Paul Graham's essays
Paul Graham · 58 korrents · 10 pieces · paulgraham.com
Writes and Write-Nots5 korrents · 1 Oct 2024
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- Within a couple of decades there will not be many people who can write, because AI has removed the pressure to learn.
- Most people find writing hard because writing well requires thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
- The middle ground in writing disappears: what is left is good writers and people who cannot write, with no ok writers in between.
- Because writing is thinking, a world divided into writers and non-writers becomes a world divided into thinkers and non-thinkers.
- Intelligence is becoming a choice rather than a byproduct of daily work: there will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.
Founder Mode6 korrents · 1 Sept 2024
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- There are things founders can do that managers cannot, and not doing them feels wrong to founders because it is wrong.
- There are two ways to run a company — founder mode and manager mode — and Silicon Valley has wrongly assumed that scaling a startup means switching to the second.
- In practice "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" often means hiring professional fakers and letting them drive the company into the ground.
- Founder mode breaks the rule that a CEO engages with the company only through direct reports, and makes skip-level meetings the norm.
- Founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode, and will also work better.
- As soon as founder mode is an established idea people will misuse it: founders excusing an inability to delegate, and managers deciding to act like founders.
The Right Kind of Stubborn4 korrents · 1 Jul 2024
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- The persistent and the obstinate are both hard to stop: the persistent like a boat whose engine cannot be throttled back, the obstinate like one whose rudder cannot be turned.
- Persistence and obstinacy are different behaviours: the persistent are attached to the goal, the obstinate to their ideas about how to reach it.
- Resilience means setbacks cannot change your morale, not that they cannot change your mind, and persistence often requires changing your mind.
- Persistence is five qualities combined (energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement and focus on a goal) and only resembles obstinacy in that it keeps you from giving up.
Superlinear Returns7 korrents · 1 Oct 2023
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- Returns for performance are superlinear rather than proportional across most domains that matter.
- Superlinear returns are a feature of the world rather than an artifact of capitalism, and the same pattern runs through fame, power, knowledge and benefit to humanity.
- Every situation with superlinear returns reduces to one of two causes: exponential growth or thresholds.
- Always be learning, because work that is not teaching you is probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.
- Exposing yourself to superlinear returns is not for everyone: most people are better off as part of the pool.
- At the far end of the curve it is a bargain not only to do exceptional work but merely to attempt it, because so few people even try.
How to Do Great Work13 korrents · 1 Jul 2023
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- The way to work out what to work on is by working: if you do not know, guess, but pick something and get going.
- What to work on is found by asking what you are excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people.
- It is good to know about multiple things, because some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.
- Outlier ideas are worth chasing especially when other people are not interested in them.
- Great work follows the same four steps in every field: choose a field, learn enough to reach the frontier, notice the gaps, explore the promising ones.
- Procrastinating on a whole project is far more dangerous than procrastinating on a day, because it camouflages itself as work.
How to Get Startup Ideas1 korrent · 1 Nov 2012
How Art Can Be Good2 korrents · 1 Dec 2006
Hackers and Painters5 korrents · 1 May 2003 · no page here yet
- You need a good sense of design to judge good design, and there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize it and their confidence that they can.
- Big companies have software designed by committee to avoid disasters, so a startup wins design wars by having the same people design and implement the product.
- Premature design, deciding too early what a program should do, is as dangerous as premature optimization; specifications should be allowed to change on the fly.
- Great software requires a fanatical devotion to beauty: the parts no one is supposed to see should be beautiful too, because unseen details become visible in the aggregate.
- Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one, because great software has to be seen from the user's point of view.
Design and Research5 korrents · 1 Jan 2003 · no page here yet
- Design is for users, but you have to design what the user needs rather than what he says he wants.
- You are most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer, because looking down on the user corrupts the designer.
- To get good design you have to get close to your users and stay close, calibrating your ideas on actual users constantly.
- It is hard to design something good for users you look down on, because you cannot stay interested in something you do not like yourself.
- Good design requires a dictator: design by committee is a synonym for bad design, because a design has to be all of a piece.
Taste for Makers10 korrents · 1 Feb 2002 · no page here yet
- Taste is not just personal preference: there is such a thing as good and bad design, and a maker's taste can be wrong.
- Good design is simple, because being forced to be simple forces a maker to face the real problem and deliver substance instead of ornament.
- Good design is timeless: if something is ugly it cannot be the best solution, and someone will eventually find a better one.
- Good design solves the right problem; a lot of bad design is industrious but misguided.
- Great designers make it look easy, and the ease is mostly an illusion: the conversational tone of good writing comes on the eighth rewrite.
- Good design is redesign: it is rare to get things right the first time, and experts plan to throw away early work.