Trying to dig into Paul Graham’s Advice
On ‘X’ (formerly twitter) I recently tweeted “how do paul graham and scott alexander consistently pull out great, thought-provoking, interesting, paradigm changing essays” to my surprised delight Paul had actually written back! His advice, as usual, was not just succinct and clear, but quite unintuitively obvious.
One thing I’m consistently shocked by is how obvious most pieces of good advice appear once you receive them. Even when doing something you’ve done a million times, you instinctively know it is correct but doubt yourself — once you get that confirmation from someone else you can rest assured in your approach.
Paul responded: “You notice anomalies and then you dig into them relentlessly.”
But what does this advice actually mean?
Here is my attempt to explain it:
I’m going to mainly focus on how to “Dig into them relentlessly”, and I suspect I will not spend much time on the anomalies part. This might seem like a silly thing to do, as noticing anomalies appears to be the more important part of this equation. However, I’d argue that you already know how to notice anomalies… In fact, everyone is constantly bombarded with huge amounts of information…
