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 … - Paul Graham

Sometimes people who discover a new kind of work know that they have. Other times they just do something so well that imitating them becomes a genre.

Unless you're a lawyer or a lexicographer, in a good faith conversation with someone smart, you rarely have to talk about the meanings of the words you're using. So if you have to, it's a sign that you're talking to someone stupid or intellectually dishonest.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)