Paul Graham Quotes

"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.

Trump's bullying only works (and only temporarily at that) because he's taking advantage of the high-trust customs and relationships established by more principled predecessors.

Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

If you keep acting like a banana republic, eventually you become one.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

Trying to make founders describe their products in simple everyday language is like trying to push together the north poles of two magnets.

wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

It doesn't feel laborious to go over every sentence in an essay 50 times. The mistakes in early drafts irritate me so much that it would be hard to stop trying to eliminate them.

In both cases, what it all comes down to is users. You’d think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology was. Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you have.

The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

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.

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

Unexpected advantage of appointing board members who already have significant achievements: being on your board is not the main source of their importance, so they won't tend to cling to their seats even when it's obviously time to leave.

If you're socially awkward, people will mistakenly think you dislike them, and that will make them actually dislike you.

Err on the side of verbs. If you have to choose between expressing something via the verb or in some other way, choose the verb.