Paul Graham谈规划

Paul Graham在其个人网站最近发布了名为《How to do great work》的文章，给仍然雄心勃勃的年轻人提了一些建议，适合每位对自己仍有期望的朋友反复阅读。下面是本文的第三部分摘录：

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.

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.

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.

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.

追随你的兴趣可能看似一个相当被动的策略，但在实践中它通常意味着你需要跨越各种障碍并不断前行。在这个过程中，你通常需要有冒着被拒绝和失败风险的勇气。所以这确实需要很大的胆识。然而，尽管你需要大胆，但你通常不需要做太多计划。在大多数情况下，做出伟大工作的秘诀只是：全力以赴投入令人激动和雄心勃勃的项目，好的结果就会随之而来。你不需要制定一个计划然后死板地执行，而只需保持某些原则不变。

计划的问题在于，它只对你能提前描述和定义的成就有效。你可以作为一个孩子就决定要获得奖牌或致富，然后一心一意地追求这个目标，但你无法通过这种预设路径来发现自然选择定律这样的科学真理。

我认为对大多数想要做出伟大工作的人来说，正确的策略不是做过多计划。在每个阶段做最感兴趣和为未来保持最佳选择的事情。我称这种方法为”迎风而上”。这似乎就是许多做出重大贡献的人所采用的方式。