美国著名程序员、博客作者和技术作家保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）在其个人网站上的长文《How to do great work》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。下面是本文的第二十一部分摘录：
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.
Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.
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.
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.
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.
寻找优秀的同事是很重要的。许多项目无法独自完成，即使有些项目可以，与其他人一起工作也能给你带来鼓励和碰撞思维的机会。
同事不仅会对你的工作产生影响，也会对你个人产生影响。因此，选择与你想成为的人一起工作是至关重要的，因为你会受到他们的影响。
在选择同事时，质量比数量更重要。拥有一两个优秀的同事要比拥有一大群普通的同事更好。事实上，在历史上，伟大的工作往往发生在集群中，这表明同事之间的差异常常决定了是否能够做出出色的工作。
你如何知道自己有足够优秀的同事呢？根据我的经验，当你拥有优秀的同事时，你会感觉到。这意味着，如果你对此感到不确定，那可能意味着你的同事还不够好。但是，我们也可以给出一个更具体的答案。优秀的同事会给出令人惊喜的见解，他们能够看到和做到你所不能的事情。因此，如果你有一些足够优秀的同事能够在这方面激发你的思维，那么你可能已经达到了足够的水平。
大多数人都可以从与同事合作中受益，但有些项目需要更大规模的团队。如果你想要承担这样的项目，你需要具备管理者的能力和兴趣，因为良好的管理就像其他任何工作一样需要相应的才能。如果你没有这些能力和兴趣，那么就没有中间的选择：你要么强迫自己像学习第二语言一样学习管理，要么避免涉足这样的项目。
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