容条件的回应。你不得不这样做是因为你使用不灵活的媒介，或者你需要协调很多人的努力。如果你保持项目小规模并使用灵活的媒介，你就不需要过多规划，设计也可以自然演化。

Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk
is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a
bet with high expected value. If you're not failing occasionally,
you're probably being too conservative.

承担你能承受的最大风险。在有效的市场中，风险与回报成正比，所以不要追求确定性，而是寻找具有高期望值的赌注。如果你没有偶尔失败，那可能说明你过于保守了。

Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's the
young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear
risk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most.

虽然保守通常与年长者联系在一起，但年轻人往往更容易犯这个错误。缺乏经验让他们害怕风险，但正是在年轻时，你才最能承受风险。

Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working
on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and
encountered questions few others have asked. And there's probably
no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying
to do something slightly too hard.

即使是一个失败的项目也可能很有价值。在努力的过程中，你会穿越很少有人见过的领域，遇到很少有人问过的问题。而问题的来源，大概没有比尝试做稍微超出能力范围的事情更能产生的了。

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.

趁年轻时利用年轻的优势，等年长后利用年长的优势。年轻的优势是精力、时间、乐观和自由；年长的优势是知识、效率、金钱和权力。通过努力，你可以在年轻时获得一些后者的优势，也可以在年长时保留一些前者的优势。

The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they
have. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest
is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time.
The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly
frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know
about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just
because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.

年长者的另一个优势是知道自己的优势是什么。年轻人常常拥有优势却不自知。其中最大的优势可能是时间。年轻人根本不知道自己拥有多少时间。将时间转化为优势的最佳方式是将其用于稍微随性的事情：出于好奇心去学习你不需要知道的东西，或者因为觉得酷而去尝试建造某样东西，或者把某件事做到出奇地好。

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”这个限定词很重要。年轻时可以慷慨地花费时间，但不要简单地浪费。做一件你担心可能浪费时间的事和做一件你确定会浪费时间的事，有很大的区别。前者至少是一种赌注，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——更准确地说，是缺乏经验——最微妙的优势在于，你正用全新的眼光看待一切。当你的大脑第一次接纳一个想法时，两者有时无法完美契合。通常问题出在你的大脑，但偶尔也出在想法本身。想法中的某一部分突兀地伸出来，每当思考它时就会刺痛你。习惯这个想法的人已经学会了忽略它，但你却有机会不去忽略。
[24]

So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay
attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted
to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you.
And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep
progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further
into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If
they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they
probably represent an undiscovered idea.

因此，当你初次学习某样东西时，要留意那些看似错误或缺失之处。你很可能会忽略它们，因为99%的可能问题出在你身上。而且你可能需要暂时搁置疑虑以继续前进。但不要忘记它们。当你对这门学科有了更深的了解后，再回头检查它们是否还在。如果根据你现有的知识它们仍然成立，那么它们很可能代表一个未被发现的发现。

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，是知道哪些事情你无需担心。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。所以他们同等担忧所有事情，而实际上他们应该对少数几件事倍加关注，对其余的事情几乎完全不操心。

But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience.
The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive at
adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've
acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be
able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in
the way of whatever type of work you want to do.

但无知只是缺乏经验问题的一半。另一半是你自认为知道而实际上并非如此的事情。你带着满脑子胡言乱语步入成年——那些你习得的坏习惯和被灌输的错误知识——在你能做出伟大工作之前，至少得清除掉那些妨碍你所从事工作类型的胡说八道。

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.

留在你脑海中的许多胡言乱语是学校留下的。我们太习惯于学校，以至于无意识地将上学等同于学习，但实际上学校具有各种奇怪的特质，扭曲了我们对学习和思考的看法。

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，学校导致被动性。从小你开始，教室前面就有一个权威告诉你们所有人必须学什么，然后衡量你是否学了。但班级和考试都不是学习的内在属性；它们只是学校通常设计方式的人造产物。

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.

你越早克服这种被动性越好。如果你还在上学，试着把你的教育视为自己的项目，把老师视为为你工作的人，而不是反过来。这听起来可能有些牵强，但这不仅仅是某种奇怪的思想实验。在经济上这是事实，而在最好的情况下，在智力上这也是事实。最好的老师不想成为你的老板。他们更希望你主动进取，把他们作为建议的来源，而不是被他们牵着鼻子走完课程。

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.

学校还会给你一种关于工作是什么样的误导性印象。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利用你目前所学到的知识来解决的。但在现实生活中，你必须自己找出问题是什么，而且你常常不知道这些问题是否能解决。

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是训练你通过破解考试来获胜。你无法通过这样做做出伟大的工作。你无法欺骗上帝。所以停止寻找那种捷径。击败系统的方法是把注意力放在别人忽视的问题和解决方案上，而不是在工作中偷工减料。

Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you
a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would
be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential
people.

不要把自己看作是依赖某个守门人给你一个"重大突破"。即使这是真的，获得它的最好方法也是专注于做好工作，而不是追逐有影响力的人。

And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that
impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different
from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection
committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of
a feedback loop, and very few are.

也不要对委员会的拒绝耿耿于怀。给招生官员和奖项委员会留下深刻印象的品质与做出伟大工作所需的品质截然不同。选拔委员会的决定只有在它们是反馈循环的一部分时才有意义，而很少有委员会是这样的。

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.

刚进入一个领域的人常常会模仿现有的作品。这本身并没有什么不好的。没有比尝试复制某物更好的方式来学习它的工作原理了。模仿也不一定使你的作品缺乏原创性。原创性在于新思想的出现，而不是旧思想的缺失。

There's a good way to copy and a bad way. If you're going to copy
something, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still,
unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributed
phrase "Great artists steal." The really dangerous kind of copying,
the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that's done
without realizing it, because you're nothing more than a train
running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other
extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination.
[25]

复制有好有坏。如果你要复制某样东西，就公开地去做，而不是偷偷摸摸，或者更糟，无意识地复制。这就是那句被错误引用的名言“伟大的艺术家剽窃”的含义。真正危险的复制，那种让复制名声扫地的复制，是那种没有意识到自己正在复制的复制，因为你只不过是在他人铺设的轨道上运行的一列火车。但在另一个极端，复制也可以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，你的早期作品几乎不可避免地在某种意义上基于他人的作品。项目很少凭空出现。它们通常是对之前工作的反应。当你刚开始时，你没有自己的先前作品；如果你要对某事物做出反应，那必须是别人的作品。一旦你站稳脚跟，你就可以对自己的作品做出反应。但虽然前者被称为模仿，后者却不然，从结构上看，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，最新颖的思想的新颖性有时最初会让它们看起来比实际更缺乏独创性。新的发现常常不得不初始地被视为现有事物的变体，即使是对发现者本人来说也是如此，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.

然而，复制确实存在一些危险。其中之一是你倾向于复制旧事物——那些在当时处于知识前沿、但如今已不再前沿的事物。

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.

而且当你复制某样东西时，不要复制它的所有特征。有些特征如果复制会显得可笑。例如，如果你18岁，不要模仿一位德高望重的50岁教授的风度，或者几百年后模仿文艺复兴诗歌的风格。

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.

你崇拜的事物的某些特征其实是它们尽管存在这些缺陷却仍能成功的缺陷。事实上，最容易模仿的特征往往正是那些缺陷。

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.

这在行为方面尤其如此。有些有天赋的人很混蛋，这有时会让缺乏经验的人觉得混蛋是有天赋的一部分。事实并非如此；有天赋只是他们得以逃脱惩罚的方式。

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样东西从一个领域复制到另一个领域。历史上充满了这样的偶然发现，因此我们很可能应该通过刻意学习其他领域的工作来给偶然性一个机会。如果你允许它们成为隐喻，你可以从相当遥远的领域汲取想法。

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.

负面例子和正面例子一样能激励人。事实上，有时你从做得糟糕的事情中学到的比从做得好的事情中学到的更多；有时只有当某样东西缺失时，人们才清楚需要什么。

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]

如果你所在领域的许多顶尖人才都聚集在一个地方，通常来说，去那里待一段时间是个好主意。这会增强你的雄心壮志，同时也会让你看到这些人也是凡人，从而增强你的自信心。[26]

If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you
might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy
to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're
really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's
interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their
hobbies.

如果你态度认真，你可能会得到比预期更热情的欢迎。大多数在某方面非常出色的人，都乐于与任何真正感兴趣的人谈论它。如果他们真的擅长自己的工作，那么他们可能对此有着业余爱好者的兴趣，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.

然而，找到真正优秀的人可能需要一些努力。做出伟大工作享有如此高的声望，以至于在某些地方，特别是大学里，存在一种礼貌的虚构，即每个人都在从事伟大工作。而事实远非如此。大学内部的人不能公开这样说，但不同院系所做工作的质量差异巨大。有些院系有做出伟大工作的人；有些院系过去有；有些院系从未有过。

Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can't
be done alone, and even if you're working on one that can be, it's
good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.

寻找最优秀的同事。有很多项目无法独自完成，即使你能独自完成的项目，有其他人鼓励你并与你交流想法也是件好事。

Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect
you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.

然而，同事不仅影响你的工作，也影响你本人。因此，要与你希望成为的那种人共事，因为你最终会变得像他们一样。

Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better
to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good
ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from
history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests
that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great
work and not.

同事的质量比数量更重要。拥有一两个出色的同事，胜过一整栋楼里相当不错的同事。事实上，这不仅仅是更好，而且是必要的——从历史上看，伟大的工作往往成群出现，这表明同事常常是决定你能否做出伟大工作的关键。

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.

如何判断你是否有足够好的同事？根据我的经验，当你拥有时，你就会知道。这意味着如果你不确定，那么很可能你还没有。但或许可以给出一个更具体的答案：足够好的同事能提供令人惊讶的见解。他们能看到并做到你无法做到的事情。因此，如果你有几个在某种程度上足以让你保持警觉的同事，你可能就超过了门槛。

Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but some
projects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of those
is not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you'll
have to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude and
interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there
is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management
as a second language, or avoid such projects.
[27]

我们大多数人都能从与同事的合作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的人力，启动这样的项目并不适合所有人。如果你想管理这样的项目，你必须成为管理者，而良好的管理需要与其他工作一样的天赋和兴趣。如果你不具备这些，没有中间道路可走：要么强迫自己像学习第二语言一样学习管理，要么避开这样的项目。[27]

Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working
on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a
living organism.

保持你的士气。当你从事雄心勃勃的项目时，它是所有事情的基础。你必须像呵护一个活生生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.

士气源于你的人生观。如果你是一个乐观主义者，你就更有可能做出伟大的工作；如果你认为自己幸运而不是受害者，你就更有可能成功。

Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If
you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a
refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism,
it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by
some of the greatest minds in history.

的确，工作可以在一定程度上保护你免受问题的困扰。如果你选择纯粹的工作，其本身的困难将成为你逃离日常生活困难的避难所。如果这是逃避现实，那也是一种非常富有成效的逃避方式，历史上一些最伟大的头脑都曾采用过这种方式。

Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which
increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this
cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing
good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since
it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right
direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when
you're stuck, just so you start to get something done.

士气通过工作不断累积：高士气有助于你做出好工作，而好工作又会提升士气，帮助你做得更好。但这个循环也可能反向运作：如果你没有做出好工作，那可能会打击你的士气，使工作更难进行。由于这个循环的方向至关重要，当你陷入困境时，转向更简单的工作可能是个好主意，只是为了开始有所进展。

One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow
setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting.
You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering
setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always
involves some backtracking.

雄心勃勃的人常犯的最大错误之一，就是让挫折一次性摧毁他们的士气，就像气球爆裂一样。你可以通过明确将挫折视为过程的一部分来对此免疫。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.

做出伟大工作是一种深度优先搜索，其根节点是渴望。所以“如果一开始不成功，就再试一次”并不完全正确。应该是：如果一开始不成功，要么再试一次，要么回溯然后再试。

"Never give up" is also not quite right. Obviously there are times
when it's the right choice to eject. A more precise version would
be: Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you
need to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node.

“永不放弃”也不完全正确。显然，有时退出是正确的选择。更精确的说法是：永远不要让挫折迫使你恐慌性地回溯超出必要的程度。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.

工作吃力并不一定是坏兆头，就像跑步时喘不过气也不一定是坏兆头一样。这取决于你跑得多快。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；坏的疼痛是损伤的标志。

An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar,
your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience
in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big.
The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with
its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if
you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated
audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people
genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.

观众是士气的重要组成部分。如果你是学者，你的观众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，可能是传统意义上的观众。无论如何，它不需要很大。观众的价值并非与其规模呈线性增长。这对名人来说是坏消息，但对刚起步的人来说是好消息，因为这意味着一个小而忠诚的观众群就足以支撑你。如果有少数几个人真正热爱你所做的事情，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横亘在你和观众之间。在某些工作中这不可避免，但摆脱它是如此自由，以至于你最好转向一个相邻的领域，以便能直接面向观众。[28]

The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your
morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and
others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always
what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and
avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone
you need to take care of, that takes precedence.

你花时间相处的人也会对你的士气产生巨大影响。你会发现有些人能增加你的能量，而有些人则会消耗它，而且一个人的影响往往出乎你的意料。去寻找那些能增加你能量的人，避开那些消耗你能量的人。当然，如果你需要照顾某人，那优先考虑。

Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work,
or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're
ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition;
so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you,
or does and doesn't care.

不要嫁给一个不理解你需要工作，或者将你的工作视为与你争夺注意力的人。如果你有雄心壮志，你就必须工作；这几乎像一种医疗状况；所以一个不让你工作的人要么不理解你，要么理解却不在乎。

Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's
important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly,
eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of
drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise
because they're good for thinking.
[29]

最终，士气是生理性的。你用身体思考，所以照顾好自己的身体很重要。这意味着定期锻炼，吃好睡好，并避免使用更危险的毒品。跑步和走路是特别好的锻炼形式，因为它们有助于思考。[29]

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone
else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact,
if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive.
People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to
become bitter.

做出伟大成就的人不一定比其他人更幸福，但比他们自己不做这些事时要幸福。事实上，如果你聪明且有抱负，不保持高效是很危险的。聪明且有抱负但成就平平的人往往会变得愤世嫉俗。

It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people.
The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the
opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just
adds noise.

想要给别人留下好印象是可以的，但要选对人。你尊重的人的意见是信号。而名声，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滞后指标，有时甚至完全错误。如果你把任何事情做得足够好，你就会让它变得有声望。所以，关于一种工作要问的问题不是它有多大声望，而是它能否被出色地完成。

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose
the problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasing
something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors
make you do anything much more specific than work harder.

竞争可以成为有效的动力，但不要让它替你选择问题；不要因为别人在追逐某件事就被卷入其中。事实上，不要让竞争让你做任何比“更努力工作”更具体的事情。

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows
more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

好奇心是最好的向导。你的好奇心从不撒谎，它比你自己更了解什么值得关注。

Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the
secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single
word, my bet would be on "curiosity."

注意这个词出现了多少次。如果你问一位神谕者做好工作的秘诀，而神谕只用一个词回答，我的赌注会押在“好奇心”上。

That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to
be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can
nurture it and let it drive you.

这并不能直接转化为建议。仅仅保持好奇心是不够的，而且你无法命令自己产生好奇心。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四个步骤的关键：它会为你选择领域，带你走到前沿，让你注意到其中的空白，并驱使你去探索它们。整个过程就是与好奇心的共舞。

Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could.
But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it
this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so
you're already further along than you might realize, because the
set of people willing to want to is small.

信不信由你，我尽量把这篇短文写得简洁。但它的长度至少意味着它起到筛选作用。如果你读到了这里，你一定对做出伟大工作感兴趣。如果是这样，你实际上已经比你自己意识到的走得更远了，因为愿意做这件事的人本来就很少。

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?

影响伟大工作的因素在字面上和数学上都是因素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。运气从定义上讲是你无法改变的，所以我们可以忽略它。我们也可以假设努力是存在的，如果你确实想做出伟大的工作。那么问题就归结为能力和兴趣。你能找到一种工作，让你的能力和兴趣结合起来，催生出一系列新想法吗？

Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different
ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered.
Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited
for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close
match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your
ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by
trying.

在这方面，我们有理由感到乐观。做出伟大工作的方法有如此之多，而且还有更多尚未被发现。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，你最合适的那个可能与你的匹配度相当高。甚至可能高得有些滑稽。问题只在于找到它，以及你的能力和兴趣能带你走多远。而这一点，只有通过尝试才能回答。

Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds
them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous
to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if
you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation
is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do
great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy
away from the question.

尝试做出伟大工作的人本可以比现在多得多。阻碍他们的是谦逊和恐惧的结合。试图成为牛顿或莎士比亚似乎太自以为是了。而且似乎也很难；如果你真的尝试类似的事情，你很可能会失败。很可能这种计算很少是明确的。很少有人有意识地决定不去尝试做出伟大的工作。但这正是潜意识里发生的事情；他们回避了这个问题。

So I'm going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great
work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that.
I wouldn't have done it to a general audience. But we already know
you're interested.

所以我打算耍个小花招。你想做出伟大的成就吗？现在你必须有意识地做出决定。很抱歉。我不会对普通观众这么做。但我们已经知道你很感兴趣。

Don't worry about being presumptuous. You don't have to tell anyone.
And if it's too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have
worse problems than that. In fact you'll be lucky if it's the worst
problem you have.

不要担心显得冒昧。你无需告诉任何人。而且如果太难你失败了，那又怎样？很多人的问题比这更糟。事实上，如果这是你遇到的最糟糕的问题，那你已经很幸运了。

Yes, you'll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to
work hard. And if you're working on something you find very
interesting, which you necessarily will if you're on the right path,
the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your
peers'.

是的，你必须努力工作。但同样，很多人都必须努力工作。如果你在做一件你非常感兴趣的事情——如果走在正确的道路上，你必然会如此——那么工作可能不会像你的许多同龄人那样沉重。

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?

那些发现就在那里，等待着被做出。为什么不是你？

Notes

注释

[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]
我认为你无法给出一个精确的定义，说明什么才算伟大的工作。做出伟大的工作意味着将某件重要的事情做得如此出色，以至于拓展了人们对可能性的认知。但重要性没有门槛。这是一个程度问题，而且当时往往难以判断。所以我更希望人们专注于培养自己的兴趣，而不是担心它们是否重要。只管努力去做令人惊叹的事情，把是否成功的评判留给后代。

[2]
A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in
everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing
this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's
reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!

[2]
很多脱口秀都基于对日常生活中的异常现象的观察。“你有没有注意到……？”新想法正是通过对非平凡事物的这种观察产生的。这或许有助于解释，为什么人们面对新想法时的反应往往先是笑声的前半段：“哈！

[3]
That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited about
something most authorities discount, but you can't give a more
precise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're starting
to drift into the territory of cranks.

[3]
第二个限定条件至关重要。如果你对某个多数权威都不看好的东西感到兴奋，但却无法给出比“他们不懂”更精确的解释，那么你就开始滑向怪人的领域了。

[4]
Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding
a match between the current version of you and a list of known
problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's
why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The
search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible
types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible
future versions of you.

[4]
找到要研究的问题，不仅仅是让当前版本的你与已知问题清单匹配那么简单。你常常需要与问题共同进化。这就是为什么有时很难确定该做什么。搜索空间巨大，它是所有可能的工作类型（包括已知和尚未发现的）与所有未来版本的你的笛卡尔积。

There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have to
rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope
the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be;
different types of work have been collected together as much by
accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.

你不可能搜索完整个空间，所以必须依靠启发式方法来生成有希望的路径，并希望最佳匹配会聚集在一起。但情况并非总是如此；不同类型的工作被聚集在一起，既有历史的偶然因素，也有它们之间内在的相似性。

[5]
There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do
great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide
net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the
first place.

[5]
好奇心强的人更有可能做出伟大工作的原因有很多，但其中一个更微妙的原因是，通过撒大网，他们更有可能在第一时间找到正确的事情去做。

[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]
为你认为不如你聪明的观众创作东西也可能很危险，如果这导致你居高临下地与他们说话。以一种足够愤世嫉俗的方式这样做，你可以赚很多钱，但这并非通往伟大工作的道路。当然，采用这种手法的人不会在乎。

[7]
This idea I learned from Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology,
which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any
field.

[7]
这个想法是我从哈代的《一个数学家的自白》中学到的，我向任何想在任意领域有所成就的人推荐这本书。

[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，而低估几年能做的事情；我们也高估拖延一天带来的损害，而低估拖延几年带来的损害。

[9]
You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want,
especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work
close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for
doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side.
Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your
work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight
to get time to do it.

[9]
通常你无法在做自己真正想做的事情时获得报酬，尤其是在早期。有两种选择：一种是为接近自己兴趣的工作获得报酬，并希望逐渐靠近目标；另一种是完全做其他工作以获得报酬，并在业余时间做自己的项目。两种方法都可能有效，但都有缺点：第一种方法中，你的工作默认会有所妥协；第二种方法中，你必须争取时间来做自己的事。

[10]
If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax
cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and
that you walk to and from.

[10]
如果你把生活安排得当，它就会自动带来专注和放松的循环。理想的安排是有一个你工作的地方，并且你步行往返。

[11]
There may be some very unworldly people who do great work
without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to
cover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except the
best.

[11]
也许有些非常超脱的人会在没有刻意努力的情况下做出伟大的工作。如果你想把这个规则扩展到这种情况，它变成：不要刻意追求成为其他什么，只追求成为最好的。

[12]
This gets more complicated in work like acting, where the
goal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to be
affected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoid
unintentional affectation.

[12]
在像表演这样的工作中，这会变得更加复杂，因为目标是采用一个虚假的角色。但即使在这里，也可能受到影响。也许在这些领域，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]
持有你认为不可质疑的信念是安全的，当且仅当这些信念也是不可证伪的。例如，坚持法律面前人人平等的原则是安全的，因为含有“应该”的句子并非关于世界的陈述，因此难以被推翻。如果没有证据能推翻你的某个原则，那么就不存在你需要忽视的事实来维护它。

[14]
Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty.
Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in
time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.

[14]
做作比智力上的不诚实更容易纠正。做作往往是年轻人的短处，会随着时间消逝，而智力上的不诚实更像是一种性格缺陷。

[15]
Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact moment
you have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairly
recently.

[15]
显然，你不必在产生想法的那个确切时刻正在工作，但你很可能刚刚工作过不久。

[16]
Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm
skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.

[16]
有人说精神类药物有类似的效果。我对此持怀疑态度，但也几乎完全不了解它们的影响。

[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，你可以将第n重要的主题分配(m-1)/m^n的注意力，其中m>1。当然，你无法如此精确地分配注意力，但这至少提供了一个合理分配的思路。

[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]
定义一种宗教的原则必须是错误的。否则任何人都可能接受它们，那就没有什么能将宗教的追随者与其他所有人区分开了。

[19]
It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of
questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're
now in a position to do something about some of them.

[19]
尝试写下你年轻时好奇的问题列表，可能是个不错的练习。你或许会发现，现在你已经有能力去解决其中一些问题了。

[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.

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."

[20]
原创性与不确定性之间的关联引发了一种奇怪的现象：因为思维传统的人比思想独立的人更有把握，这往往使他们在争论中占上风，尽管他们通常更愚蠢。

优秀者毫无信念，而卑劣者

却充满狂热的激情。

[21]
源自莱纳斯·鲍林的“如果你想有好点子，你必须有很多点子。”

[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]
将某个项目攻击为“玩具”，类似于将某个说法攻击为“不恰当”。这意味着无法提出更有力的批评。

[23]
One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if
you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely
to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where
you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than
playing games where you don't.

[23]
判断你是否在浪费时间的一个方法是问自己是在创造还是在消费。编写电脑游戏可能比玩游戏更不容易浪费时间，而玩那些能创造东西的游戏比玩那些不能创造东西的游戏更不容易浪费时间。

[24]
Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anything
publicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supports
your earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieve
eternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people,
having previously published opinions has an effect similar to
ideology, just in quantity 1.

[24]
另一个相关优势是，如果你还没有公开说过什么，你就不会偏向于支持你早期结论的证据。具有足够正直的人在这方面可以永葆青春，但很少有人能做到。对大多数人来说，之前发表过的观点会产生类似意识形态的影响，只是数量上为1。

[25]
In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta
Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted
his own version to show how much better he was.

[25]
在17世纪30年代早期，丹尼尔·米滕斯创作了一幅画，描绘了亨丽埃塔·玛丽亚将月桂花环递给查理一世。随后凡·戴克画了他自己的版本，以展示他比他优秀多少。

[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]
我故意模糊了一个地方的含义。在撰写本文时，身处同一个物理地点有着难以复制的优势，但这种状况可能会改变。

[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]
当他人必须做的工作受到严格限制时，情况就不是这样了，比如SETI@home或比特币。通过定义类似但赋予节点更多行动自由的受限协议，或许可以扩大这一不适用范围的领域。

[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：构建能让人们绕过中间人、直接与受众互动的工具，可能是个好主意。

[29]
It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, because
that frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, and
there is some historical evidence for it.

[29]
按固定路线步行或跑步可能会有帮助，因为这能释放注意力用于思考。我对此有同感，而且有些历史证据也支持这一点。

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

感谢Trevor Blackwell、Daniel Gackle、Pam Graham、Tom Howard、Patrick Hsu、Steve Huffman、Jessica Livingston、Henry Lloyd-Baker、Bob Metcalfe、Ben Miller、Robert Morris、Michael Nielsen、Courtenay Pipkin、Joris Poort、Mieke Roos、Rajat Suri、Harj Taggar、Garry Tan以及我的小儿子提供的建议和阅读草稿。