was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball. How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if we were visited by beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew. During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important; by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1] But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? The answer, of course, is that the original raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance. And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good deal of resistance at first. The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s. The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5] And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it. Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question. And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury. Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over. At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth. The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else. To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. is the French verb meaning "to try" and an is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside. If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them. In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud. But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea. Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't draw any conclusions.) Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know. But you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander. The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. [6] The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original. Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course. So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise. I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording. Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten. How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers. For example, in a recent I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn't realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That's what you're looking for. So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected. What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting how important color was to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into the case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing. (I think now it was the salt.) So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it? To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared. Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken. When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But (as with wealth) there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones? I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting. I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way. I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm aiming for good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny? The connection may be surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver. I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head. People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice. One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. And so were books and paintings. Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which (like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept breaking off. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of casting hilt and blade as one piece. Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're " ," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it. For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially the extreme sort that make a man look as if he's wearing a beret made of his own hair. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in-- the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath. The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? And the answer is that he got to look that way What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel? See what you can extract from a frivolous question? If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school. The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming . It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely because they're insiders. The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote. Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this. [1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve. [2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English Departments Come From?" 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351. Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). Indiana University Publications. Daniels, Robert V. University of Vermont, 1991. Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the 1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed). Ashgate, 1998. [3] I'm compressing the story a bit. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of the leading scholars of that generation had been trained. In some cases the writing teachers were transformed into English professors. Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English. [4] Parker, , p. 25. [5] The undergraduate curriculum or (whence "trivial") consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study the of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these were the seven liberal arts. The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered the most important subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes. [6] Trevor Blackwell points out that this isn't strictly true, because the outside edges of curves erode faster. to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. |
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There’s probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, there’s a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Graham’s wisdom isn’t limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.
I’ve read all of Paul Graham’s published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts I’ve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.
Whenever possible, I’ve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).
If my description of Graham’s idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.
Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Graham’s essays. They’re worth your time.
Boring disclaimer stuff:
Okay, let’s jump in.
Unsurprisingly, many of Graham’s essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, there’s a lot to unwrap, including some classics like “Ramen Profitable”, “Do Things that Don’t Scale” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. Let’s start with an overview.
Startups in 13 sentences :
For a detailed account, try How to Start a Startup .
This section presents some of Graham’s core ideas around startups, including the principles above.
Essays mentioned in this section:
Startups in 13 sentences
How to Start a Startup
Startup = Growth
How to Make Wealth
After Credentials
The Lesson to Unlearn
The Power of the Marginal
News from the Front
A Student's Guide to Startups
What Startups Are Really Like
Before the Startup
Hiring is Obsolete
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
Organic Startup Ideas
Six Principles for Making New Things
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Black Swan Farming
Crazy New Ideas
Why There Aren't More Googles
Ideas for Startups
Jessica Livingston
Startup FAQ
Earnestness
Relentlessly Resourceful
A Word to the Resourceful
The Anatomy of Determination
Mean People Fail
Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
Design and Research
A Version 1.0
What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
Beating the Averages
Do Things that Don't Scale
Ramen Profitable
Default Alive or Default Dead?
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Holding a Program in One's Head
How Not to Die
Disconnecting Distraction
Good and Bad Procrastination
Don’t talk to Corp Dev
The Top Idea in Your Mind
The Fatal Pinch
Startups aren’t ordinary businesses. “ A startup is a company designed to grow fast ”, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham says : “If you want to understand startups, understand growth”.
“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.” (From How to Make Wealth )
Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable. At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to hack the tests . But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.
So you don’t need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, that may even be a good thing (if your business teacher was excellent in business, they’d probably be a startup founder). In a startup, credentials don’t really matter - your users won’t care if you went to Stanford or got straight A’s. (Related: A Student's Guide to Startups ) .
Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job , too. In a startup, experience is overrated . The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. “The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.” (From Hiring is Obsolete ). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.
So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and “normal work”. But why don’t more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in Why to Not Not Start a Startup .
So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?
Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If you’re successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you don’t know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves:
“Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.” (From The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn )
In How to Make Wealth , Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesn’t actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but it’s important: “making money” seems really complicated while “making something people want” is far easier.)
Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?
Leverage: If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly.
Measurement: The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, you’re in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.
More detail in How to Make Wealth .
While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and don’t even think that you’re starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that you’ve started a company. (From Organic Startup Ideas )
He’s also observed that good ideas tend to come from the margins - places you’d not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isn’t obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.
So, good ideas don’t initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, the initial idea is usually so crude and basic that you’ll ignore it if you’re looking for a billion-dollar idea. The really big ideas may even repel you - they are too ambitious.
A good idea doesn’t sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. “The most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.” (From Black Swan Farming )
Indeed, when someone presents a crazy new idea to you, and if they are “both a domain expert and a reasonable person”, chances are that it’s a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). “If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.”
Graham also emphasizes that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them.
Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." ( Graham quoting Howard Aiken )
Nevertheless, if you’re in need of inspiration, Graham has some good starting points for coming up with startup ideas.
“ The earlier you pick startups, the more you’re picking the founders. ” Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAM… - a startup’s success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)
“Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.” (from Startups in 13 Sentences ).
Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups tend to have multiple founders .
If the founders are the most important factor for a startup’s success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.
According to Graham, a good founder is:
“The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as ‘earnest.’”
An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isn’t to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why it’s important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which we’ll discuss later).
“A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.”
Relentless = make things go your way
Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way
Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and “hustle” until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and selling cereal .
Graham noticed a pattern around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesn’t need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and they’ll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to.
It is not the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined . Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must.
"Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.
Oh, also: good founders aren’t mean. Mean People Fail and can’t get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice tend to attract people to them .
If there’s one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, it’s this: “Make something people want”. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinator’s motto)
Yes, it is obvious. But it’s also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, you’ll attract users, employees, investors, money. “ You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives .”
Indeed, many early-stage startups are “ indistinguishable from a nonprofit ”, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.
“In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as ‘ran out of funding,’ but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.” (From How to Start a Startup )
So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.
Get close to users
“The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.” (From Startups in 13 Sentences )
“You have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.” (From Design and Research )
Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, it’s useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups tend to arise from personal need.
Launch fast, then iterate
“The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.”
The importance of iterations is highlighted in “ A Version 1.0 ”, “ What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? ” and “ Early Work ”, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)
Some ideas from these essays:
Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in “ Early Work ”.
Mostly, a startup shouldn’t try to replicate what other startups do:
“If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.”
Startup execution is a pathless land; there’s no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why it’s so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.
Even though there isn’t a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:
Do Things that Don’t Scale
“Think of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.”
“Startups take off because the founders make them take off. If you don’t take off, it’s not necessarily because the market doesn’t exist but because you haven’t exerted enough effort.”
At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before you’re there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering “ surprisingly good customer service ”.
The “Do Things that Don’t Scale” advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.
Get Ramen Profitable
Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.
“Ramen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the founders’ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).”
Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from default dead into default alive . The game changes from “don’t run out of money” into “don’t run out of energy”. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.
To increase your startup’s chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.
Maintain a Maker’s Schedule
To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You can’t build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; “that’s barely enough time to get started”. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.
“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If you’re the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if you’re the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.
Holding a Program in One's Head expands on some of these ideas.
What not to do
Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, “ How Not to Die ”.
To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Graham’s Six Principles for Making New Things :
Graham doesn’t often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. It’s like “sure, we’re talking about money... but I’d rather we talk about the product instead.” Let me explain:
In Don’t talk to Corp Dev , Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So it’s better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&A.
In The Top Idea in Your Mind : “once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind”, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.
When you get money, don’t spend it . “ The most common form of failure is running out of money ”, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.
One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is default dead . “Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left?” If you know you’re default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding The Fatal Pinch .
In the long term, it’s obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money.
What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who you’re with. While Graham’s treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.
What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Fashionable Problems
How to Do What You Love
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
A Project of One's Own
Great Hackers
If it’s something you’re intrinsically motivated about, that’s something where you have infinite curiosity, and that’s something you’ll eventually do well in. (Later, we’ll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)
“ If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. ” Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes.
Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. This is a revolutionary shift : in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether it’s from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.
The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself.
Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school tend to be unpopular , not because they couldn’t figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they don’t really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on Fashionable Problems , the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.
A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: “What are you a big nerd on?”
Let’s end this part with a sharp and practical observation from “ How to Do What You Love ”:
“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.”
The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other people’s projects where you have significant ownership).
You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And there’s a reason for that: “ You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss ”.
In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, it’s not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.
While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, it’s also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in “ A Project of One’s Own ”. If a project feels like it’s your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you don’t otherwise have. You’re much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great.
“It's a mistake to insist dogmatically on ‘work/life balance.’ Indeed, the mere expression ‘work/life’ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.” (From “ A Project of One’s Own ”)
For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and eat nothing but ramen , with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided it’s something they want to take over their lives. “People will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.”
How do you know if something has taken over your life? Here’s a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower?
In “ The Top Idea in Your Mind ”, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does not happen, you’ll have trouble doing great work - that’s your sign to reconsider what you work on.
Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that they’re willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.
What drives them? It can’t be just money - there are so many founders who’ve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why aren’t there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you don’t find in non-founders?
By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
The Two Kinds of Moderate
Orthodox Privilege
Novelty and Heresy
How to Disagree
How to Think for Yourself
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
Is It Worth Being Wise?
Beyond Smart
How to Work Hard
Mind the Gap
Being a Noob
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
How Art Can Be Good
Taste for Makers
The Island Test
Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.
In The Four Quadrants of Conformism , Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. There’s a clash between the groups, so it’s important for independent-minded people to “be protected”, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These “protected areas” are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)
If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you don’t really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you can’t imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are politically moderate by accident . A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.
Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls Orthodox Privilege : it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. “They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.”
So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy. Novelty and Heresy go hand-in-hand. “It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.” To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn How to Disagree .
In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded won’t get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else won’t build great new stuff. You need to be right and most other people need to be wrong.
Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; it’s not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.
In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles.
We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that it’s an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.
“ Those who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about something ”. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest “is a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination”.
Intelligence
There’s a difference between wisdom and intelligence . If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of “genius”, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, you’re a genius.
High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in Beyond Smart , there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; “There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.”
Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).
Hard work and courage
Even when you’re undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing How to Work Hard can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isn’t the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): “ If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush .”
When you start to do or learn anything new, you’ll Be a Noob at it first. But “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.” In How to Be an Expert in a Changing World , Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.
Putting together Graham’s thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you can’t influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage.
Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an “eye” for design or an “ear” for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.
”Taste is subjective” isn’t true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. There’s good art and there’s bad art , good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying “taste is subjective” is lazy and won’t help you improve your work.
So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. “Good work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.” (From Taste for Makers )
So what is good art or design? Graham gives a list (I redacted a few points):
Good work isn’t necessarily the most popular work; “There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.” But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it.
If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. He’s thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if it’s testable.
Watch him do it in How to Do What You Love :
“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.”
And in The Island Test , he presents a test to figure out what you’re addicted to:
“Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.
What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to.”
In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In How to Start a Startup , Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say “they are determined and will do whatever it takes”, but that’s not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone who’s hiring.
Instead, Graham devised a test: “Could you describe the person as an animal?” If you could say “Jaakko is an animal” and don’t laugh but rather take the description seriously, that’s the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply won’t take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured.
Fun evening activity: Go through an essay you’ve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable.
Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic.
You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if it’s an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.
For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in Writing, Briefly . It’s an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.
Writing, Briefly
Writing and Speaking
The List of N Things
Persuade xor Discover
General and Surprising
The Age of the Essay
How to Write Usefully
Write Simply
Write Like You Talk
Economic Inequality
If you read Writing, Briefly , as you should, you noticed this:
“I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”
From an idea perspective, being a good writer is better than being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas.
There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where it’s going before you start, and those where you have no clue where it’s going.
We’re taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. We’re writing to persuade the reader, so that they’ll accept our thesis. A listicle is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesn’t help you discover new ideas or knowledge. “ I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell .”
Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.
An essay should be new
If an essay doesn’t share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe .
But just anything new doesn’t cut it. There’s constantly new info and news, and that doesn’t make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something General and Surprising . “Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).” If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), you’ve got a winning essay.
“ Essays should aim for maximum surprise. ”
An essay should be useful
What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in How to Write Usefully :
Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. Good writing is rewriting . Because we can’t see someone’s drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our Early Work , then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough.
“My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.” (From How to Write Usefully )
And when you rewrite, your main goal is to make your writing simple . Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader “do extra work just so you can seem cool.”
In Write Like You Talk , Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. “If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.”
This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and what’s simpler than a great metaphor?)
Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.
Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:
“There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means ‘leap into the mouth.’ My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.” (From Write Simply )
“People don’t realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding ‘there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.’” (From Do Things that Don’t Scale )
“The list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.” (From The List of N Things )
“Sometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.” (From Economic Inequality )
“If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.” (From Mind the Gap )
“I'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.” (From Taste for Makers )
“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.” (From How to Make Wealth )
“The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.” (From How to Think for Yourself )
Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into billionaires , products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If you’re working to help startups, you’re working to change society in a big way.
The Refragmentation
Inequality and Risk
What You Can't Say
As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldn’t surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isn’t the demonic thing many believe.
Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one I’m no expert in, so I’ll try to provide a general overview without twisting Graham’s ideas into something they aren’t. You might want to read the essays in full if you’re interested in the topic.
By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad.
In Mind the Gap , Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:
Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.
“Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.
In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.” (From Great Hackers )
“By helping startup founders, you’re helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesn’t sound right.” (From Economic Inequality )
There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so it’s unsurprising they are able to make more money than other people.
Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesn’t mean you must have been screwed over. It’s more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.
Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some people’s salaries are higher than others’, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price than ever before , and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.
Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results you’d hope for.
If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so they’ll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.
So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see Inequality and Risk ). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesn’t sound as positive as “reducing economic inequality”. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.
The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflix… 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didn’t, they had things we now regard as “essentials” while the poor didn’t. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.
Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.
“You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.” (From Mind the Gap ) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how it’s used
Graham’s proposition:
Allow those who create wealth to keep it.
When you’re allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.
Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Graham’s opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in How to Make Wealth and Mind the Gap ).
“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.” (From Taste for Makers )
“And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.” (From Orthodox Privilege )
Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.
Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.
Graham deep-dives into this idea in What You Can't Say , an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that I’d do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, here’s the main takeaway I was left with:
There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded.
If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, you’d be smart to listen.
What You'll Wish You'd Known is sort of Paul Graham’s compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. It’s also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:
Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.
What You'll Wish You'd Known
Life is Short
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
Lies We Tell Kids
Keep Your Identity Small
Cities and Ambition
The Top of My Todo List
“Life is short” is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.
For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it ; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.
Whether you agree with the premise that Life is Short , it’s easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we don’t like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, “bullshit”).
And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in Life is Short .
Since life is short, it’s easy to let it slip away in a blur if you’re not careful.
One thing you get easily sucked into is “ anti-tests ”. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldn’t care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldn’t care about that. Just because there’s a test doesn’t mean you should try to perform well in it.
Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of “bullshit” life is too short for.
Another thing that can corrode your life, if you’re not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but it’s harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In The Acceleration of Addictiveness , Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. “ Technology tends to separate normal from natural. ”
“ You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ” For example, if your approach to consumerism doesn’t seem a bit weird, you probably own too much Stuff .
But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and “the bullshit” isn’t enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In How to Lose Time and Money , Graham writes:
“It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking ‘wow, I'm spending a lot of money.’ Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.”
Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, it’s hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking “this is a waste of time” sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.
If you’re not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.
What’s a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like “if you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomach” is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like “be careful with strangers, they are dangerous”? Less so.
In Lies We Tell Kids , Graham shows that we’ve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that we’ve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if it’s something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.
As a rule, if you think it’s true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. It’s better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.
If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bull…). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something that’s part of our identity , so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.
Another thing to uncondition comes from Cities and Ambition . When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if you’re into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But there’s an inverse consideration, too, and it’s an important one: the places you’ve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if it’s simply a product of where we have lived in so far.
This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because you’ve been conditioned a certain way, you’re set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, it’s easy to waste your life.
You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started.
Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:
In The Top of My Todo List , Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:
Paul Graham’s favorites
This is in addition to the three that get the most traffic: https://t.co/zsxRpKm4ew https://t.co/nROmN4eyhO https://t.co/O8hIcjcMd2 I should also have included: https://t.co/CUBGEQ9N7H https://t.co/bAcAN5wROL https://t.co/MVTTJDzyQ2 https://t.co/OKZOGIhi4i — Paul Graham (@paulg) December 20, 2019
My favorites
This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Graham’s ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that weren’t included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.
Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.
If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so it’d be awesome if many people knew about this.
And if there’s something you’d like to add / edit, reach out: [email protected] / Twitter
Thanks for reading.
RSS feed Follow me on Twitter for more content.
12 great essays by paul graham, life skills, is it worth being wise, keep your identity small, how to disagree, what you can’t say, good and bad procrastination, the submarine, taste for makers, the acceleration of addictiveness, post-medium publishing.
The age of the essay, writing, briefly, writing and speaking, see also…, 10 great articles by venkat rao, 12 great articles by gary wolf.
About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism
Episode 276: #276 Paul Graham’s Essays Part 2
Episode 276
Hosted by David Senra
David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading more of Paul Graham’s essays.
What I learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays .
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[4:01] You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have but that you know isn't to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea.
[5:20] The independent-minded are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly.
[6:20] Founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees.
[7:40] There are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
[8:30] How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something.
[9:00] How To Think For Yourself by Paul Graham
[9:00] How To Work Hard by Paul Graham
[10:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
[11:00] Paul on Twitter: "Maybe better founders could have..." Presumably Patrick knows what he means by that, but in case it's not clear, he's describing the empty set. If Patrick and John Collison had to work long hours to build something great, you will too. Link to tweet
[13:00] Less is more but you have to do more to get to less. — Rick Rubin: In the Studio by Jake Brown. (Founders #245)
[13:00] If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.
[14:30] Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
[15:30] Aliens, Jedis, & Cults
[16:30] How To Do What You Love by Paul Graham
[19:00] Fear's a powerful thing. I mean it's got a lot of firepower. If you can figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind rather than to stand in front of you, that's very powerful. I always felt that I had to work harder than the next guy, just to do as well as the next guy. And to do better than the next guy, I had to just kill.
And you know, to a certain extent, that's still with me in how I work, you know, I just go in. —Jimmy Iovine
[20:00] Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.
[22:00] Find work that feels like play. — The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. (Founders #191)
[23:00] A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.
[23:00] Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson. (Founders #240)
[25:00] Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clearsighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are.
[26:00] How to Lose Time and Money by Paul Graham
[30:00] Schlep Blindness by Paul Graham
[31:00] A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great.
[33:00] What I’ve Learned From Users by Paul Graham
[34:00] The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but it's surprising how much the problems remain the same, regardless of what they're making. Once you've advised 100 startups all doing different things, you rarely encounter problems you haven't seen before.
[34:00] Today I talked to a startup doing so well that they had no current problems that needed solving. Profitable, growing ~20x a year (not a typo), only 9 employees. This is so rare that I didn't know what to do. We ended up talking about problems they might have in the future.
I advised them never to raise another round, so to get equity you're going to have to get hired there. So learn to program. Link to tweet
[35:00] But knowing (nearly) all the problems startups can encounter doesn't mean that advising them can be automated, or reduced to a formula.
[37:00] It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want.
And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. —Steve Jobs
[39:00] That was another big surprise: how often founders don't listen to us.
[39:00] Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe. (Founders #221)
[40:00] The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what it's like except those who've done it.
[42:00] Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.
[42:00] Alexander combined an excessive tolerance of fatigue with an intolerence for slowness. Alexander the Great: The Brief Life and Towering Exploits of History's Greatest Conqueror--As Told By His Original Biographers (Founders #232)
[43:00] However good you are, good colleagues make you better. Indeed, very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else, because they're so starved for them in everyday life.
[45:00] Leading By Design: The Ikea Story (Founders #104)
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There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You see this pattern with start-up founders. You don't want to start a start-up to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there'll already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't, like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers’ floors. He's referencing Microsoft and Airbnb there. Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture, which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research. One difficulty here is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. It genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers. And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly. Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself with independent-minded people, hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you too and to think of more. The independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional-minded people. A place where the independent and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded. Otherwise, the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones. So as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. The importance of founders knowing other founders is repeated a lot in Paul's essays. I'm going to read that one more time because I think it's important. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. You don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people. It's enough to have one or two who you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you are. They need you, too. You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space by reading history. When I read history, I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is why I say, every entrepreneur needs a library. It's a tool for entrepreneurs. Back to his idea about how to make yourself more independent-minded, more generally, your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas. When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see his ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion. You notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt and then more and more and more until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. There are intellectual fashions, too. And you definitely don't want to participate in those because unfashionable ideas are -- oh my God, this is so good, Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking. Novel ideas come from curiosity. Independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. The independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity who keep eating even after they're full. And this is what I think the most important sentence in this entire essay is. "How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is not much, maybe you should change something. Curiosity is unlike most other appetites. Indulging it tends to increase rather than to satiate it. Questions lead to more questions. So perhaps, curiosity is the compass. Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be do what you love so much as do what you're curious about."
That's an excerpt from Paul Graham excellent essay, How to Think for Yourself. And so before I jump into his next excellent essay, which is How to Work Hard, if I sound funny, what I went through this week is going to be very familiar to anybody with school-aged children. My daughter brought home some kind of sickness. It was spread to my son, then spread to my wife. And then now I finally have gotten it. And so for the last few days, I've just been held up in bed reading and reading and reading any time I'm not asleep. So I have spent the last few weeks living inside the mind of Paul Graham and it has been an amazing experience. So not only have I finished reading all of his essays since I was sick in bed, I had the opportunity, I've already finished reading his book, which is a collection of essays too called Hackers & Painters, which will be the next episode of Founders.
#361 estée lauder.
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COMMENTS
The Best Essay: Superlinear Returns: How to Do Great Work: How to Get New Ideas: The Need to Read: What You (Want to)* Want: Alien Truth: What I've Learned from Users: Heresy: Putting Ideas into Words: Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? Beyond Smart: Weird Languages: How to Work Hard: A Project of One's Own: Fierce Nerds: Crazy New Ideas: An ...
The Best Essay. March 2024. Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about. Obviously some topics would be better than others.
A student's guide to startups. Paul Graham. The pros and cons of starting a startup in (or soon after) college. Pros: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, ignorance. Cons: building stuff that looks like class projects.
Hey Everyone, Hope you're doing well. I wanted to share my favorite essays of Paul Graham. I believe listening and reading advice from experienced people is a way of encoding success into your brain. In a sense, our brains let us code almost anything. Counterintuitively, reading does not seem like a part of this encoding because we forgot ...
r/EntrepreneurRideAlong. A community of like minded individuals that are looking to solve issues, network without spamming, talk about the growth of your business (Ride Along), challenges and high points and collab on projects together. Stay classy, no racism, humble and work hard. Catch Localcasestudy at Rohangilkes.com.
This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly. Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English composition.
Paul Graham 101. Misc. There's probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, there's a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Graham's wisdom isn't limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on ...
Apr 16, 2023. I've been a reader of Paul Graham's essays since around sophomore year of college. Back then it was tremendously infrequent (and lacking depth), but this past year, it has been ...
12 Great Articles by Gary Wolf. Great reading from the intersection between society and technology. 12 Great Essays by Paul Graham - The Electric Typewriter - Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
P.S Been spending the last few hours reading through Paul Graham 101 and loving it! My favourite insights so far are: See startups as a path to wealth over a small period of time. E.g 4x years, so need to work hard in 4 years, rather than work slowly in a 40 year job.
Hands down, Paul Graham's essay on the social dynamics of High Schoolis easily one of the best pieces of writing I've ever come across. After reading Hackers and Painters (a collection of Paul…
Paul Graham's essays about this are the very best resources I've been able to find. How to Fund a Startup This essay is a great overview of the different sources of funding a startup can use, along with the considerations each different type of investor will have when evaluating your company.
The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking. [8:30] How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something. [9:00] How To Think For Yourself by Paul Graham [9:00] How To Work Hard by Paul Graham [10:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion.
Is It Worth Being Wise? It's Charisma, Stupid. Schlep Blindness. Startup = Growth. Taste for Makers. The Age of the Essay. The Python Paradox. Two Kinds of Judgement. Undergraduation.
Top essays by Paul Graham (massivetimesaver.com) 25 points by alexjv89 on Apr 24, 2018 ... Same here. I find that essay enormously helpful for evaluating one's current living situation and planning your future. Also, it provides a great way for explaining to others why you live where you live. ... I often disagreed with Paul (especially on ...
Read Paul Graham's essays while saving your progress and view ratings. Paul Graham Essays. Search ...
Here's the deal: Last week, Paul Graham, the co-founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote an essay trumpeting the value of what he coined the "founder mode," management style that ...
A revival had started, which promised reformation and renewal. A Moscow crowd gathers to see Billy Graham preach in 1992. "Inspired and captivated by what he had seen and heard that day, Michael returned to his village in Ukraine under the influence of Billy Graham's message. Feeling the promptings of God's call and seeing a colossal need ...
The answer is, the first component of importance: the number of people who care about what you write. If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and you're writing.
As I wrote last week, the believing-is-seeing nature of public opinion may mean that perceptions of the economy, and perhaps crime, won't matter very much for this year's election: Americans ...
Imagine you're listening to a football game on the radio and the play-by-play guy says: "Patrick Mahomes takes the snap, throws … and that's 71 yards gained over the last 12 plays!"
How to Get What We Want From Putin. We'll never agree with the Russian leader on principles, but we might be able to negotiate a better security structure for Europe. Thomas Graham, a ...
Beyond Smart. October 2021. If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that stiff economic sanctions should be imposed now against Russia amid warnings that a military invasion of Ukraine could commence in a matter of days.