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.
如果你收集了许多不同领域中做出杰出工作的技巧清单，它们的交集会是什么样的呢？我决定通过整理清单来找出答案。

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，我的目标是创作一本适用于任何领域从业者的指南。但我也对这个交集的形态感到好奇。而这项研究表明，它确实有明确的形态，并非只是一个标着“努力工作”的点。

The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.
以下方法假定你雄心勃勃。

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.
第一步是决定从事什么工作。你选择的工作需要具备三个特质：必须是你天生有才能胜任的事，是你有浓厚兴趣的事，并且是有做出出色工作空间的事。

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]
在实践中，你不必太担心第三个标准。有抱负的人对这一点往往过于保守。所以你要做的就是找到自己有天赋且极感兴趣的事情。[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，但往往相当困难。年轻时，你不知道自己擅长什么，也不清楚不同类型的工作是什么样的。你最终从事的某些工作甚至可能尚未出现。所以，虽然有些人 14 岁就知道自己想做什么，但大多数人都得自己去弄清楚。

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.
弄清楚该从事什么工作的方法就是去工作。如果你不确定该从事什么工作，那就猜。但要选个事情，然后开始行动。有时你很可能猜错，但没关系。了解多种事物是件好事；一些重大发现就来自于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.
养成致力于自己项目的习惯。不要让“工作”变成别人吩咐你做的事。如果你有朝一日真的做出了了不起的工作，很可能是在你自己的项目上。它可能是某个更大项目的一部分，但你会主导自己负责的那部分。

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？任何在你看来雄心勃勃且令人兴奋的事情。随着年龄增长，你对项目的喜好也会发生变化，令人兴奋的事和重要的事会逐渐趋于一致。7 岁时，用乐高积木搭建大型物件可能会让你觉得雄心勃勃且令人兴奋；14 岁时，自学微积分可能会有同样的感觉；到 21 岁，你可能开始探索物理学中尚未解答的问题。但始终要保持那份兴奋感。

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，也是方向舵。它不仅会驱动你，而且如果你任由它发挥作用，它还会告诉你该从事什么工作。

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
你对什么极度好奇——好奇到会让大多数其他人觉得厌烦的程度？这就是你要寻找的东西。

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.
一旦你找到了自己极度感兴趣的事物，下一步就是对其进行充分了解，直至触及知识的前沿领域。知识呈分形扩展，从远处看，其边界似乎很平滑，但一旦你学到足够多的知识，靠近边界时，就会发现其中充满了空白。

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]
下一步是留意这些异常。这需要一些技巧，因为你的大脑为了构建一个更简单的世界模型，往往会忽略这些差异。许多发现都源于对其他人习以为常的事物提出疑问。[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，那就再好不过了。伟大的作品往往带有一丝怪异。从绘画到数学，你都能看到这一点。刻意制造怪异会显得做作，但如果它出现了，那就欣然接受。

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]
大胆追寻那些与众不同的想法，即便其他人对此不感兴趣——事实上，尤其是在他们不感兴趣的时候。如果你对其他人都忽视的某种可能性感到兴奋，而且你有足够的专业知识，能确切指出他们都忽略了什么，那这就是你能找到的绝佳机会。[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，学到足以触及前沿的程度，留意空白之处，探索有前景的空白。从画家到物理学家，几乎每一个做出伟大成就的人都是这样做的。

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努力。或许无法证明要成就伟大的事业就必须努力工作，但实证证据的分量与证明人终有一死的证据相当。这就是为什么致力于自己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.
最强大的三种动机是好奇心、愉悦感以及做出非凡成就的渴望。有时它们会交汇在一起，而这种结合是所有动机中最强大的。

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萌芽。你注意到知识表面的一条裂缝，撬开它，里面是一个完整的世界。

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]
我们再多谈谈确定从事什么工作这项复杂的事。之所以难，主要原因在于，除非亲身体验，否则你无法判断大多数工作是什么样的。这意味着这四个步骤相互重叠：你可能得在某项工作上干上好几年，才知道自己有多喜欢它，或者自己干得有多好。与此同时，你没有去做其他大多数类型的工作，因此也无从了解它们。所以在最糟糕的情况下，你基于非常不完整的信息，很晚才做出选择。[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.
抱负的本质加剧了这个问题。抱负分为两种，一种先于对事物的兴趣产生，另一种则由兴趣衍生而来。大多数做出杰出成就的人两者兼具，而前者在你身上所占比例越大，你就越难决定该做什么。

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都装作这很容易。它们期望你在远未了解一个领域究竟是什么样之前，就投身其中。结果，一个沿着最佳轨迹发展的有抱负之人，在教育体系看来往往像是一个破坏规则的例子。

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.
要是他们至少承认这一点就好了——承认这个体系不仅在帮你弄清楚该从事什么工作方面起不了多大作用，而且它的设计基于一种假设，即你在青少年时期不知怎的就能神奇地猜对。他们不会告诉你，但我会：说到弄清楚该从事什么工作，你只能靠自己。有些人运气好猜对了，但其他人会发现自己在按照“每个人都能猜对”这一假设铺设的轨道上斜着艰难前行。

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]
如果你年轻且有抱负，但不知道该从事什么工作，你该怎么办？你不该做的是消极地随波逐流，以为问题会自行解决。你需要采取行动。但并没有你可以遵循的系统程序。当你阅读那些成就非凡事业之人的传记时，会惊讶地发现其中运气成分占了多大比例。他们因为一次偶然的相遇，或者碰巧读到一本书，从而发现了该从事的工作。所以你得让自己成为运气的大目标，而做到这一点的方法就是保持好奇心。尝试很多事情，结识很多人，阅读很多书籍，提出很多问题。[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.
拿不准的时候，就以趣味性为优化目标。随着你对各个领域了解的加深，它们也会发生变化。例如，数学家所做的工作与你在高中数学课上做的事情大不相同。所以你需要给不同类型的工作一个机会，让它们向你展示各自的模样。但随着你对某个领域了解得越多，它应该会变得越来越有趣。如果没有，那这个领域可能不适合你。

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事物与他人不同，也不必担心。你对有趣事物的品味越独特越好。独特的品味往往很强烈，而对工作有强烈的喜好意味着你会富有成效。而且，如果你去探索鲜有人涉足的领域，就更有可能发现新事物。

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.
你适合某种工作的一个迹象是，即使是其他人觉得乏味或可怕的部分，你也喜欢。

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.
但领域并非人；你无需对它们尽忠。如果在钻研某件事的过程中，你发现了另一件更令人兴奋的事，别害怕转换方向。

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.
如果你在为人们制作某种东西，要确保这是他们真正想要的。做到这一点的最佳方法是制作你自己想要的东西。撰写你自己想读的故事；构建你自己想用的工具。因为你的朋友可能有相似的兴趣，这样做也能帮你获得最初的受众。

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]
这应该遵循趣味性原则。显然，最有趣的故事就是你自己想读的故事。我之所以明确提到这一点，是因为很多人都搞错了。他们不去创作自己想要的东西，而是试图去迎合某个想象中的、更有品位的受众的需求。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.
当你试图弄清楚该从事什么工作时，有很多因素会让你误入歧途。自命不凡、潮流、恐惧、金钱、政治、他人的意愿、知名的骗局。但如果你坚持做自己真正感兴趣的事，就能抵御所有这些因素。如果你感兴趣，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.
追随自己的兴趣听起来可能是一种相当被动的策略，但在实践中，这通常意味着要跨越各种障碍去追寻它们。你通常得冒着被拒绝和失败的风险。所以这确实需要很大的勇气。

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.
不过，虽然你需要大胆，但通常并不需要太多规划。在大多数情况下，做出伟大成果的诀窍很简单：在令人兴奋的宏大项目上努力工作，就会有好的结果。你不用制定计划然后执行，只需努力维持某些不变因素。

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.
规划的问题在于，它只适用于你能提前描述的成就。你可以在小时候就下定决心，然后顽强地追求目标，从而赢得金牌或发财致富，但你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杰出成就的人而言，正确的策略并非过度规划。在每个阶段，去做那些看起来最有趣、且能为未来提供最佳选择的事。我将这种方法称为“迎风而上”。大多数做出杰出成就的人似乎都是这么做的。

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.
即便你已经找到值得为之努力的有趣之事，做起来也并非总是一帆风顺。有时，某个新想法会让你清晨一睁眼就迫不及待地起床开工。但也有很多时候并非如此。

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.
你不能仅仅扬起风帆，靠灵感推动前行。会有逆风、水流和暗礁。所以工作和航海一样，也有技巧。

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，虽然你必须努力工作，但也有可能过度工作，如果你这样做，你会发现回报在递减：疲劳会让你变迟钝，最终甚至损害你的健康。工作回报开始递减的节点取决于工作类型。一些最艰巨的工作类型，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。尽可能地安排好生活，以便拥有大块的时间来工作。如果你知道自己可能会被打断，就会回避艰巨的任务。

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。你常常得哄骗自己，才能跨过最初的那道坎。别为此担心；这是工作的本质，并非你性格上的缺陷。无论是每天的工作，还是每个项目，都存在一种“活化能”。既然这道坎是虚假的，因为它所需的能量比持续工作所需的能量更高，那么对自己撒个相应程度的谎来跨过它，也无妨。

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.
如果你想做出了不起的工作，对自己说谎通常是个错误，但这是少有的例外情况之一。早上我不愿开始工作时，常常哄骗自己说：“我就看看目前已经完成的部分。”五分钟后，我就会发现一些似乎有误或不完整的地方，然后就投入工作了。

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?"
类似的技巧也适用于开启新项目。例如，对自己谎报一个项目需要付出多少努力也无妨。许多伟大的成就都始于有人说“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.
在这种情况下，年轻人具有优势。他们更为乐观，尽管其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，尽量完成你已经开始做的事，即便最终工作量比你预期的要大。完成任务不只是为了整洁或自律。在许多项目中，很多最出色的成果都出现在原本被认为是最后阶段的时候。

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]
另一种可以接受的谎言是夸大你正在做的事情的重要性，至少在你自己心里这么认为。如果这能帮助你发现新东西，那么到头来这可能根本就不算谎言。[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意义——按天和按项目——拖延也有两种形式。按项目拖延要危险得多。你年复一年地推迟启动那个宏大的项目，因为时机不太成熟。当你以年为单位拖延时，你会有很多事做不成。[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.
每个项目都拖延之所以危险，原因之一在于它通常伪装成工作。你并非无所事事地闲坐着，而是在勤奋地做其他事。所以每个项目都拖延不会像每天都拖延那样拉响警报。你太忙了，无暇察觉。

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]
战胜这种情况的方法是偶尔停下来问问自己：我正在做的是我最想做的事吗？年轻时，答案有时是否定的也无妨，但随着年龄增长，这就越发危险了。[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.
出色的工作通常需要在一个问题上花费在大多数人看来不合理的时间。你不能把这段时间视为一种成本，否则它看起来就太高了。你必须在工作进行时，觉得它足够引人入胜。

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.
可能有些工作，你得在自己讨厌的事情上兢兢业业干上好几年，才能迎来好的部分，但出色的工作成果并非如此产生。出色的工作成果源自始终专注于你真正感兴趣的事物。当你停下来评估进展时，你会惊讶于自己已经取得了多大的进步。

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.
我们感到惊讶的原因是，我们低估了工作的累积效应。一天写一页听起来不算多，但如果你每天都写，一年就能写出一本书。关键就在于：持之以恒。成就非凡之事的人并非每天都完成大量工作。他们每天都有所作为，而不是无所事事。

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.
如果你从事的工作具有复利效应，你将获得指数级增长。大多数这样做的人都是无意识的，但值得停下来思考一下。例如，学习就是这种现象的一个例子：你对某事物了解得越多，就越容易学到更多。积累受众是另一个例子：你的粉丝越多，他们为你带来的新粉丝也就越多。

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，一开始曲线看起来很平缓。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，所以在早期阶段我们会低估指数增长。

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可能会变得极具价值，值得付出巨大努力去开启。但由于我们在早期低估了指数级增长，这一过程大多也是在无意识中完成的：人们在学习新事物时，会熬过最初毫无收获的阶段，因为他们从经验中知道，学习新事物总是需要一开始的推动；或者他们一次增加一个粉丝来扩大受众群体，因为他们没有更好的事情可做。如果人们有意识地意识到自己可以对指数级增长进行投入，那么会有更多人这么做。

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.
工作并非只有在你刻意为之的时候才会有进展。当你散步、洗澡或躺在床上时，那种无定向的思考可能会极具成效。让思绪稍稍飘荡，你常常能解决那些正面强攻无法解决的问题。

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]
不过，你得以正常的方式努力工作，才能从这种现象中受益。你不能只是四处闲逛、做白日梦。白日梦必须与经过深思熟虑的工作穿插进行，而这些工作会为白日梦提供问题。[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.)
每个人都知道工作时要避免分心，但在工作周期的另一半时间里同样要避免分心。当你任由思绪飘荡时，它会飘向你当时最在意的事物。所以要避免那种将工作挤出首要位置的分心，否则你就会把这种宝贵的思考时间浪费在分心之事上。（例外情况：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.
有意识地培养你对所在领域工作成果的鉴赏力。在你了解何为最佳以及其优势所在之前，你并不清楚自己的目标是什么。

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]
而这正是你要追求的目标，因为如果你不努力做到最好，就连优秀都谈不上。许多不同领域的人都有过这样的观察，或许值得思考一下为什么这是真的。这可能是因为，在追求目标这件事上，几乎所有的失误都朝着同一个方向——几乎所有脱靶的炮弹都是因为距离不够。也可能是因为，立志做到最好与立志做到优秀，在本质上是不同的。又或许，优秀这个标准太过模糊。这三点或许都有道理。[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，这里存在一种规模经济效应。虽然试图做到最好可能看似会让你背负沉重负担，但实际上你往往最终会有所收获。这令人兴奋，而且还会带来一种奇妙的解脱感。它让事情变得简单。在某些方面，努力做到最好比仅仅努力做到不错更容易。

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.
志存高远的一个方法，是努力创造出百年之后人们仍会在意的东西。这并非因为他们的看法比同时代的人更重要，而是因为百年之后仍被视为佳作的东西，更有可能是真正的佳作。

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.
不要刻意追求独特的风格去工作。只需尽你所能做到最好；你自然就会以独特的方式完成工作。

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.
风格就是自然而然地以独特方式行事。刻意为之则是做作。

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]
装模作样实际上就是假装是别人在做这项工作。你塑造了一个令人印象深刻但虚假的形象，虽然你对这种令人印象深刻的感觉很满意，但作品中展现出来的却是虚假。[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.
年轻人最容易受到成为别人的诱惑。他们常常觉得自己无足轻重。但你永远不必担心这个问题，因为如果你致力于足够宏大的项目，这个问题会自行解决。如果你在一个宏大的项目上取得成功，你就不是无足轻重的人；你就是做成这件事的人。所以只管去做，你的身份认同自然会得到解决。

"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”这条规则在一定程度上很有用，但你要如何从正面表达这个观点呢？你要如何说明应该做什么，而不是不应该做什么呢？最佳答案是真诚。如果你真诚，你避免的就不只是矫揉造作，还有一系列类似的不良行为。

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?
真诚的核心在于在理智上保持诚实。我们从小就被教导，诚实是一种无私的美德，是一种牺牲。但事实上，它也是力量的源泉。要发现新想法，你需要对真相有异常敏锐的洞察力。你要努力看到比其他人目前所看到的更多的真相。如果你在理智上不诚实，又怎么能对真相有敏锐的洞察力呢？

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]
避免学术不诚实的一个方法是，保持一股轻微的反向正向压力。要积极主动地承认自己错了。一旦你承认自己在某件事上有误，你就解脱了。在此之前，你都得背负着它。[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.
热忱还有一个更微妙的组成部分，那就是不拘小节。不拘小节的重要性远远超过其语法上的否定性名称所暗示的程度。它不仅仅是缺少了什么。它意味着专注于重要的事情，而不是无关紧要的事情。

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.
拘泥形式和矫揉造作的共同之处在于，除了完成工作，你在做的时候还试图表现出某种样子。但任何花在塑造自身形象上的精力，都会从做好工作中被抽走。这就是书呆子在做出伟大成就方面具有优势的一个原因：他们几乎不花精力去塑造形象。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大胆，这正是你做出伟大成就所需要的。这种特质不是后天习得的，而是从童年保留下来的。所以要坚守它。做那个勇于付诸实践的人，而不是那个坐而论道、提出听起来高深莫测批评的人。“批评很容易”这句话从最字面的意义上来说是对的，而通往伟大成就的道路从来都不轻松。

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.
也许有些工作中，愤世嫉俗和悲观能成为一种优势，但如果你想做出伟大的成就，乐观才是优势，尽管这意味着有时你可能会显得像个傻瓜。有一种古老的传统做法与之相反。《旧约》说，最好保持沉默，以免显得像个傻瓜。但那是为了显得聪明而给出的建议。如果你真的想发现新事物，最好还是冒险把自己的想法告诉别人。

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，而对另一些人来说，认真需要有意识地努力。这两种认真都足够了。但我怀疑，不认真就不可能做出伟大的工作。即便认真，要做到也很难。你没有足够的容错空间来容纳因做作、不诚实、正统、赶时髦或耍酷而产生的偏差。[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.
伟大的作品不仅与创作者本人相符，其自身也具有连贯性。它通常浑然一体。所以，如果你在创作过程中面临一个抉择，问问自己哪个选择更具连贯性。

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?
你可能得舍弃一些东西然后重新做。不一定非得这么做，但你得有这个意愿。而这可能需要付出一些努力；当有些事需要重新做时，现状偏见和懒惰会一起让你对此予以否认。要克服这一点，可以问问自己：如果我已经做出了改变，我还想回到现在的状态吗？

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.
要有删减的自信。不要仅仅因为对某样东西感到自豪，或者因为为之付出了大量努力，就保留不适用的内容。

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，在某些类型的工作中，将你所做的事情提炼至本质是有益的。结果会更加凝练；你会理解得更透彻；而且对于其中是否有实质内容，你也无法自欺欺人。

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源自艺术的比喻。我第一次听到 “优雅” 这个词被用于形容一个证明时就是这么想的。但现在我怀疑它在概念上更为根本——艺术上的优雅，其主要要素就是数学上的优雅。无论如何，这是一个远远超出数学范畴的有用标准。

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，优雅可能是一场长期的赌博。费力的解决方案在短期内往往更受推崇。它们耗费大量精力，而且难以理解，这两点至少在短期内都会给人留下深刻印象。

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.
尽管一些最出色的作品看似相对不费吹灰之力，因为从某种意义上说，它们已然存在。无需构建，只需发现。当你难以分辨自己是在创造还是在发现时，这是个非常好的迹象。

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.
当你所做的工作既可以被视为创造，也可以被视为发现时，宁可倾向于发现。试着把自己想象成一个纯粹的管道，让想法通过这个管道自然成形。

(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.)
（说来奇怪，选择要研究的问题这一问题是个例外。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，你会在探索过程中创造出这个领域。）

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，那就让它毫无限制。从定义上来说，一个强大的工具几乎肯定会被用于你意想不到的方面，所以宁可消除限制，哪怕你不知道这样做有什么好处。

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.
伟大的成果往往具有工具般的特性，即能成为他人构建的基础。因此，如果你提出的想法能被他人所用，或者提出的问题能让他人解答，这都是好迹象。最出色的想法会在许多不同领域产生影响。

If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended.
如果你以最笼统的形式表达自己的想法，它们会比你预期的更真实。

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，仅仅正确是不够的。伟大的想法必须既正确又新颖。即便你已经学到了足够多的知识，触及到了知识前沿之一，也还需要具备一定的能力，才能发现新想法。

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，我们给这种能力起了诸如独创性、创造力和想象力之类的名字。给它单独起个名字似乎很合理，因为在某种程度上它似乎确实是一种独特的技能。一个人有可能在其他方面具备很强的能力——具备大量通常所说的技术能力——但在这方面却并不出色。

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.
我一直不喜欢“创作过程”这个说法。它似乎具有误导性。创造力并非一个过程，而是一种思维习惯。有创见的思考者无论专注于何事，都会迸发出新想法，就像角磨机迸出火花一样。他们情不自禁。

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.
如果他们专注的事情是自己不太了解的，这些新想法可能就不怎么样。我认识的最具原创性的思想家之一，离婚后决定专注于约会。他对约会的了解大致和普通 15 岁少年差不多，结果可谓精彩纷呈。但看到原创性与专业知识如此脱节，反而让其本质更加清晰了。

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，但肯定有办法充分利用你所拥有的任何一点原创能力。例如，当你致力于做某件事时，你更有可能产生原创想法。原创想法并非来自试图想出原创想法。它们来自试图构建或理解一些稍有难度的事物。[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.
谈论或写下你感兴趣的事物，是产生新想法的好方法。当你试图用语言表达想法时，一个尚未成形的想法会制造出一种真空，将其从你脑海中吸出来。事实上，有一种思考方式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]
改变环境会有所帮助。如果你去一个新地方，常常会发现自己在那里有新的想法。旅途本身往往就能激发这些想法。但你可能不必走太远就能获得这种好处。有时候，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.
在主题空间中游走也有帮助。如果你探索许多不同的主题，就会产生更多新想法，部分原因是这为你的思维打磨机提供了更多可加工的表面，部分原因是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，不要在众多主题上平均分配你的注意力，否则你会分散精力，一无所长。你应该按照类似幂律的方式来分配注意力。[17] 对少数几个主题保持专业的好奇心，对更多主题保持漫不经心的好奇。

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.
好奇心与创造力紧密相关。好奇心为创造力提供新的研究对象，从而滋养创造力。但二者的关系不止于此。好奇心本身就是一种创造力；它之于问题，大致相当于创造力之于答案。既然精妙的问题是答案的重要组成部分，那么极致的好奇心就是一种创造性力量。

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?
产生新想法是一场奇妙的游戏，因为这通常意味着看到就在你眼皮子底下的事物。一旦你想到了一个新点子，它往往看起来显而易见。为什么之前没人想到这个呢？

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.
当一个想法既新颖又显而易见时，它很可能是个好想法。

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.
发现显而易见的事物听起来很容易。然而，从经验上看，想出新点子却很难。这种明显的矛盾从何而来？原因在于，发现新点子通常需要你改变看待世界的方式。我们透过模型看世界，这些模型既帮助我们，也限制我们。当你修正一个有缺陷的模型时，新点子就会变得显而易见。但注意到并修正有缺陷的模型很难。这就是为什么新点子既显而易见，又难以发现：在你完成艰难的任务后，它们就很容易被发现。

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.
发现有缺陷模型的一种方法是比其他人更严格。有缺陷的世界观模型在与现实碰撞时会留下一连串线索。大多数人不想看到这些线索。说他们执着于自己当前的模型都算是轻描淡写了；那是他们思考的依据；所以他们往往会忽略模型破损留下的线索，无论事后看来这些线索多么明显。

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.
要找到新想法，你必须抓住矛盾的迹象，而不是视而不见。爱因斯坦就是这么做的。他能看出麦克斯韦方程组的深远意义，与其说是因为他在寻找新想法，不如说是因为他更加严谨。

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.
你还需要愿意打破规则。尽管听起来有些矛盾，但如果你想修正自己对世界的认知模式，成为那种乐于打破规则的人会有所帮助。从你和其他人最初都认同的旧有认知模式来看，新的认知模式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.
很少有人明白打破常规需要达到何种程度，因为新思想一旦成功，看起来就会保守得多。当你采用它们带来的新世界观时，这些思想似乎完全合乎情理。但在当时并非如此；日心说花了近一个世纪才被普遍接受，甚至在天文学家中也是如此，因为它在当时感觉太离谱了。

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，仔细想想就会发现，一个好的新想法在大多数人看来肯定很糟糕，否则早就有人去探索了。所以你要找的是那些看似疯狂，但疯狂得恰到好处的想法。如何识别这类想法呢？你无法确定。通常，看似糟糕的想法确实很糟糕。但疯狂得恰到好处的想法往往令人兴奋；它们蕴含着丰富的意义；而仅仅是糟糕的想法往往令人沮丧。

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.
打破规则并感到自在有两种方式：一是享受打破规则，二是对规则漠不关心。我将这两种情况分别称为积极的独立思考和消极的独立思考。

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.
极具独立思想的人是调皮捣蛋的一群。规则不仅无法阻止他们，打破规则还能给他们额外的动力。对于这类人而言，仅仅是一个项目所具有的大胆无畏就能带来喜悦，有时这种喜悦足以提供启动项目所需的能量。

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规则，甚至可能都不知道规则的存在。这就是为什么新手和外行常常能有新发现；他们对某个领域既有假设的无知，成了一种暂时的被动式独立思考的源泉。阿斯伯格综合征患者似乎对传统观念也有一种免疫力。我认识的几个阿斯伯格综合征患者都说，这有助于他们产生新想法。

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.
严格与打破规则听起来是一种奇怪的组合。在流行文化中，它们是相互对立的。但流行文化在这方面的模式是有缺陷的。它隐含地假定问题都是些琐碎小事，而在琐碎之事上，严格与打破规则确实是对立的。但在真正重要的问题上，只有打破规则的人才能做到真正的严格。

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不会在半决赛前就被淘汰。你在潜意识里确实看到了它，但随后你潜意识的另一部分却将它否决，因为它太怪异、太冒险、工作量太大、争议性太强。这就引出了一种令人兴奋的可能性：如果你能关闭这些筛选机制，就能看到更多新想法。

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.
做到这一点的一个方法是，思考别人去探索哪些想法会很不错。这样一来，你的潜意识就不会为了保护你而否定这些想法。

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.
你也可以从相反方向着手，发现被忽视的想法：从那些掩盖它们的事物入手。每一个被珍视却错误的原则周围，都存在一片有价值想法的盲区，这些想法因与该原则相悖而未被探索。

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]
宗教是人们珍视却错误的原则集合。因此，任何能从字面上或隐喻意义上被描述为宗教的事物，其背后都隐藏着尚未被探索的宝贵思想。哥白尼和达尔文都有过这类发现。[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?
在你的领域中，人们盲目执着于哪些原则，也就是过于拘泥于某些可能并不像他们认为的那样不证自明的原则？如果你摒弃这些原则，会有什么可能性？

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.
人们在解决问题时展现出的原创性，比在决定要解决哪些问题时要多得多。即便是最聪明的人，在决定从事什么工作时，也可能保守得惊人。那些在其他任何方面都绝不会想要赶时髦的人，却会热衷于研究热门问题。

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时更保守，原因之一在于，选择问题是更大的赌注。一个问题可能会耗费你数年时间，而探索一个解决方案可能只需几天。但即便如此，我认为大多数人还是过于保守了。他们不仅在对风险做出反应，也在迎合潮流。不受欢迎的问题被低估了。

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.
最有意思的一类冷门问题，是那种人们以为已被充分探索、实则不然的问题。伟大的成就往往是从已有的事物中发掘出其潜在的可能性。丢勒和瓦特都是如此。所以，如果你对某个别人认为已无潜力可挖的领域感兴趣，别让他们的质疑阻碍你。人们在这方面常常判断失误。

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.
致力于解决一个不热门的问题可能会带来极大的满足感。没有炒作，也无需匆忙。机会主义者和批评家都在别处忙碌。现有的研究成果往往有着传统的扎实根基。而培育那些可能被浪费的想法，会带来一种令人满足的经济实惠感。

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.
但最常见的那种被忽视的问题，并非是那种明显不时髦、已经过时的问题。只是这类问题看起来没有实际上那么重要。你要如何发现这类问题呢？要任性一点——任由好奇心引领，至少暂时屏蔽脑海中那个说你只该钻研 “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.
你确实需要致力于解决重要的问题，但几乎每个人对于什么样的问题才算重要都过于保守。而且，如果在你所处的领域存在一个重要却被忽视的问题，它很可能已经出现在你的潜意识雷达屏幕上了。所以不妨问问自己：如果你打算从 “严肃” 的工作中抽出时间，仅仅因为某件事非常有趣就去做它，你会做什么？答案可能比看上去更重要。

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.
在选择问题上的独创性似乎比在解决问题上的独创性更为重要。这正是那些开拓全新领域的人与众不同之处。因此，看似仅仅是第一步——决定从事什么工作——从某种意义上说，却是整个事情的关键。

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.
很少有人理解这一点。关于新想法，最大的误解之一在于其构成中问题与答案的比例。人们认为伟大的想法就是答案，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学校里使用问题的方式。在学校里，问题往往在提出后很快就得到解答，就像不稳定的粒子一样。但一个真正好的问题远不止如此。一个真正好的问题是一种局部发现。新物种是如何产生的？使物体落向地面的力与使行星保持在轨道上运行的力是同一种力吗？仅仅提出这样的问题，你就已经身处令人兴奋的全新领域了。

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.
带着悬而未决的问题四处奔波，可能会让人感到不安。但你背负的问题越多，就越有可能找到解决方案——或者更令人兴奋的是，发现两个悬而未决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]
有时你会长期思考一个问题。伟大的成果往往源自重新审视一个你多年前——甚至在童年时期——就首次留意到且一直念念不忘的问题。人们常常谈论永葆青春梦想的重要性，但同样重要的是，不要忘记年少时的疑问。[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.
这是实际的专业知识与大众认知差异最大的地方之一。在大众认知里，专家们胸有成竹。但实际上，你困惑越多越好，只要（a）你所困惑的事情至关重要，且（b）其他人也同样不理解这些事情。

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]
想想就在新想法被发现之前那一刻发生了什么。通常，某个具备足够专业知识的人会对某件事感到困惑。这意味着独创性在一定程度上源自困惑——源自迷茫！你必须对这个充满谜题的世界感到足够自在，以至于愿意去正视它们，但又不能自在到不想去解开它们。[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.
拥有大量悬而未决的问题是件好事。这是一种强者愈强的情况，因为获得新问题的最佳方式就是尝试回答现有的问题。问题不仅会引出答案，还会带来更多问题。

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.
最好的问题在解答过程中不断发展。你注意到当前范式中有一根线头冒了出来，试着拉一下，结果它越拉越长。所以，在尝试回答一个问题之前，不要要求它明显是个大问题。你几乎无法预测这一点。光是注意到那根线头就已经够难了，更不用说预测拉一下会解开多少。

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.
最好是广泛地保持好奇心——多去尝试一些不同的事物，看看会发生什么。伟大的事业始于微小之处。那些伟大事物的最初版本往往只是实验、副业或演讲，而后才发展壮大。所以，多开启一些小项目吧。

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]
多产往往被低估了。你尝试的不同事物越多，发现新事物的机会就越大。不过要明白，尝试很多事情意味着尝试很多行不通的事情。没有大量糟糕的想法，就不会有大量好的想法。[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.
虽然先研究前人所做的一切听起来更靠谱，但尝试新事物能让你学得更快，也更有趣。而且当你真正去研究前人的成果时，你会理解得更深刻。所以，宁可选择先行动起来。如果起步意味着从小事做起，那就更容易了；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.
你如何从做小事起步，进而成就一番伟大事业呢？答案是通过不断改进。伟大的成就几乎总是在不断改进中诞生的。你从一件小事做起，逐步发展它，最终的成果会比你最初设想的任何计划都更巧妙、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，制作多个连续版本尤为有用——先迅速拿出初始版本给他们看，然后根据他们的响应进行改进。

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.
从尝试可能有用的最简单方法入手。令人惊讶的是，这种方法往往行得通。如果不行，这至少能让你迈出第一步。

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.
不要试图在任何一个版本中塞入过多新内容。对于在第一个版本中这么做（发布时间过长）和在第二个版本中这么做（第二系统效应），都有相应的说法，但这些都只是一个更普遍原则的具体例子。

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认为是小儿科。人们这么看其实是个好兆头。这意味着它具备了新创意所需的一切要素，只差规模，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.
不从小事做起并逐步发展，另一种选择是提前规划好你要做的事。规划通常看起来确实是更负责任的选择。说“我们要先做 x，然后做 y，再做 z”，听起来比“我们要试试 x，看看会发生什么”更有条理。而且它确实更有条理；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.
规划本身并无益处。它有时是必要的，但也是一种必要之恶——是对严苛条件的一种响应。你之所以必须做规划，是因为你使用的媒介缺乏灵活性，或者因为你需要协调众多人员的工作。如果你让项目规模保持较小，并使用灵活的媒介，就无需做太多规划，而且你的设计反而能够不断演进。

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.
承担你所能承受的风险。在一个有效的市场中，风险与回报成正比，所以不要追求确定性，而要寻找预期价值高的赌注。如果你偶尔没有失败，那你可能过于保守了。

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.
尽管保守主义通常与老年人联系在一起，但往往是年轻人会犯这个错误。缺乏经验让他们惧怕风险，但恰恰是在年轻时，你最能承受风险。

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有价值。在推进项目的过程中，你会涉足鲜有人至的领域，遇到鲜有人问的问题。而在尝试做一些稍有难度的事情时遇到的问题，可能是最好的问题来源。

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，利用好青春的优势；上了年纪，就发挥成熟的优势。青春的优势在于精力、时间、乐观和自由。成熟的优势在于知识、效率、财富和权力。只要努力，年轻人可以获得一些后者的优势，年长者也能保留一些前者的特质。

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.
老年人还有一个优势，就是知道自己有哪些优势。年轻人往往拥有这些优势，却浑然不觉。其中最大的优势可能就是时间。年轻人根本不知道自己在时间上有多富有。把这些时间转化为优势的最佳方式，或许是以略显随性的方式利用它：仅仅出于好奇，去了解一些你无需知道的事情；或者仅仅因为很酷，就尝试去构建一些东西；又或者把某件事做到极致。

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]
这个“稍微”是个很重要的限定词。年轻时可以大把地花时间，但别纯粹浪费时间。做一件你担心可能是浪费时间的事，和做一件你确定会浪费时间的事，两者之间有很大区别。前者至少是一场赌博，而且可能比你想象中更值得下注。[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，或者更确切地说缺乏经验，最微妙的优势在于，你是以全新的视角看待一切。当你的大脑初次接纳一个想法时，有时两者并非完全契合。通常问题出在你的大脑，但偶尔也可能出在这个想法本身。其中一部分会突兀地冒出来，当你思考这个想法时，它会刺痛你。习惯了这个想法的人已经学会忽略它，但你却有机会不这么做。[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.
所以当你初次学习某样东西时，要留意那些看似有误或缺失的地方。你可能会忍不住忽略它们，因为很有可能（99% 的概率）问题出在你自己身上。而且为了继续进步，你可能得暂时放下疑虑。但不要忘记这些问题。当你对这个主题有了更深入的了解后，回过头来看看这些问题是否依然存在。如果以你目前的知识来看，它们仍然站得住脚，那它们很可能代表着一个尚未被发现的想法。

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.
你从经验中获得的最有价值的知识之一，就是知道哪些事情不必担心。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。所以他们对每件事都同样担心，而实际上他们应该多担心几件事，对其余的事则几乎不必担心。

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.
但你不知道的东西只是缺乏经验带来的问题的一半。另一半问题在于你自以为知道但实际并非如此的东西。成年时，你的脑袋里满是荒谬的观念——你养成的坏习惯，被灌输的错误认知——除非你至少清除掉那些阻碍你从事任何类型工作的荒谬观念，否则你无法做出出色的工作。

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.
你头脑中留存的许多荒谬观念都是学校灌输的。我们对学校太过习以为常，以至于无意识地将上学等同于学习，但实际上，学校有各种奇怪的特质，扭曲了我们对学习和思考的认知。

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，学校会导致被动性。从你还是个小孩子起，教室前面就有一位权威人士告诉你必须学什么，然后衡量你是否做到了。但课程和考试并非学习所固有的；它们只是学校通常设计方式的产物。

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.
你越早克服这种消极状态越好。如果你还在上学，试着把你的学业当作自己的项目，把老师看作是为你工作，而非反过来。这可能听起来有些牵强，但这不仅仅是某种奇怪的思想实验。从经济角度看，这是事实，而且在最好的情况下，从知识层面看也是事实。最优秀的老师不想当你的老板。他们更希望你主动进取，把他们当作建议的来源，而不是由他们拖着你学习知识。

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.
学校也会让你对工作产生一种误导性的认知。在学校里，老师会告诉你问题是什么，而且几乎总能用你目前所学的知识解决。但在现实生活中，你得自己弄清楚问题是什么，而且你常常根本不知道这些问题能否解决。

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.
但或许学校对你做的最糟糕的事，就是训练你通过投机取巧的方式在考试中取胜。靠这种方式你无法做出伟大的成就。你骗不了老天爷。所以别再寻找这种捷径了。战胜体制的方法，是专注于他人忽视的问题和解决方案，而不是在工作本身上偷工减料。

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.
不要认为自己要依赖某个把关人给你“重大机遇”。即便真是如此，获得机遇的最佳方式也是专注于做好工作，而非追逐有影响力的人。

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.
而且不要把委员会的拒绝太放在心上。能打动招生官员和评奖委员会的特质，与做出伟大工作所需的特质大不相同。评选委员会的决定，只有在作为反馈循环一部分的情况下才有意义，而很少有决定能做到这一点。

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.
刚进入某个领域的人往往会模仿现有的作品。这本身并没有什么坏处。要了解某样东西是如何运作的，没有比尝试复现它更好的办法了。而且模仿并不一定会让你的作品缺乏原创性。原创性在于新想法的存在，而不是旧想法的缺失。

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]
抄袭有好的方式，也有坏的方式。如果你要抄袭某样东西，那就光明正大地做，而不是偷偷摸摸，更糟的是，在不知不觉中抄袭。这就是那句常被误引的名言“伟大的艺术家剽窃”的含义。真正危险的抄袭，那种给抄袭带来坏名声的抄袭，是在没有意识到的情况下进行的，因为你只不过是一列在别人铺设的轨道上行驶的火车。但在另一个极端，抄袭可能是优越性而非从属地位的标志。[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，从某种意义上说，你早期的工作几乎不可避免地会基于他人的成果。项目很少凭空出现。它们通常是对前人工作的回应。当你刚开始起步时，你没有任何过往的工作成果；如果你要对某事物做出回应，那就只能是他人的成果。一旦你站稳脚跟，你就可以对自己的成果做出回应。虽然前者被称为借鉴，而后者不是，但从结构上看，这两种情况比表面上更为相似。

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.
说来奇怪，最具创新性的想法，其新颖性有时会让它们乍看之下比实际情况更具衍生性。新发现最初往往不得不被设想为现有事物的变体，即便对于发现者来说也是如此，因为当时还没有相应的概念词汇来表述它们。

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.
不过，抄袭肯定存在一些风险。其中之一是，你往往会抄袭陈旧的东西——那些在它们所处的时代处于知识前沿，但如今已不再如此的东西。

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.
而当你确实要借鉴某些东西时，不要照搬其所有特点。有些特点照搬的话会让你显得很荒唐。例如，如果你才 18 岁，就不要模仿一位 50 岁杰出教授的举止，也不要在几百年后还照搬文艺复兴时期诗歌的语言风格。

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.
你所欣赏的事物，有些特点其实是它们克服了的缺陷。事实上，最容易模仿的特点，往往最有可能是缺陷。

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.
这在行为方面表现得尤为明显。有些有才华的人举止粗鲁，这有时会让缺乏经验的人觉得，举止粗鲁是有才华的一部分。事实并非如此；有才华只是他们得以如此行事而不被追究的原因。

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.
最有效的借鉴方式之一，是将某个领域的东西借鉴到另一个领域。历史上这类偶然发现屡见不鲜，因此，主动去了解其他类型的工作，或许有助于促成这种偶然。如果你把其他领域的理念当作隐喻，那么你可以从相距甚远的领域获取灵感。

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.
反面例子可能和正面例子一样具有启发性。事实上，有时你从做得不好的事情中学到的东西，可能比从做得好的事情中学到的更多；有时候，只有当某些东西缺失时，才会清楚地知道需要什么。

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]
如果在你所在领域有很多顶尖人才聚集在一个地方，通常去那里待上一段时间是个不错的主意。这会激发你的抱负，而且，当你看到这些人也是普通人时，还能增强你的自信心。[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.
如果你态度诚恳，可能会得到比预期更热情的回应。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相关话题。如果他们真的擅长自己的工作，那么他们很可能对工作抱有爱好者般的热情，而爱好者总是乐于谈论自己的爱好。

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.
不过，要找到真正优秀的人可能需要费些功夫。做出杰出的工作极具声望，以至于在某些地方，尤其是在大学里，存在一种客气的假象，即人人都在从事杰出的工作。但事实远非如此。大学里的人不能公开这么说，但不同院系所做工作的质量差异巨大。有些院系有人在做出杰出的工作；有些院系过去有过；还有些院系从未有过。

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，即使你正在做的项目可以独立完成，有其他人来鼓励你并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.
不过，同事不仅会影响你的工作，还会影响你本人。所以，要和你希望自己成为的那种人共事，因为你会受到他们的影响。

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。有一两个出色的同事，好过一屋子还不错的同事。事实上，从历史经验来看，这不仅更好，而且是必要的：伟大成就往往集中出现，这表明同事常常决定了能否做出伟大成就。

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.
怎样才能知道自己拥有足够优秀的同事呢？以我的经验，当你真的拥有时，你自然会知道。这意味着，如果你不确定，那很可能你并没有。但或许可以给出一个比这更具体的答案。以下是一种尝试：足够优秀的同事会带来意想不到的见解。他们能看到并做到你做不到的事。所以，如果你有几位在这种意义上能让你时刻保持警觉的优秀同事，那你可能就达标了。

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，但有些项目需要更多的人手，而启动这类项目并非适合所有人。如果你想运作这样一个项目，你就必须成为一名管理者，而出色的管理工作和其他任何工作一样，需要有相应的资质和兴趣。如果你不具备这些，那就没有中间道路可走：你要么强迫自己像学习第二语言一样学习管理，要么避开这类项目。[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.
珍惜你的士气。当你从事雄心勃勃的项目时，它是一切的基础。你必须像呵护一个有生命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.
士气始于你对生活的看法。如果你是个乐观主义者，就更有可能做出出色的工作；如果你认为自己幸运，也比认为自己是受害者更有可能做到。

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，工作在某种程度上能让你避开自身的问题。如果你选择纯粹的工作，其本身的难题会成为你躲避日常生活难题的庇护所。如果这算是逃避现实，那也是一种卓有成效的逃避方式，而且历史上一些最伟大的人物也曾采用过这种方式。

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.
士气会通过工作产生复利效应：高昂的士气有助于你出色地完成工作，这又会提升你的士气，进而帮助你把工作完成得更出色。但这个循环也会朝着相反的方向运转：如果你工作完成得不好，这会打击你的士气，让你更难把工作做好。鉴于让这个循环朝着正确的方向运转至关重要，当你陷入困境时，转而从事更轻松的工作或许是个好主意，这样你就能开始有所成就。

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.
有抱负的人常犯的最大错误之一，就是让挫折一下子摧毁他们的斗志，就像气球爆炸一样。你可以通过明确将挫折视为过程的一部分，来增强自己对此的抵抗力。解决难题总是需要一些回溯。

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.
做出卓越的工作是一种深度优先搜索，其根节点是做这件事的渴望。所以“一次不成功，那就再接再厉”这种说法不太对。应该是：一次不成功，要么再试一次，要么回溯后再试一次。

"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”这种说法也不太准确。显然，有些时候选择退出才是正确的。更准确的表述应该是：永远不要让挫折吓得你做出不必要的退缩。推论：永远不要放弃根本目标。

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.
如果工作很艰难，这不一定是个坏兆头，就像跑步时气喘吁吁并非坏事一样。这取决于你跑得有多快。所以要学会区分良性痛苦与恶性痛苦。良性痛苦是努力的标志；恶性痛苦则是受损的标志。

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.
受众是士气的关键组成部分。如果你是一位学者，你的受众可能是你的同行；在艺术领域，受众可能是传统意义上的观众。无论哪种情况，受众规模无需很大。受众的价值与规模并非呈线性增长。如果你已成名，这是个坏消息，但如果你才刚刚起步，这就是个好消息，因为这意味着一小群专注的受众就足以支撑你。只要有几个人真心喜欢你所做的事，那就够了。

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]
在力所能及的范围内，避免让中间人介入你和受众之间。在某些类型的工作中，这或许不可避免，但摆脱中间人束缚的感觉如此畅快，以至于如果换做相近类型的工作能让你直接面向受众，那么你或许会过得更好。[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.
与你相处的人也会对你的士气产生重大影响。你会发现，有些人能让你精力充沛，而有些人则会让你萎靡不振，而且一个人产生的影响并不总是如你所料。去寻找那些能让你精力充沛的人，避开那些让你萎靡不振的人。当然，如果你有需要照顾的人，那照顾他们优先。

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.
不要和不理解你需要工作，或者将你的工作视为争夺你注意力的竞争对手的人结婚。如果你有抱负，你就需要工作；这几乎就像一种生理需求；所以，不让你工作的人，要么是不理解你，要么就是理解却不在乎。

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]
归根结底，士气是身体层面的。你用身体思考，所以照顾好身体很重要。这意味着要定期锻炼、饮食和睡眠良好，并且避免使用更危险的毒品。跑步和散步是特别好的锻炼方式，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.
做出卓越成就的人不一定比其他人更幸福，但比起无所作为，他们会更幸福。事实上，如果你既聪明又有抱负，没有产出是很危险的。聪明且有抱负却一事无成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.
想要给他人留下深刻印象并没有错，但要选对对象。你所敬重之人的看法是有意义的信号。而名声，也就是一群你可能敬重也可能不敬重的人的看法，只会徒增干扰。

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，有时甚至完全是错误的。如果你把任何事情做得足够好，你就能让它变得有声望。所以，对于一种工作，要问的问题不是它有多大声望，而是它能被做得多好。

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.
竞争可以成为一种有效的激励因素，但不要让它为你选择问题；不要仅仅因为别人在追逐某样东西，就跟着去追。事实上，除了让你更努力工作之外，不要让竞争对手迫使你做任何更具体的事。

Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.
好奇心是最佳指引。你的好奇心从不说谎，对于哪些事物值得关注，它比你了解得更多。

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."
注意这个词出现得有多频繁。如果你向神谕询问成就卓越工作的秘诀，而神谕只用一个词作答，我敢打赌这个词会是“好奇心”。

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。仅仅有好奇心是不够的，而且无论如何你也无法掌控好奇心。但你可以培养它，让它引领你。

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.
好奇心是做好工作四个步骤的关键：它会为你选择领域，带你到达前沿，让你注意到其中的空白，并驱使你去探索它们。整个过程就像是与好奇心共舞。

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，我已经试着把这篇文章写得尽可能简短了。但文章篇幅至少意味着它起到了筛选作用。如果你读到了这里，那你肯定对做出卓越成就感兴趣。如果是这样，你其实已经比自己意识到的更有进展了，因为愿意有此追求的人并不多。

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?
做出卓越工作的要素，是字面意义和数学意义上的要素，它们是：能力、兴趣、努力和运气。从定义上来说，运气是你无能为力的，所以我们可以忽略它。而且如果你确实想做出卓越的工作，我们可以假定你会付出努力。所以问题归结为能力和兴趣。你能否找到一种工作，让你的能力和兴趣相结合，从而激发出大量新想法？

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.
对此我们有乐观的理由。做出杰出工作的方式有很多种，还有更多方式尚待发现。在所有这些不同类型的工作中，最适合你的那种可能非常契合。可能契合得离谱。问题只在于找到它，以及你的能力和兴趣能让你在其中走多远。而你只能通过尝试来找到答案。

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.
想做出伟大成就的人比实际付诸行动的人要多得多。阻碍他们的是谦逊与恐惧交织的心态。试图成为牛顿或莎士比亚，似乎显得狂妄自大。而且这看起来也很难；要是你尝试做那样的事，肯定会失败。这种考量大概很少会明说。很少有人会有意识地决定不去尝试做出伟大成就。但潜意识里就是这么回事；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.
所以我要跟你耍个小花招。你到底想不想做出了不起的成就？现在你得有意识地做出决定。很抱歉这么做。我不会对普通听众这么做。但我们已经知道你对此感兴趣。

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.
别担心自己冒昧。你不必告诉任何人。要是事情太难，你失败了，那又怎样？很多人的问题比这严重得多。事实上，如果这是你遇到的最糟糕的问题，那你算是幸运的了。

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'.
没错，你得努力工作。但话说回来，很多人都得努力工作。而且如果你在做自己觉得非常有趣的事情，如果你选对了路，就必然会如此，那么这份工作可能会比你很多同龄人所做的工作感觉没那么繁重。

The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?
这些发现就在那里，等待着被人发掘。为什么不能是你呢？

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] 我认为你无法精准定义什么才算得上伟大的工作。做出伟大的工作意味着把重要的事情做得极为出色，从而拓展人们对可能性的认知。但重要性并没有一个明确的界限。这只是程度问题，而且在当时往往也很难评判。所以我更希望人们专注于培养自己的兴趣，而不是担心这些兴趣是否重要。只管努力做出了不起的事，至于是否成功，就留给后人去评判吧。

[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] 很多单口喜剧都基于对日常生活中异常现象的观察。“你有没有注意到……？” 新想法就来自于对重要事物做这样的观察。这或许有助于解释为什么人们对新想法的反应往往先是笑的前半声：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] 这第二个限定条件至关重要。如果你对大多数权威人士不看好的某件事感到兴奋，但除了“他们不明白”之外，你无法给出更确切的解释，那么你就开始陷入怪人（偏执之人）的范畴了。

[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] 找到值得投入精力的事情，并非仅仅是在当下的你与一系列已知问题之间寻找匹配。你往往得与问题共同演进。这就是为什么有时候要弄清楚该做什么会如此困难。搜索空间极为庞大。它是所有可能的工作类型（包括已知的和尚未被发现的）与未来所有可能的你的笛卡尔积。

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.
你不可能搜索整个空间，因此你必须依靠启发法来生成有前景的路径，并希望最佳匹配项能聚集在一起。但情况并非总是如此；不同类型的作品被收集在一起，这既源于历史的偶然，也源于它们内在的相似性。

[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卓越的工作，原因有很多，其中一个较为微妙的原因是，通过广泛涉猎，他们一开始就更有可能找到合适的事情去做。

[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] 要是你觉得受众不如你世故，就为他们创作东西，还因此用高人一等的口吻与他们交流，这也可能很危险。要是你足够愤世嫉俗地这么做，是能赚不少钱，但这并非创作出伟大作品的途径。倒不是说用这种方式的人会在乎。

[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] 这个观点我是从哈代的《一个数学家的辩白》中学到的，我向任何有志于在任何领域做出杰出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] 就像我们高估自己一天能做的事，却低估几年能做的事一样，我们也高估拖延一天造成的损害，却低估拖延几年造成的损害。

[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] 通常情况下，你无法因为做自己真正想做的事而获得报酬，尤其是在职业生涯早期。有两种选择：一是做与自己想做的事相近的工作来获得报酬，并希望能让工作内容越来越贴近自己的想法；二是做完全不同的工作来获得报酬，同时利用业余时间做自己的项目。这两种方法都可行，但也都有缺点：第一种方法中，你的工作默认会有所妥协；第二种方法中，你得努力挤出时间来做自己的事。

[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] 如果你把生活安排妥当，它会自动形成专注与放松的循环。理想的安排是有一间办公室，你步行往返于家和办公室之间。

[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] 或许有一些超凡脱俗之人，无需刻意为之就能做出伟大的成就。如果你想将这条规则扩展以涵盖这种情况，它就变成了：除了做到最好，别试图成为其他任何人。

[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 avoidunintentional affectation.
[12] 在表演这类工作中，情况会变得更为复杂，因为其目标是塑造一个虚构的角色。但即便如此，也有可能受到影响。或许在这些领域，规则应该是避免无意的做作。

[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] 当且仅当某些信念无法被证伪时，将其视为毋庸置疑的信念才是稳妥的。例如，秉持法律面前人人平等这一原则是稳妥的，因为含有 “应该” 一词的句子并非真正关于世界的陈述，因此很难被反驳。而且，如果没有证据可以反驳你的某项原则，那么为了维护该原则，你也就无需忽视任何事实。

[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] 矫揉造作比学术不端更容易改正。矫揉造作往往是年轻人的一个缺点，会随着时间消逝，而学术不端更多是一种性格缺陷。

[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一刻就立刻投入工作，但你很可能在不久前刚工作过。

[16] Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.
[16] 有人说精神活性药物也有类似效果。我对此表示怀疑，但对其效果也几乎一无所知。

[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.
例如，对于某个大于 1 的 m，你可以将注意力的(m - 1)/m^n 分配给第 n 重要的主题。当然，你无法如此精确地分配注意力，但这至少给出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] 界定一种宗教的教义必然存在谬误。否则，任何人都可能接受这些教义，那么该宗教的信徒与其他人就没有区别了。

[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] 试着写下一份你年轻时好奇的问题清单，这或许是个不错的练习。你可能会发现，如今你有能力为其中一些问题做点什么。

[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.
[20] 原创性与不确定性之间的关联导致了一种奇怪的现象：由于循规蹈矩者比独立思考者更笃定，这往往使他们在争论中占据上风，尽管他们通常更愚蠢。

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
最优秀的人缺乏一切信念，而最糟糕的人
Are full of passionate intensity.
充满了热烈的激情。

[21] Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas."
[21] 源自莱纳斯·鲍林的话：“如果你想有好点子，就必须想出很多点子。”

[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] 把一个项目当作“儿戏”来对待，类似于把一种说法当作“不恰当”来对待。这意味着无法提出更实质性的批评意见。

[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] 判断自己是否在浪费时间的一个方法，是问问自己是在创造还是在消耗。编写电脑游戏比玩游戏更不太可能是浪费时间，而玩那些能让你创造些什么的游戏，又比玩没有创造内容的游戏更不太可能是浪费时间。

[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，如果你还没有公开发表过任何观点，就不会偏向于支持自己先前结论的证据。若能始终保持正直，在这方面你就能永葆青春，但很少有人能做到。对大多数人来说，先前发表的观点会产生类似意识形态的影响，只是程度为 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.
17 世纪 30 年代初，丹尼尔·迈滕斯创作了一幅画，画中亨丽埃塔·玛丽亚将月桂花环递给查理一世。随后，凡·戴克也创作了自己的版本，以显示自己更胜一筹。

[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] 我有意对“场所”的概念含糊其辞。在撰写本文时，身处同一物理空间具有难以复制的优势，但这种情况可能会改变。

[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] 当其他人必须完成的工作受到极大限制时，情况并非如此，比如 SETI@home 或比特币。或许可以通过定义类似的受限协议，让节点有更多行动自由，从而扩大这种情况不成立的范围。

[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：打造一种能让人们绕过中介机构、直接与受众互动的产品，或许是个好主意。

[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] 始终沿着同一条路线散步或跑步可能会有所帮助，因为这样能让注意力解放出来用于思考。我自己就有这种感觉，而且历史上也有一些相关证据。

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.
感谢特雷弗·布莱克韦尔、丹尼尔·加克尔、帕姆·格雷厄姆、汤姆·霍华德、帕特里克·许、史蒂夫·赫夫曼、杰西卡·利文斯顿、亨利·劳埃德 - 贝克、鲍勃·梅特卡夫、本·米勒、罗伯特·莫里斯、迈克尔·尼尔森、考特尼·皮普金、乔里斯·波特、米克·鲁斯、拉贾特·苏里、哈吉·塔格、加里·谭，以及我的小儿子提出建议并阅读草稿。