Early Work

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| October 2020One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work
is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an
irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on
where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You
have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies
beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the
stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue
past it. They're too frightened even to start.Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame.
Imagine how much more we'd do.Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits
at work here are not very deeply rooted.Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has
always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so
slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn't
need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious
projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would
judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't
realize they're a special case.Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can do
better is that it's already starting to happen. There are already
a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon
Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding
idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home.
In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge
to your imagination � not just to have lower standards, but to
switch polarity entirely, from listing
the reasons an idea won't
work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I
meet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I've
had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being
practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown
people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at
you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a
power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious
if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes
urgent.But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become
widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick
used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative
trick, and those tend to spread quickly.Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh
on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem
clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups,
those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just
not when their predictions are
weighted by outcome.But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas.
If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope,
consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if
you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.
In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part
of the national culture.I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome these
impulses because they're morally better.
[1]
The reason many hope
you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investors
this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed
because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. But many
other people you meet can hope to benefit in some way from your
success. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're
famous, that they've known you since way back.But even if Silicon Valley's encouraging attitude
is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a
sort of benevolence. Encouraging startups has been practiced for
so long that it has become a custom. Now it just seems that that's
what one does with startups.Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooled
by impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that.
But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, and
plagued with asterisks.
[2] If you use revenue as the test, Silicon
Valley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's.
And because it works, it will spread.There's a lot more to new ideas than new startup ideas, of course.
The fear of making something lame holds people back in every field.
But Silicon Valley shows how quickly customs can evolve to support
new ideas. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not
so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.
___________
Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force
more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.
You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid
that?This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completely
eliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steers
you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily,
the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.People have already discovered several techniques that work. Hardy
mentions two in A Mathematician's Apology:

Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first
duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate
a little both the importance of his subject and his importance
in it.

If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, that
will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial
results. If you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal
worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth
200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though
both components are wrong.It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident.
I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are
slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible.
Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of
one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken?
Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the
opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against
both other people's skepticism and your own.Ignorance has a similar effect. It's safe to make the mistake of
judging early work as finished work if you're a sufficiently lax
judge of finished work. I doubt it's possible to cultivate this
kind of ignorance, but empirically it's a real advantage, especially
for the young.Another way to get through the lame phase of ambitious projects is
to surround yourself with the right people � to create an eddy in
the social headwind. But it's not enough to collect people who are
always encouraging. You'd learn to discount that. You need colleagues
who can actually tell an ugly duckling from a baby swan. The people
best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their
own, which is why university departments and research labs work so
well. You don't need institutions to collect colleagues. They
naturally coalesce, given the chance. But it's very much worth
accelerating this process by seeking out other people trying to do
new things.Teachers are in effect a special case of colleagues. It's a teacher's
job both to see the promise of early work and to encourage you to
continue. But teachers who are good at this are unfortunately quite
rare, so if you have the opportunity to learn from one, take it.
[3]For some it might work to rely on sheer discipline: to tell yourself
that you just have to press on through the initial crap phase and
not get discouraged. But like a lot of "just tell yourself" advice,
this is harder than it sounds. And it gets still harder as you get
older, because your standards rise. The old do have one compensating

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