If you want to start a startup and don't know what to build, one way to get ideas is to ask if there's something you could create that would help you… - Paul Graham

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.

Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.

1. When you write something intended to be read by an important person, go through it and cut every unnecessary word.

2. The reader of anything you publish is an important person.