There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may als… - Paul Graham
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There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.
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About
Paul Graham
Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
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I’d like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don’t see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren’t doing it, or (c) that they aren’t getting paid for it.
I suspect one of the rarest skills is to have any sense whatsoever of how different things were in the past. I believe it's as rare as being able to solve hairy integrals, but we don't realize that because there are so few explicit tests of it.
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So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.
