The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become … - Paul Graham

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

The value of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is not just that it prevents you from messing up things that are going well, but that it also causes you to focus instead on fixing the things that are real problems.

One heuristic for making startups AI-proof is to make things human intelligence can't compete with either. For example, marketplaces are proof against AI competitors for the same reason they're proof against human ones.