Paul Graham Quotes

“Always produce.”

“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise.

If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.”

“Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself.

Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.”

“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”

“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.”

“I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”

“If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation.

In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.”

“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school.

Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me.

While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.”

“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

“Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.”

“Keep your identity small.”

“Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw."

This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far.

But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't".”

“Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination.”

“Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.

Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.”

“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.”

“When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide of some great fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked 'Why don't artists paint like that now?'

The room suddenly got quiet. Though rarely asked out loud, this question lurks uncomfortably in the back of every art student's mind. It was as if someone had brought up the topic of lung cancer in a meeting within Philip Morris.

'Well,' the professor replied, 'we're interested in different questions now'. He was a pretty nice guy, but at the time I couldn't help wishing I could send him back to fifteenth century Florence to explain in person to Leonardo & Co. how we had moved beyond their early, limited concept of art. Just imagine that conversation.

In fact, one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence made such great things was that they believed you could make great things. They were intensely competitive and were always trying to outdo one another, like mathematicians or physicists today — maybe like anyone who has ever done anything really well.

The idea that you could make great things was not just a useful illusion. They were actually right. So the most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it.”

“You can go anywhere in books.”

“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.”

“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score.

No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”

“As for building something users love, here are some general tips.

Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do.

The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.”

“Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.”

“Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”

“Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses.

Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.”

“If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.”

“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”

“If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won.

Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics.

Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.”

“If you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you.

These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.”

“If you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.”

“If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.”

“If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win.

Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.

This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. ”