That averaging gets to be a problem. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each per… - Paul Graham

When I finished the first draft of an essay in high school, I'd scan through it hoping it was long enough. Now when I finish a first draft I scroll through it hoping it's not too long.

Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

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.