Paul Graham Essay Excerpts

"You don't need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you."

"Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche."

"startups take off because the founders make them take off."

"What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things."

"it's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you, than a large number of users kind of like you."

"If you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?"

"The initial idea [of a startup] is just a starting point -- not a blueprint, but a question."

"One should focus on quailty of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological"

"If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters."

"It's hard to do a good job on anything you don't think about in the shower... There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary."

"You can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness."

"You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy... Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they've ever made. And you should in turn be thinking of new ways to delight them."

"In software, especially, it usually works best to get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then see what they do with it. Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate, even if you're one of them."

"Even if what you're building really is great, getting users will always be a gradual process -- partly because great things are usually also novel, but also because users have other things to think about."

"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startups as scalars. Instead, we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

"Investors' opinions are a trailing indicator. The best founders are better at seeing the future than the best investors, because the best founders are making it."

"So that's what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. People's motives for starting startups are usually mixed. They're usually doing it from some combination of the desire to make money, the desire to seem cool, genuine interest in the problem, and unwillingness to work for someone else. The last two ar emore powerful motivators than the first two."

"Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world."

"The main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. It doesn't just affect the way we think; it is the Lego blocks we build thought out of. Popping out of the current paradigm is something only a few people can do. And even they usually have to suppress their intuitions at first."

"if you want to have new ideas yourself, one of the most valuable things you can do is to learn what they look like when they're born."

"Having new ideas is a lonely business."

"Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in the business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. 'I never took a day off in my twenties,' he said. 'Not one.'"

"Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can."

"Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accuratetly judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are."

"Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking. It's more fun, but also much more productive."

"The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally ... the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance."

"[On TJ Rodgers:] brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology"

"[On Larry Page & Sergey Brin:] Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measures, you win. All the other stuff -- which includes all the stuff that business schools consists of -- you can figure out along the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal."

"It's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind"

"Try to get yourself into situations where the most urrgent problems are ones you want to think about."

"Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic."

"If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for."

"It is not merely that returns from following a path are hard to predict. They change dramaically over time."

"Remember that careless confidence you had as a kid when starting something new? That would be a powerful thing to recapture."

"I find that to have good ideas I need to be working on some problem. You can't start with randomness. You have to let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form."

"In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions"

"when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community."

"if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job."

"Finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of startup ideas."

"To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not."

"... the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate."