My favorite Paul Graham essays:
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
November 2019
Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural abilityand determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood…
Write Like You Talk
October 2015
Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start…
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
July 2019
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more…
Good and Bad Procrastination
December 2005
The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad? Most people who write about procrastination…
The Top Idea In Your Mind
July 2010
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
How To Do What You Love
January 2006
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated…
What I Worked On
February 2021
Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn’t write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then…
How To Think For Yourself
November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can’t do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can’t publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet…
Do Things That Don’t Scale
July 2013
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t…
Write Simply
March 2021
I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply…
How To Work Hard
June 2021
It might not seem there’s much to learn about how to work hard…
Black Swan Farming
September 2012
I’ve done several types of work over the years but I don’t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas…
Keep Your Identity Small
February 2009
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions…
Taste For Makers
February 2002
I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. “A lot of them seem smart,” he said. “What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.” Taste…