How to KILL DISTRACTIONS and do great work? (Ep 81)

Welcome to the Mindset Show, I'm your host Tux Jindal and each week I'll bring you an inspiring person or a message to help you develop a strong mindset and good habits. Thanks for spending some time with me today and I hope you enjoy this episode. We all have same 24 hours every day and many of us are studying and working 8 to 9 hours a day. Then why is it that some people produce really great work in very less time whereas most of us despite working for hours and hours produce mediocre work. What makes those very few people do great work while most people can't even get close to that high quality great work? Well, in this episode I won't share my philosophy but we will try to learn from another great mind called Paul Graham. He is the founder of Y Combinator, a company that invests in startups and has funded some really great startups like Airbnb Reddit Resurpe. He is also a philosopher who reads a lot and comes up with his own theories about life on his blogs and essays. Even Elon Musk reads his essays and blogs. So, today we will learn 4 important principles of doing great work from his most important essay How to Do Great Work. The first principle from the essay is very important for great work. Paul says the first step to do great work is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have 3 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. Once you have found something you are excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Paul talks about a very important principle here. This is the trickiest and the most important part of doing great work. We need to know what we are naturally good at and work on it with more and more curiosity without expecting anything in return. Our education system has ruined that curiosity by measuring everyone on the same scale for same subjects and then comparing them and shaming them. That is why in an experiment that was done on kids, their genius level was measured before going to school and it turned out 98% kids were genius and then the same kids were followed in the school and their genius level was measured after few years of schooling. It turned out only 5% of those kids remained genius after going to school. Most of their confidence and curiosity was killed. Once working on something that you are really interested in helps you in keeping that curiosity alive. Now you might say, "Duck, I am interested in stock market, I am curious about it." No, Paul is not talking about that greedy curiosity, where you are curious about something to become rich. No, you need to be curious about something without expecting anything from it. Like I was genuinely curious about reading, so I read and read and read so many books that I ended up accumulating so much knowledge that today that knowledge is helping you guys. I never started reading with the expectation that I will start a podcast after reading books. No, that was never my intention, if it would have been I would have given up on reading long back. I did reading just out of curiosity without expecting anything in return. But Ducks, how do we find that thing we are interested in? Let's read what Paul says about finding your interest. This is where the second most important principle from the essay comes in. Paul says in the second principle, "What should you do if you are 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 have done great work, it is 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. Such an important point Paul makes here. He says that don't just passively go through life watching more and more YouTube videos and doing something for two days and then switching because you are not getting results. As I told you before on social media, the algorithm supports only three things. Sex, ultra success and fear. The algorithm doesn't support curiosity as much as it supports ultra success. So the high chance is that you will only learn to chase money and success by your watching YouTube videos. Videos will never tell you the complete picture and then you will try something thinking if I do this I will become rich as well. So you won't see results and you will give up. Most people are gliding through life like this just chasing money by trying more and more things out of chasing attitude without building deep curiosity and expertise in anything. So Paul says when you read more and more biographies you will realize how luck plays a very big role to become rich and successful and he is right. If you read about Bill Gates you will see he was born in one of the richest families of his times and he had early access to computers when 99% of the kids on the planet did not even know what a computer is. He made the most of this lucky opportunity due to his rich background. Similarly, you must have heard about Gookesh in the news recently, youngest person to win the world chess championship. His story might inspire you to play chess as well and maybe one day you become a champion yourself but if you look deeper you will find that his chess skills were not the only thing that won him the championship. His father got him trained under the greatest Indian Grandmaster Vishwanath Anand. His father hired a mental coach who was coaching the Indian cricket team mentally in the 2011 World Cup. Yes, you heard it right, he was mentally trained by the same person who made Indian cricket team win the world cup. So imagine how lucky Gookesh had to be to afford these things to actually win the championship. Does this mean luck if luck plays such a big role then what is the point of doing anything? Exactly, if luck plays such a big role then what is the point of doing anything to chase success? Because success is decided by luck and chasing success which is not in your control is one of the most anxious way to live life. Whereas a few chase curiosity without expecting anything that is where the magic of life happens. Doors open for you that you never expected and you will start improving your chances to become lucky. Elon Musk Jeff Bezos even bill gates when he started playing with computers despite being rich, he didn't play with them to become the richest someday, no he was just extremely curious about computers. And suddenly because of following his curiosity he became lucky to be one of the only guys who knew so much about computers that he ended up building the most successful operating system for computers. So Ducks, how can we implement this in our life? It's very simple. If you are a student look at the marks of all your subjects and see which subject do you score the highest in. Highest doesn't mean 90%, it means if you are scoring 60% in every subject is there a subject where you score 65%? That subject might become a starting point to explore your curiosity. Now study that subject more and more with complete curiosity and not for just getting marks. You will come out as a better, more educated and an expert student rather than a mediocre student who is good at no subject. Once you become expert at a subject your chance is to become lucky increases. Similarly, if you are a professional who goes to office regularly make a list of 5 things that really make you curious. It could be anything from space to cricket to cooking. Now take out 30 minutes every day, Monday to Friday and study about those things. Study about space on Monday, study about cricket on Tuesday, study about cooking on Wednesday, after trying 5 things in 5 days ask yourself which thing did you enjoy the most. Now pick that thing and commit 30 minutes every day to study that thing for next 3 months. Example, you chose to read books on cricket. But only after 3 months you become really good at understanding the business and game of cricket. Suddenly you decide to make YouTube videos to analyze cricket matches using that new knowledge you gained. So that cricket fans get more insights they didn't know about. Suddenly you are providing value to the society using your curiosity. When you do that magical things happen and suddenly luck starts following you. But you don't care about magical things, you only care about following your curiosity. Let's learn the 3rd principle which will help you follow your curiosity without listening to the mediocre people around you. In the 3rd principle, Paul says don't worry if you find you are interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes and interestingly the better. Strangestastes are often strong ones and a strong taste for work means you will be productive. And you are more likely to find new things if you are looking where few have looked before. There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you are trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fear, money, people, politics. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you will be a proof against all of them. Following your interest 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. Here Paul is teaching us how to deal with the outside world while following our curiosity. He says it is okay to be interested in things that other people find weird. Like in the movie Dungal, where it shows a man who is making his daughter wrestlers, where most people find it weird for girls to wrestle and they try to stop him. But as he did that, his girls became so good in their age group and had so less competition comparatively in wrestling than studies. Because studies was normal but wrestling was not normal especially for girls. And hence when the girls gave completely into the curiosity of wrestling, they made a path for themselves, which had low competition and they reached the top of their field. Similarly, if you are curious about anything that other people find weird, like who reads books about cricket, everyone watches cricket. But since you showed curiosity by reading books on cricket, you gained the knowledge that very few cricket fans have. And when you share that knowledge through cricket analysis on YouTube, suddenly you have no one on YouTube who has read so much on cricket giving such interesting analysis of the game. And the more weird a thing is, the more quickly you become an expert in it. But this doesn't mean that you need to find a weird thing desperately to win quickly. No, hair polish just saying this, so that you are not scared to explore even weird curiosities. Don't chase any curiosity to win, chasing curiosity without expecting anything in return is a win in itself. Now the fourth and the final principle, which is the biggest reason behind great perk of highly excellent people. Paul says in this principle, "We underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page at a 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 don't do great things, don't get a lot done every day. They get something done rather than nothing. Everyone knows to avoid distraction 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 time. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes work out of your mind, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. Hair polish giving us the crux of doing great work. He says that there will be days when you don't feel like doing the work. Have a minimum standard. Like for me as a writer, the minimum standard is to write at least 200 words every day. On good days, I write up to 2000 words, but I make sure I write at least 200 words every day. He says that we underestimate the cumulative effect of doing some work every day. Most high-productive people are not productive because they do a lot of work every day. No, they do great work by making sure that they at least do the minimum every day. This minimum accumulates over time and creates great work. Destruction will be your biggest enemy for doing great work. So fight distraction in any way possible. Fight distraction by setting an alarm for 25 minutes on your phone and then hiding the phone and working deeply for 25 minutes till the alarm rings. Take a break and hide the phone again. The more you stay away from distraction even during your chill time, if you choose the right way to chill like walk in a park or a good story book, your mind will become much more tuned for great work rather than rowing your mind with junk distraction of social media and videos. Like my distraction is filled with podcasts, reading and walking, making me mentally and physically better. Elon Musk's distraction is filled with strategy games and books, making him really efficient as an engineer. So choose your distractions' wise name. So just to summarize the whole episode, Paul talks about four important principles in his essay How to do great work. First principle he says work on something that makes you really curious, curiosity, not because of greed, curiosity, just because you want to know more about that thing, work on something that makes you very, very curious. Second principle was to find what makes you really curious, you will have to do work, you will have to take action and the easiest way to take action is, for example, if you are a student, pick up the subject which you score the highest and if you are scoring 16 every subject and 65 in one subject, pick up that subject where you are scoring 65 and study that subject without the expectation of marks, drown into that subject, choose at least one subject which you are not studying for marks but for your curiosity. Similarly as a professional, choose five things and try them for 30 minutes every day Monday to Friday and on the weekend ask yourself which was the thing you enjoyed doing the most and follow that thing for 30 minutes for next three months follow your curiosity. Principle number three, even if your curiosity is weird, don't feel disheartened because weird curiosities is very less explored by other people. For example, reading a book on cricket, very few people read a book on cricket when you read lots of books on cricket, suddenly you have a unique perspective on cricket which you can share with the world and which can actually help discover a new side of cricket to cricket fans. And Principle number four, have a minimum standard and make sure even on bad days you follow that minimum standard, even if that minimum standard is just studying for five minutes, make sure you follow that minimum standard every day and that minimum standard will accumulate into great work over time. Also choose your distractions wisely, choose the distractions which make you mentally and physically better even when you are not working and once you do that and when you come back to your work with a sharp mind and body, no one will be able to stop you from doing great work. So, if you found this podcast helpful, don't forget to share it with your family and friends, you never know whose life you might change by sharing this podcast. And I hope you learned something new from this episode and you will go and implement the things we discussed. If you enjoyed this episode and got value out of it, then don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review as that review will help me a lot in my podcast journey. I will see you in my next episode, till then take care and take action.