In practice, good intentions rarely work as well as good incentives. - Paul Graham

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.

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

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.