Paul Graham Quotes

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you. Don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something merely because there's a lot of competition for it.

If people lived forever they'd accumulate infinitely many injuries.

People's irrational dislike of shipping charges seems so powerful that it would be worth thinking about what new things it could drive.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

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.

It seems so much more civilized when you arrive in America from Europe, and bottle caps just come right off. That regulation was a big mistake. It's as if the bureaucrats were seeking out something with a high ratio of annoyance to impact.

You don't know how big a fish you are till you try a big pond.

The fear that you won't get something sometimes makes you lie to yourself about whether you want it. To counteract this, ask yourself: If I already had it, would I be glad?

While I believe that AI is a powerful and useful tool, I think the rules against aigiarism should be roughly similar to those against plagiarism.

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people?6 These things don’t scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it’s concentrated in one individual.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator.

Prediction: Because the quality of abstract art is (ahem) hard to judge, it will be a lot easier to revise the history of that period to adjust the representation of great artists to suit present and future fashions.

The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It’s that it tends not to happen at all. It’s only when you’re deliberately looking for hard problems, as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass. It is, as Edison said, one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to do it.

Garry Tan is a moral canary in a coal mine. When people hate on Garry Tan, they out themselves as either evil or stupid, because in fact Garry is as close to a 100% good guy as you get.

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