Paul Graham Quotes

The test of character is how you treat the powerless.

Someone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.

Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

Instead of simply cancelling student debt, maybe it would be a good idea to loosen the rules about discharging it via bankruptcy. Then you'd both help the people in the greatest need, and start to fix the system (because lenders would have to become less indiscriminate).

It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

The reason AI coding works so well is that the source code of the median app was already slop before LLMs.

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you’ll find that most of them grew organically.

When a political figure is killed, his supporters want to believe he was killed by some powerful, organized "them." They want his death to be meaningful, and it's more meaningful to be killed by a powerful political force than a random nut, as most actual killers turn out to be.

"Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't.

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. ... But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work.

Organizations that can't measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.

If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.

Wealth is what you want, not money.

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers.