looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success. - Paul Graham

The biggest sleight of hand in essay writing is cramming tree-shaped ideas into linear form.

(Endnotes help a lot. They force those branches to be compressed, but the result can sometimes be pleasing in the same way gatehouses are.)

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you’re designing
something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good, even for idiots.

Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.