Paul Graham Quotes

I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that prim, prig, and prude all begin with pr. There's something censorious about pr the same way there's something slippery about sl.

Some of the patterns in the numbers are intrinsic (e.g. the alternation of even and odd) and others are artifacts of our use of base 10 (e.g. multiplying by 10 is trivial), but both enable shortcuts in calculation.

When we do things that work, we rarely understand exactly why. We do them unconsciously, or because of tradition, or because we stumbled onto them. A lot of the value of essay writing is in figuring out why things that work do work.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

You don't need to know more than the most obvious things about business to start a startup, but you need to be at least decent at building things, in order to build sufficiently good initial versions.

It's so much more interesting focusing on things that are unfashionable, undervalued, overlooked. And there are so many of them! People are great at overlooking.

"What if the model companies do this?" is the new "What if Google does this?" I.e. the meaningless question investors ask that shows either that they're stupid or that they dislike you and are looking for ways to find fault.

Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors’ pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

It's easier to innovate when you're the original of something. People copying you can only copy a snapshot of your current state. They don't know which aspects of the snapshot are essential and which are random things you'd been about to change anyway.

At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.

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).

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