There’s literally a note that says the text assumes you’re very ambitious. If you have no desire to work towards some definition of “greatness”, I assume that you’re not ambitious, and the text doesn’t apply to you.

Which is ok! You don’t need to be ambitious, but it also means you shouldn’t take this essay so personally.

Ambition is a pretty ambiguous term for what I think—here—means “A strong yearning for a type of success characterised by western capitalist-individualistic schema of wealth and status.” Cool if you want that I guess. But it’s narrow af.

If you work hard, in the fields, every day, perhaps one day you, too, could be a successful pharaoh like me. Said the great wise pharaoh.

Can you give me an example of a very ambitious goal that doesn’t fall under the western definition you posted, and yet, can not benefit from the article?

This is a oddly very narrow view of ambition.

Genuinely not sure what you mean — it seems like the standard definition of ambition.

How would you define it?

Ambition has a large dynamic range. Shooting for greatness is closer to the extremes.

?

The article says “very” ambitious. So there’s no contradiction here

“Ambition is wanting to live any life you want” is not a very useful concept

It literally means a strong desire to do or achieve something.

Why

I think the idea here would be to manage your manager so you can tie what work interests you into your job whenever possible, implied by this section:

"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."

as for time with family and friends, I'd say you can't have it all. It's a personal decision on whether you want to achieve "greatness" and what you are willing to sacrifice for it

> The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

No reason why. PG isn't writing to you. If you've got hobbies that make you happy, relationships you love, and runs that keep you healthy, I'm sure PG would tell you not to change anything.

What's your complaint? That this article is not targeted at you? The article is titled "how to do great work". If you aren't interested in doing great work then you are not the target audience.

Does HN really think this? 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem. None of us are the target audience is this article

The words you wrote make sense but are filled with so many assumptions and beliefs that I actually don't understand what you are trying to say.

For example

> 99% of people will have neutral to negative impact on the world 10 yrs post mortem

What does it even mean to have a negative impact on the "world"? Do you mean a negative impact on humanity? Also, where does the 99% number come from.

> None of us are the target audience is this article

Do you think humanity would be worse off with more people working hard to create and discover things to improve their own lives and the lives of others?

Anyway, your comment is filled with cliche cynicism. Cynicism is a cheap way to appear smart. I think people learned it from TV when they watched tv shows like House or Sherlock.

Develop a habit of having a lot of dollars. Don't let life be something you do without at least a billion of them.

You're totally welcome for the sage advice. Have a nice day.

haha.

Sometimes that side work prepares you for a day job that's more enjoyable and/or pays better.

Sure, but also sometimes you waste your life working thinking you kick ass left and right, till you arrive at certain point, ie retirement and realize you actually wasted your life, and no amount of money can change that. Sure, you have a some freedom ahead of you, but only as much as your health, finances and other circumstances allow you to, and this is usually less than people project earlier.

Plus family happens now for many of us, and not later. Kids need their parents, not their money. Its a grave mistake that hurts badly your closest ones for life to prioritize excellence in 1 direction over everything else, especially them.

I'll always have endless amount of respect of people raising their kids properly themselves into mature, happy adults who know what they want in life and go for it, even if it means they just worked to live. I don't have even a cubic picometer of respect for folks who end up doing the opposite, regardless of what they achieved professionally. This world needs new generation of balanced adults much much more than some search optimized by 0.1% or some marginally improved social graph monetization.

Of course not everybody wants, needs or can create a family, that's fine but another topic, then I agree with you more.

After staying at a job for too long by 2008 and barely surviving the recession at a startup until 2012 and also getting married the same year and (gladly) becoming the father to my then 9 and 14 year old stepsons, I changed jobs six times and pushed myself to get ahead until 2020 and falling into a mid level position at BigTech (cloud consulting department).

I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”.

I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely.

I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966

I’ve never been happier not trying to be “great” and being “content”

I found it much better to work “overtime” at my day job to learn new to me technologies and do POCs if the company is not using the technology or to volunteer for assignments based on something I don’t know well and put in extra time to meet the deadline.

One reason is that I can seek feedback from coworkers and polish the POC. I also can take advantage of infrastructure that may be cost prohibitive to test something at scale based on real world usage.

The other reason is that for my next job, it’s much more impressive to say I spearheaded work for a company than a hobbyist side project.

Yes I know one advantage of your own side project is that you can show your code. But most of the time the hiring manager isn’t going to take time to look at your work anyway.

I have personally been fortunate enough to have unfettered Admin access to an AWS account on someone else’s dime between two jobs for the past five years where I could experiment and learn on the job.

If your personal projects are "work" then yes do not bother. These are my creative outlet and where I get to enjoy coding again. My day job is massive .net/angular/sql projects that are just meh.

I enjoy working on my side projects more so than other hobbies, I have fun with them, it's not "work" in the sense as I think you mean. I'm not working towards "greatness" as much as I have ideas for projects that I think should exist and then want to bring them into existence.

I truly and deeply find my chosen projects interesting and stimulating in a way other things aren't.

I don't view work as a bad thing, with the caveat that it has to be productive and interesting work that goes towards something I think is impactful where the definition of impactful is personal.

I'm not saying your way is incorrect or bad or anything, just providing the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time working and how I feel about it.

I certainly don't think you have to, and I don't think that's what Graham is saying, either. For those who are ambitious/do seek "greatness" in some form, though, I think this is a good article.

If you can be a great parent, you’ve already achieved greatness from my point of view. And perhaps easier to achieve.

Is Franz Kafka best remembered for how good he was at his day job?

And he died at 40 and this was his personal life:

> Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire … his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure".[64] Kafka visited brothels for most of his adult life[65][66][67] and was interested in pornography.[63] In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company. A week after the meeting at Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:

OK… neither here nor there for my point that nobody remembers him as a clerk.

Isn’t that the point though? Do you think on his death bed when he looked back at his relatively short life he took solace in the fact that years in the future some random people admired his “greatness” even though his personal life was a mess?

I don't pretend to have any idea of his interior life but I do think that if he invested his time in being great at his job rather than a passion project with no real practical purpose he would be forgotten. I like being a dad but I don't think everyone has to do that or aspire to it.