You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in or… - Paul Graham

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.

The harder the task, the less you care about people's race or sex or whatever, either in the racist sense or the diversity sense. You're so desperate simply to find anyone who can do it well that you don't think about anything else.

Hypothesis: One way to tell whether someone's a "natural" at something is when they do it with style even when they're first learning and don't know much yet.