Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 376

Paul Graham just published his latest essay and it is a recipe for " how to do great work ." I highly recommend it, but you should know two things: (1) it assumes that you're "very ambitious" and (2) it's quite long. It's possibly his longest essay.

However, this second feature acts as a kind of filter. Because if you do actually make it to the end, his assumption is that it says something about both your level of ambition and your overall commitment to doing great work. You are presumably not the majority.

As I read through it (albeit relatively quickly), I immediately started copying and pasting excerpts that resonated with me. Eventually I stopped this because there were just too many of them. But as a preview, here are some of the ones that I did pull out:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

You really should read the entire essay , though. It's worth it.

This is going to be old news to many of you, but this past week I experienced Tesla's self-driving capabilities for the first time. And I must say that I was very impressed. It did everything from navigate stop-and-go city traffic to navigate lane changes on the highway. Overall, it makes my five-year old car feel pretty quaint. The software is that much more sophisticated and one has to assume that all of this autonomy stuff will only get significantly better as LIDAR becomes common place in production vehicles .

In other car news, North America appears to be narrowing in on an EV charging plug standard. It is Tesla's plug, but it is now appropriately called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. And last week, Electrify America -- which is the largest non-Tesla, fast-charging network in the US -- announced that it would be adding the plug to its network. The company also happens to be owned by Volkswagen. So big and important companies seem to be coalescing around this plug type.

Lastly for today, here's a post by Fred Wilson talking about (1) bi-directional EV charging, (2) the apartment buildings he and his wife are developing, and (3) our ongoing transformation away from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized one. What he talks about in his post is something that we are actually piloting in a few of Slate's office buildings right now. It's still early days, but I think it's really exciting. Tech seems to be enabling a broader shift toward decentralization. And in the case of our electrical grid, it's going to lead to a more resilient one.

https://videopress.com/v/FLw4IuBH?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

I love cycling. And I have been using Toronto's bike share system to get around over the last few weeks (both for work and personal stuff). There's no better way to get around when the city is busy . But it was also a reminder that we have a lot of work to do when it comes to cycling infrastructure.

Here are a few observations:

• The Bike Share mobile app has got to be the worst app that I have ever used. First of all, it's called PBSC. I think this was a deliberate choice so that it's impossible to remember and impossible to locate on your phone. Because once you do find it, it's an awful experience.

• I struggled to make it from downtown up to midtown a few days ago. Can I blame the Bike Share bike instead of my lack of physical conditioning? I can't see the majority of people wanting to do this sort of ride. This is where e-bikes and e-scooters come in.

• Many of the bikes have something wrong with them.

• We don't have enough bike lanes and bike-friendly streets. I know that some you don't want to hear this. But it's the truth. There are a lot of streets in Toronto where it is terrifying to be on a bicycle. This is true even in the center of the city.

• If you're not familiar with Toronto, you won't get this point. But Queens Quay is a seemingly complicated street for many people to navigate. Cycling along here in peak summer is an exercise in dodging people as they meander across the bike lane.

• We need dockless bikes. I'm sure that the team is doing their best to load balance across the network, but it is often a challenge to find an available dock at the end of a trip. There are ways to do this that avoid bikes being left everywhere .

• And while we're at it, we should also add e-scooters to our roster .

What would you add to this list?