Paul Graham Quotes

In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Twitter won't last forever. Nothing does. But whatever motivation ends up driving a successful "next Twitter," it's unlikely to be the fear that Elon will start allowing people to say heterodox things on the original Twitter.

I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

Forums have immense momentum. Reddit, for example, maintained its character through years of mis- and no management. So my bet about the future of Twitter is that there will be less change than those who fear or hope for change expect.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Being both imaginative and determined is a powerful combination because it's so rare — so many imaginative people are dreamy and ineffective, and so many determined people are merely energetic robots.

The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.

People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.

You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.

Something I just told a founder: Stay as small as you can for as long as you can. People who come to visit your office should always be surprised that such an important company has so few employees.

I don't mind when people are unambitious. It's up to each person to decide that. But it bugs me when the people who aren't ambitious try to bring down those who are.

If you're running a process that people want to hack, and you're not actively measuring attempts to hack it, it's being hacked.

I expected technology to make programming less laborious, as it does to most things. But I have to admit I expected it to happen by programmers switching to more powerful languages, rather than continuing to write programs full of boilerplate, but having AIs generate most of it.