paul graham age of the essay

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Paul graham’s ‘the age of the essay’.

A number of things struck me in Paul Graham’s essay titled The Age of the Essay . Prehaps most importantly, this line: “Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you’re not supposed to, either because they’re “inappropriate,” 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”. What about this particular line, three quarters of the way through this essay struck me? It was because that is exactly what I was doing. I was disregarding his main point and focusing on a tiny error in his writing. Earlier in this long winded and frequently digressing essay, Graham, while explaining how he hasn’t explained himself well, says “…in the course of the conversation I’ll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation…” You may notice the simple typo, an added ‘a’. Or you may have breezed over it as many others will, but I have always been rather against any piece of writing that had any spelling, grammar, or punctuation issues. Again this can be linked to Graham’s later question of what makes someone qualified to write on this subject? At Graham’s simple inclusion of an extra ‘a’, I had automatically deemed him unfit to discuss literary essays. I know nothing of his qualifications, his previous work, or any other aspect of his academic life, but I have already painted the picture in my mind that he is somebody that doesn’t quite know what he is talking about. I regularly do this while reading, if an article misses a quotation mark, I stop reading, having decided that the journalist is lacking in intelligence, or at least the ability to proof read. If a story lacks clarity in a single sentence, I will skim the rest, having come to the conclusion long ago that stories without good writers are of no importance to me. What gives me the right to act so high and mighty above all other writers? Absolutely nothing. I lack any qualifications, and my own writing is far from perfect. Yet I still dictate who I consider to be a worthy academic by their use of linguistics. At the start of this essay, I considered Graham’s ideas to have much depth, agreeing with his scepticism of school children being forced to write about literary classics as opposed to something they actually consider relevant, or something they are passionate about. Slowly over the course of the reading though I began to have less and less belief in Graham’s opinions. Perhaps it was his constant digression from the topic, what he would most likely call ‘surprises’ in his essay. Graham would most likely disagree with my points in this review of his work, but in a way I think he would also be proud of my focus on his finer points, rather than the overall intent of the essay, and my ‘disobedience’ as having no right to make judgement on his work, but still doing so.

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YC’s Paul Graham: The Complete Interview

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham isn’t your typical startup guru. For eight years he’s been at the helm of what's now the industry’s most prominent accelerator and a lightning rod for frustrations with entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston ( link ) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.

Below are lightly edited excerpts.

What was it like to interview companies for YC when you started eight years ago compared to today?

It was a lot like it is now, except longer. The interviews were shockingly long. Possibly 45 minutes, which in retrospect seems crazy. We'd be interviewing them for 20 minutes and then twiddling our thumbs for the remaining 35 now.

Y Combinator has three interview tracks. We are all pretty in sync with one another. We look at all the numbers. We look at how many groups each track accepts. We look at how the groups that each track accepts end up doing.

How do you do?

We're too accommodating but that's not the error that I worry about. I worry far less about accepting a group that does badly than I do about rejecting one that does well. One that does well, sufficiently well, would pay for hundreds of other start ups that return nothing.

It's terrible to reject a group that does well. Whereas, it's merely somewhat annoying to accept a group that does badly. I know that we are measured by the much less frightening error, accepting groups that do badly.

I think also that we don't throw out any babies with the bath water. I'm worried some of the other interview tracks that are stricter, I worry that they might miss something. We don't know about that for years. When we miss somebody, we do find out eventually.

Has there been a famous case when you didn't accept a company that became big?

All the time. We keep a list. We've definitely had people in our interview tracks that we rejected that we were bummed about. I can't say which groups apply to YC. There definitely have been some from our interview track that we missed.

We don't keep enough notes about why we reject people. We take videotapes of our interviews and our deliberations afterwards. I'd have to go back and look at the videotape and see what we were saying. I worry we might have lost some of the videotapes.

It's convenient for us that we have all these imitators. They act as a drop cloth: if we drop something off the table it doesn't just disappear into a void. It makes a splat because it gets funded by one of these other incubators. Then we find out about it. We do know because of that. Not all of the people we've missed got funded by YC clones, but most of them.

How did YC get started? When did you know it was working?

Initially, it was really just, "Oh, I should really do some angel investing. Let's get into angel investing."

Then, of course, once I started thinking about it I started to think "Oh, how could you reinvent angel investing?" I have all these ideas. I realized it could be promising within the first couple weeks. We got really excited about it.

What’s YC’s biggest innovation?

The biggest innovation is funding startups synchronously instead of asynchronously, funding them all at once in a batch, instead of one at a time as they come to you.

No one had ever done this before. It's better for both sides. It's much more scalable for us. They're all doing the same things at the same time. I can get up in front of them and say something once to 50 groups instead of having the same conversation one at a time with 50 groups and forgetting it half the time, right?

But it's also better for them. It has the same advantages as mass production. Mass production, you produce things cheaper but they're also of higher quality, instead of some individual person stitching things together. They have colleagues, other people to encourage them, bounce ideas off of, compete with, exchange information about investors. It's good for them and yet, also, good for us.

What’s the biggest reason startups fail?

It's a domain where there's constant, constant ups and downs. I never know. All of my conclusions are tentative. I never say, "These guys are going to be great." All I ever say is, "These guys are doing great so far," because some percentage of the time, it turns out there's some explosion around the corner. Not just founder disputes, there's all kinds of explosions. Startups are very, very uncertain.

Probably the biggest cause of failure is not making something people want. The biggest reason people do that is that they don't pay enough attention to users. For example, they have some theory in their heads about what they need to build. They don't go out there and talk to users and say "What do you want?" They just build this thing and then it turns out users don't want it. It happens time and time again.

Another reason might be that they're just not energetic enough. Part of what you have to be energetic enough about is going out and making users real, real happy. They just do a half ass job of it. Maybe they're pointing along the right vector but they only go half as far as they need to. Users look at it and they say, "Ah, it's pretty good." A million pretty goods, and you're dead.

What’s an example of a startup where you loved the founders more than the idea?

Airbnb is a classic case of funding startups for the people rather than the idea because we actually didn't like the idea. We loved the founders.

Now, it's just one of these brands. Like Apple. People don't even think of it as Airbed and Breakfast Anymore. People don't realize the first "B" goes with the "Air." It's "Airb and b." Right?

People call it "Airbnb" as if it were an airline. Definitely, when we interviewed Airbnb, Jessica said, "We have to fund these guys."

They were very energetic and imaginative, especially the story that they told us about how they had been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal.

That's like one of those famous stories. They were out of money, and the company was dead, and they were going to have to give up. They were like deep in credit card debt, and the way they managed to survive was they sold $30,000 worth of Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal, and they were two of the three founders, the designers. They had designed these fabulous, cool boxes. It that was Obama Os, and Captain McCains. You look on the web, you'll see boxes of these things.

It showed great energy, but also great imagination to do something like that. You're about to go out of business. What do you do? Most people despair and give up.

That combination of keeping going, but also keeping going in such an imaginative way, is exactly the kind of quality that makes successful startup founders. We thought, "These guys are so good. Maybe they'll do some other idea, or maybe this idea will turn out not to be as bad as we think, but whatever. We have to fund these guys. How could you not have the Airbnbs in your batch?"

How much money do YC startups need right at the beginning?

You want enough money for people to keep going for, maybe, a year if there's two founders. If the company does well, they're going to raise far more on top of that, so who cares? It's a great deal for the investors.

The case where you care about there being too much money is in the case where the startup does badly. The more money you have, the more time consuming for us. Problems, like break ups. Think about the difference between a divorce where neither party has any assets, and a divorce where one of them has millions of dollars.

There's a lot more incentive to make the divorce take a lot more time when one side has lots of money, or both. That's what was happening. We noticed, empirically, that there were all these messy divorces and often money was at the root of it.

We thought maybe, if we decreased the amount of money, we would decrease the force that was pushing these bad things to happen, while still getting people enough money that they weren't doomed if they couldn't raise money on Demo Day. I think it's good. I think it's cool now. You can never be sure, but I think we got it right now. (YC and investors it teams up with invest about $94,000 to $100,000 in each startup.)

Does YC discriminate against female founders?

I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.

The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.

If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.

It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.

How can you tell whether you are discriminating against women?

You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon, for example, which is this big Python conference.

That's a self-selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They're not discriminating for or against anyone. If you want to see what a cross section of programmers looks like, just go look at that or any other conference, doesn't have to be PyCon specifically.

Or you could look at commits in open source projects. Once again self-selected, these people don't even meet in person. It's all by email, no one can be intimidated by or feel like an outcast for something like that.

Ok, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want. What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it?

No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23...Like Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he's like 10 or whatever. By the time he's starting Facebook he's a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes. That's what causes him to start Facebook. We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years.

It is changing a bit because it's no longer so critical to be a hacker. The nature of startups is changing. It used to be that all startups were mostly technology companies. Now you have things like the Gilt Groupe where they're really retailers, and that's what they have to be good at because the technology is more commoditized.

That's probably why we have more female founders than we used to in the past, because the nature of the startups that they're working on is different. You don't have to be a hardcore hacker to start a startup like you might have had to be 20 years ago. It's partly software eating world, and partly that there's just more infrastructure.

Now that there's Heroku you don't need to do all that yourself, you just write some Ruby app and put it on Heroku and bang, it scales. Or AWS. You don't have to have a system administrator quite as much anymore. You have Amazon racking your servers for you. It's a combination of startups moving into different domains, that whole software eating the world thing, and infrastructure being more available so you don't have to be such a hardcore nerd even to start a startup, like you used to have to be.

When we started a startup back in the '90s we had the servers in our office with us. You couldn't even co-locate servers in those days let alone have AWS.

What makes you an essential part of Y Combinator?

I specialize in when people need to tweak or replace their ideas, or when they need to figure out what giant thing their current idea is stage one of. Because very often people will do something initially, just knowing instinctively that it's a promising thing to work on and not know what its full implications might be.

But it's a good idea to think about what the full implications might be, because it influences which direction you go in. You going that way or more that way?

Because in the beginning that way and that way are almost the same, but after a while they diverge.

Why do Y Combinator startups all seem to search for a way to explain how their business could address a billion dollar problem?

What investors are looking for when they invest in a startup is the possibility that it could become a giant. It may be a small possibility, but it has to be non-zero. They're not interested in funding companies that will top out at a certain point. If you were the early Bill Gates explaining your startup to investors, if you just said "We're going to keep making programming languages for microcomputers," that would not have seemed promising.

You would have wanted to say something like, "We're starting out with programming languages because that's all microcomputers can run, but microcomputers are going to become more powerful and more prevalent. As they get more powerful we're just going to work our way up the stack until we write all the software that runs on all the microcomputers."

Do you lose credibility if you encourage companies to frame themselves in terms of how they can address a billion dollar market?

We don't fund everybody who applies. We only fund the people who we think are sufficiently good. I never tell these people lies. I actually believe every takeover-the-world plan that we cook up with these startups. If they executed sufficiently energetically, almost all of them could actually make them happen. One of the secrets to convincing people is surprisingly simple, you just tell them the truth.

Sometimes people make up Demo Day presentations without consulting me, where they make up some harebrained story about how they're going to be a billion dollar market. "We're making software, software is a multi-trillion dollar market. All we have to get is one percent of it and then it's like billions here."

Why do people attack YC?

It's weird. Just last night, actually, in bed, Jessica was saying, "Why does everybody hate us so much? Why is everyone trying to attack us?" I explained that reputation is potential energy.

For example, some random clothing brand you've never heard of has their stuff made in sweatshops, right? Someone writes a news story about that, everybody would say "Yeah, so? Isn't that how all the clothing is made, in sweatshops?”

Nike has their clothing made in sweatshops, and suddenly it's like "Nike uses sweatshops!" It's big exciting news. Newspapers report about it because it gets pageviews, and labor advocates are all over it, even though they're not over the smaller companies using sweatshops, right?

It's because their reputation is potential energy.

She was talking about investors who were trying to stab us in the back, and stuff like that. There's so many.

If you're a startup and you ask an investor, "Should I apply to Y Combinator?" The investor will say no, right? They resent us! The investors resent us. A lot of investors resent us.

Well, it depends. You could say, if you think we're actually good, then envy. If you think we're not actually good, then it's because they think we don't deserve all the deal flow we get. That's what investors all want. They want deal flow.

We are rich in deal flow, and they are poor in deal flow. It's like the haves and the have nots. They're angrily looking at us, and when they see another startup about to become part of our deal flow, they're like "No, not another one!"

You were recently quoted saying that a “strong foreign accent” can hurt an applicant’s chances of getting into Y Combinator. What’s the backstory to the comment?

That was such a controversy made out of nothing. It depends who applies. That interview was boiled down from a two hour long conversation, which is why it sounds like a bunch of aphorisms stitched together. They took out all the bits in between.

That was from this long conversation where I talked about how we had sat down and tried to consciously identify the predictors of failure. We had this huge list of about 30 or 40 things that we looked at in interviews, tells. They included things like how people sit, what their body language is between them, who they look at when they're talking. All this stuff.

The interviewer asked me, "Can you tell me some of them?" I said, "Not on the record, because most of these things if I told you, people could fake them. Then they wouldn't work anymore."

The reason that I was willing to tell her about the accent thing is if you faked having a good accent, you would have a good accent. That's what an accent is!

I was OK with people faking that one. But people acted as if I had said we automatically reject people if they have a strong accent. It's one of like 40 things. We would reject people if they had eight out of 40, maybe, but not just a strong accent.

There were people in the current batch that you could barely understand, but we funded because they were good in other respects. It depends who applies.

How tough do you really have to be to found a startup?

Ultimately in a startup you have to pull yourself together. You cannot be a wimp and succeed.

People do get tougher. People get a lot tougher in the course of working on a startup. But if you're a wimp now, then either you're going to have to stop being a wimp, and no one can stop it except you. Or you're going to fail and go off and get a job somewhere. Those are the only two alternatives. You can't keep being a wimp for a long time because eventually your wimpiness is going to produce failure in company, and you're going to have to go do something else.

That's one of the things that surprises people most, actually. That you have to be much tougher than you would have to be in a job and that they turn out to be capable of it. People are capable of wildly differing things. Like some people are capable of growing much more than others, and people don't really know how much they're capable of growing. In fact, even we aren't that good at estimating it, even though that's what our main job is.

Nobody can predict this stuff very well. We can probably predict it better than anybody else because we have so much data about it and because this is all we've thought about for the last eight years.

This story has been updated to add more comments by Mr. Graham about female founders. Mr. Graham has said that the material edited changed the meaning of the quote. We don't believe that it did, but have provided the additional information here in the interest of transparency.

Retire In Progress

The Almanack of Paul Graham

Table of Contents

Early Drive

Philosophy and ai, art school and employment, rags to riches, financial abundance, the age of the essay, y combinator and hacker news, the last cool thing you do, what to do next, paul graham’s theoretical minimum.

Hi Ripsters,

I’m a huge fan of Paul Graham .

Paul is the co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the greatest essayist of modern era.

I’ve read I guess 70% of his essays, several of them multiple times (I reached double digits re-readings count on The age of the Essay ) and I’ve already shared some of his essays in my Learning Journals with you in the past months.

A good chunk of my life philosophy has been influenced by Paul’s writing. I wish I had his writings available when I was younger. Luckily you, 20-years-younger-than-me reader, have access today to his entire body of work.

Few months ago this crazy idea popped up in my mind: I wanted to write The Almanack of Paul Graham .

Of course I got also inspired by The Almanack of Naval Ravikant , by Eric Jorgensen, mentioned in my WLJ #5 . Naval and Paul are both in my personal Olympus. Paul is much more concrete and action oriented, while Naval is my “principles” guide and “virtual mentor”.

As a Naval huge fan, I looked at the success of the Navalmanack with a bit of envy. I should have written that book myself! I was already devouring everything about Naval, and taking personal notes about his Philosophy from sources like: How to Get Rich without being Lucky , Naval on Farnam Street Podcast , Naval on Tim Ferriss Show , Naval on Joe Rogan Experience , Naval’s Tweetstorm on Meditation , and more. Eric did a great job, bringing Naval’s philosophy tot he masses, but as a “scholar” I felt like being spoiled the finale of a season I was still binge watching 🙂

Btw, thanks to this post you’re reading right now, I found that the Navalmanack is available for FREE as a PDF, Mobi, ePub, and also browsable on the web . This is awesome, seriously, thanks Eric! I’m going to buy the paperback version from Amazon exactly because you made everything available for free (and because I love paper books).

That’s the “business model” I want to incentivize 🙂

Please, make yourself a favor and read this book. It’s free, you don’t have excuses 😉

Few weeks after Navalmanack publication, I felt a urge to write something similar about Paul Graham. My inner voice was telling me to drop everything else and go all-in on this project.

I didn’t react though. I silenced that voice. I just threw this idea on top of the infinite list of the things I would love to work on someday . Time is scarce, ideas are abundant.

Anyway, today I can check off this idea from my infinite TODO list.

“ Cool! RIP, you finally wrote the book? ”

No. Paul wrote the Paulmanack himself .

And it’s not a book, it’s just an essay (though 13.6k words long).

In the coming soon section of my latest Monthly Learning Journal I mentioned that I was going to read one of Paul’s newly published Essay: “ What I Worked on “. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago, on Pi Day 2021. It took me several sessions, and I guess a total of at least 10 hours of reading, taking notes, thinking and connecting the dots (plus another 10 hours to write, edit, and publish this post).

I was going to add it to the next MLJ, but given the quality and quantity of information shared I decided to write a full dedicated post, where I’m going to quote a lot of passages and adding my own thoughts.

I recommend you to read the original essay first (set at least 30 minutes away for it), then eventually come back here and read my “reaction” post if you’re still curious. I won’t mind if you skipped my post – but please make yourself another favor and read Paul’s essay. Actually, read as many Paul essays as you can, at least those I’ve listed in the “ theoretical minimum ” 🙂

According to what stage in life you currently are, this is probably going to be either the most or the least useful post you will find on my blog .

…or get out of here asap!

What Paul Worked On

Paul was born in November 1964. He’s currently 56 years old (in early 2021).

Paul’s story begins with his passions as a late teenager, before picking a field to study in college.

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, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

I can already see several gems in the first paragraph alone. First, Paul didn’t mention “passion”, or “I was passionate about” but “I worked on writing and programming”. I actually “CTRL+F”ed the word “passion” in the entire essay and I got zero results. Good .

I guess he was deeply passionate about both writing and programming, and he’s still writing and programming almost 40 years later. This is of course a “calling” level of passion, but he’s wise enough to recognize that you can’t call it passion at that early stage. Serendipitous encounters with the fields, rewarding iterations, trending topics, a community to share your thoughts and findings, a ton of deliberate practice, hours spent in flow state, good general cognitive abilities and a bit of obsession (or “talent” if you like). Those are the ingredients that build passion . You work, practice, iterate and then you become passionate. Stop waiting for your “passion” to show up before acting on something!

He’s also aware that beginner writers should write “short stories” and not essays. Why? My guess is that a beginner writer has random unstructured ideas, that could fill a few pages. Usually fictional stories that they think they’re original but whose influences from surrounding culture compose 99% of it. And with no philosophical idea to explore. But it’s ok. Writing crappy stories should ignite the positive feedback loop that gets your ball rolling faster: improving your vocabulary, finding your writing voice, playing with your ideas, building complex structures on top of them… Who cares about the quality of your teenager writings?

Now that I think about it, I also wrote short fantasy stories (and a shitload of Dungeons And Dragons adventures and settings for my players group), but I didn’t keep this ball rolling because I let society convince me that I was good at math & science, and my literature scores were just average .

It was Paul, in The Age of the Essay , who opened my eyes:

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 .

Substitute English with Italian and Dickens with Alessandro Manzoni, and you get the Italian version.

I was so uninterested in literature back then that I never stressed my writing skills hard enough at young age. Of course I don’t think that literature is uninteresting, I just think that it probably is not what a teenager wants to write about.

If I were allowed to write about (and get professional feedback on): “ the defensive problems of Roma Soccer Team in the 90s “, “ A psychological analysis of the conflict between Shu and Souther in Hokuto no Ken “, or “ The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble ” I might have become a real writer.

“ RIP… ”

Yeah, what?

“ Paul’s essay is 13.6k words long. If you vomit 10x more words on every paragraph, explore tangent topics, and talk about yourself I’m gonna cut my veins right now. ”

Ok ok, do not worry my lazy friend… thanks for reminding me to stay on topic. But this is my Paulmanack, so shut up and listen! It’s going to be less than 8k words long, promised 😀

The equivalent of “writing short stories” in the programming field is of course writing video games , which Paul also did.

Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one , a TRS-80, in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough. This was when I really started programming. I wrote simple games , a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book. There was only room in memory for about 2 pages of text, so he’d write 2 pages at a time and then print them out, but it was a lot better than a typewriter

This is me! His father bought him a computer, and he wrote video games on it ( been there , done that).

My early coding explorations helped building skills that snowballed, because I needed no permission and minimal feedback to keep it rolling. And the artifacts, the WIP crappy games I was coding, were themselves positive pushes in the feedback loop.

So I “quit” writing and humanistic disciplines in general to focus on coding.

Luckily for us, Paul kept working on both. He wanted to become an artist, a painter, and he took a PhD in Computer Science by mistake, dreaming about quitting the field at every turn.

His personal story is so inspiring, keep reading!

Paul picked Philosophy in College:

Though I liked programming, I didn’t plan to study it in college. In college I was going to study philosophy , which sounded much more powerful. It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge. What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn’t much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored.

And he quit philosophy for very practical reasons. Paul wrote a great essay about “ How to do Philosophy ” in 2007 (ranked 9/10 in my WLJ #2 ).

So I decided to switch to AI.

Oh come on Paul, stop following me !

Writing, Video Games, AI. And a desire to study the ultimate truths . Same here, that’s me talking.

I need to find patterns, I want to recognize them in myself and in others. I want to anticipate, predict. I want knowledge and wisdom.

I guess the patterns here are:

Creativity : writing and coding are two expressions of creativity. Coding at least was creative in the good old days, especially if you worked on your own project for its own sake, without the corruption of money.
Curiosity : writing is a doors opener in the realm of knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate curiosity expression.
Control : writing sharpen your thinking. Philosophy attempts to put pieces together. AI extends your control outside of yourself. Writing video games makes you “a God” in the world you created “by definition”.
Self Actualization ? Transcendence ? Immortality ? What’s our North Star?

Down to Earth.

While I like to let my mind wander in the abstract world of Platonic ideas, Paul is a very concrete man:

I don’t remember the moment it happened, or if there even was a specific moment, but during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax […] That whole way of doing AI, with explicit data structures representing concepts, was not going to work. Its brokenness did, as so often happens, generate a lot of opportunities to write papers about various band-aids that could be applied to it .

I love his accurate description of the paper publishing industry also known as Academic Research 🙂

This was the AI back in Lisp/Prolog era. I had the same feeling back in the early 2000s, and I still feel like we’re overestimating AI/ML these days . I’ll be proven wrong, I’m sure, but yeah… Intelligence Artificial isn’t (said RIP, the Principal Research Engineer for an Academic Institute working on ML).

So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was Lisp . I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI.

Jumping from a sinking ship to another. This is a common pattern among smart people. Do not get attached to your first ideas. Paul would say “ Keep your Identity Small “. Go deep, learn, view everything from the above, and keep moving.

Alan Watts would also add: “ You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago ”

On the technical side of things I can’t relate much to Paul: I’m not a fan of Lisp, simply because I never played with the language. I fell in love for C (and then C++) at first sight, which were de facto standard in the videogame industry when I started coding 30+ years ago.

While Paul loves writing software, he recognized that it has some structural problems:

Any program you wrote today , no matter how good, would be obsolete in a couple decades at best . People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work. Only people with a sense of the history of the field would even realize that, in its time, it had been good.

I realized it late. At the peak of my passion for coding I had the ambition of writing “library” code that could last forever. I was more of a library guy than a product guy. For example in my professional Videogame Development career I worked in the Game Engine development, not in final video games implementations.

Maybe if I realized (and accepted) that my artifacts were not going to last forever I’d have either had a better career (due to lower expectations) or I’d have quit way earlier to work on something “more immortal”.

All the code I’ve written at Google has been deprecated, discontinued, thrashed within a few years.

Sisyphus , hold my beer.

Paul, like me, had a strong desire to build something that would last:

While looking at a painting there (Carnegie Mellon University – RIP Note) I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wall, was something you could make that would last. Paintings didn’t become obsolete . Some of the best ones were hundreds of years old.

Yes Paul, but does it pay the bills?

And moreover this was something you could make a living doing. Not as easily as you could by writing software, of course, but I thought if you were really industrious and lived really cheaply , it had to be possible to make enough to survive. And as an artist you could be truly independent . You wouldn’t have a boss , or even need to get research funding.

Woo-hoo! Frugality as a solution to do what you love, a healthy dose of repulsion of a normal 9to5 life, and independence as a goal.

Paul, you get the FIRE membership ad honorem !

Well, given that his Net Worth should be in the 9 or 10 digits according to some estimates he “might” get a real Gold or Platinum membership…

Anyway, Paul’s approach to “ How to do hat you Love ” has been expanded in its own essay. I’ve talked about it in my WLJ #4 .

Paul started to take Art classes at Harvard, and dreaming about quitting Grad school and his PhD Program.

I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the internet worm of 1988, I was envious that he’d found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school.

After graduating in AI in spring 1990 (age 25), Paul decided to apply for Art Schools.

Fun fact: Paul studied art in Italy, at the Accademia Belle Arti in Florence. They mistakenly sent a response to his application letter back to Cambridge UK instead of Cambridge Massachusetts (US).

Aaaah, what a good taste of Italian Quality! You’re welcome Paul. Luckily for him, he managed to pass the preliminary exam even though he received the invitation letter waaay too late!

Italian bureaucracy did damage his artistic career though. We might have to thank Italy if the world was able to enjoy one of the greatest essayists and angel investors of all times:

Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn’t require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn’t require the students to learn anything .

Welcome to Italy, Paul 🙂

The entire section about his life in Italy is funny to read, but a shame for Italy itself. Shame on us.

I never considered painting, or other visual arts that require manual skills. I’ve always told myself I’m not good at it. Here Paul explains how painting is a way to practice awareness and how it’s a form of meditation:

I liked painting still lives because I was curious about what I was seeing. In everyday life, we aren’t consciously aware of much we’re seeing . Most visual perception is handled by low-level processes that merely tell your brain “that’s a water droplet” without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest points are, or “that’s a bush” without telling you the shape and position of every leaf. This is a feature of brains, not a bug . In everyday life it would be distracting to notice every leaf on every bush. But when you have to paint something, you have to look more closely, and when you do there’s a lot to see. You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.

Awesome. Maybe I should add it to my infinite list of things to do 🙂

Sadly, Paul gave up after just a single year:

The Accademia wasn’t teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out, so at the end of the first year I went back to the US.

And got a job at Interleaf . But he was a terrible employee:

They wanted a Lisp hacker to write things in it. This was the closest thing I’ve had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee . Their Lisp was the thinnest icing on a giant C cake, and since I didn’t know C and didn’t want to learn it, I never understood most of the software. Plus I was terribly irresponsible. This was back when a programming job meant showing up every day during certain working hours. That seemed unnatural to me .

I wish I had a fraction of your intellectual honesty Paul. You didn’t let Impostor Syndrome drive your career.

This working experience made him quit and go back to art school, a real art school in the US (fall 1992, age 28)

I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the Accademia had been a (very civilized) joke. Now I was going to see what real art school was like. But alas it was more like the Accademia than not. Better organized, certainly, and a lot more expensive, but it was now becoming clear that art school did not bear the same relationship to art that medical school bore to medicine . At least not the painting department.

Ouch, institutionalized art sucks… like any dream of ours, once dressed the productivity vest, becomes something different, usually worse.

It is really inspirational to see how Paul was able to dance in two completely different worlds while still being able to maintain a “view from the above”, a wise clarity of mind, not letting their respectives echo chambers interfere with his judgement. Now I see where How to Think for Yourself comes from.

In 1993, at age 29, Paul dropped out of art school again. And he was broke. Still a dreamer:

I decided to write another book on Lisp. This would be a popular book, the sort of book that could be used as a textbook. I imagined myself living frugally off the royalties and spending all my time painting .

RoyaltyFIRE, anyone?

He tried painting for a while, in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC, learning directly from Idelle Weber , one of his professors at Harvard and a real artist.

But one day…

One day in late 1994 […] there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn’t that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: why don’t I become rich? Then I’ll be able to work on whatever I want .

FatFIRE, anyone?

It’s fascinating for me to acknowledge how much “ How to Do what you Love ” comes from his own experience. It’s not a speculative essay, it’s been the struggle of his entire life. Thank you Paul, we need more people like you!

Let’s not forget where the story is set:

Meanwhile I’d been hearing more and more about this new thing called the World Wide Web .

LOL. This made me smile 🙂

Paul shares the story of his first failed startup, softly claiming he “invented” web apps:

If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part. What I got wrong was the idea. I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online .

And from the ashes of his first startup, in 1995 he launched Viaweb with Robert Morris and (later) Trevor Blackwell , a precursor of modern eCommerce software.

They got funded $10k for 10% (what a bad deal!), agreement that in a more generous form turned out to become the standard at Y Combinator.

A startup that failed hinting an idea for the next startup, who hinted an idea for the final success. Awesome! In all this, having studied Art helped Paul crafting good looking frontends necessary for the second startup (Viaweb) to live long enough and kind of thrive for a while as one of the first eCommerce platform.

How many have written about the compounding of different skills in different fields? Scott Adams calls it The Talent Stack , James Altucher calls it The Idea Sex … the list is too long.

They sold Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million in Yahoo stocks. I sincerely hope they sold their stocks before the Dot Com bubble exploded!

I hired lots more people, partly because our investors wanted me to, and partly because that’s what startups did during the Internet Bubble . A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish. So we didn’t reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998 . Which in turn meant we were at the mercy of investors for the entire life of the company. And since both we and our investors were noobs at startups, the result was a mess even by startup standards.

It’s DotCom bubble babe! Probably most of my readers were too young at that time, but I remember it vividly. I’ve also lost half of my investments back then (8M Italian Lira, i.e. 4k EUR).

Let’s not forget that Luck played a huge role in Paul’s success: finding himself at the right place at the right time. Riding the World Wide Web Wave in 1994, exiting in 1998.

Paul stayed for a year after the acquisition at Yahoo, essentially resting and vesting :

I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the summer of 1999 I left. It had been so long since I’d painted anything that I’d half forgotten why I was doing this . My brain had been entirely full of software and men’s shirts for 4 years. But I had done this to get rich so I could paint , I reminded myself, and now I was rich, so I should go paint.

We’re all so equal. Deepest desires of humans are very similar. We want to be allowed to be free to do whatever we want. Fun fact: you , yourself , are the final gatekeeper of the freedom you crave for. Most of the “asking for permission” game is played against your own mind.

Paul quit Yahoo in 1999:

When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint . At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying . My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month . If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. This was the height of the Internet Bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero of it .

Holy shit! 2 Millions a month!

I had to read this out loud several times.

It’s a FIRE amount, each month.

And Paul left everything on the table, with no regrets. Telling his boss “ listen boss, I don’t need 2M a month. I want to paint apples, pears, and a watermelon for the rest of my life “. This reminds me of my final conversation with my last manager at Google, discounted by two orders of magnitude in terms of money 🙂

How did Paul’s n-th attempt at painting go?

But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose. I’d already burned 4 years getting rich . Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. That’s what I should have done , just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me. So I tried to paint, but I just didn’t seem to have any energy or ambition .

Let me try to humbly diagnose this: a mix of The Optionality Trap and exhaustion. Paul maximized options in his life by “trying to get rich and then doing what he loved”.

Neil Soni wrote in The Optionality Trap:

And over the course of a lifetime, this optionality maximization mentality turns us into habitual option collectors and prevents us from reaching our goals.

I’m sorry to inform you all that there’s no solution. Either you play the lottery ticket and you’re lucky, or you play it safe and might never go all-in on your dreams. We’re reaching the boundaries of what could be done in just a short lifetime.

Anyway, do we want to tag Paul’s failure to become a great artist as a real failure? Of course not, he’s done better than 99.999+% of the world population!

Let’s keep going.

In the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the future. Why not build a web app for making web apps?

Actions become passions, not vice versa.

While he romanticized about seeing himself as a painter, his brain has been too much in contact with startups, Internet and the WWW, and money.

He’s now an “idea guy”, back when ideas were not so abundant as they are today.

Our surroundings shape us more than we like to think . It’s an effect similar to hedonistic adaptation. We become what we do, who we hang out with, where we live.

“ I’ll just spend ten years in Switzerland to accumulate money, then I’ll move back to Italy ”

“ I’ll just keep working for another ten years then I can do whatever I want ”

Yeah, sure.

I got so excited about this idea that I couldn’t think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future.

He was close to launch another startup, a precursor of SaaS platforms, but…

But about halfway through the summer I realized I really didn’t want to run a company — especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would have to be. I’d only started Viaweb because I needed the money . Now that I didn’t need money anymore, why was I doing this? If this vision had to be realized as a company, then screw the vision . I’d build a subset that could be done as an open source project.

He then built Arc , a Lisp dialect.

After a speech at a Lisp conference he put the slides and talk notes on his website , and got a 30k pageviews spike.

He was not writing essays yet.

If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it . That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then. In the print era there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to get it published as a book, or in a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone could publish anything.

In 2001 he started writing the best essays you can find on the internet, including the incredible The Age of the Essay . While not exactly being a blog , we can say that he was one of the pioneers of internet writing.

In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties. There were so many essays that had never been written, because there had been no way to publish them . Now they could be, and I was going to write them

This essay is a museum of creativity over the internet! I’m having so much fun reading and commenting it. I can’t thank you enough Paul 🙂

I’ve worked on several different things, but to the extent there was a turning point where I figured out what to work on, it was when I started publishing essays online. From then on I knew that whatever else I did, I’d always write essays too .

Writing brings many superpowers. The most powerful one is probably “sharpening your Thinking”.

By writing about things you don’t know (yet) with a curiosity attitude, you explore and prototype working on what might interest you.

Writing is the ultimate Deliberate Practice tool.

One of the most conspicuous patterns I’ve noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren’t prestigious .

Paul also wrote about how to not chase prestige in the How to do what you Love essay, that I already mentioned several times.

It’s not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it’s a sign both that there’s something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives . Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious.

A single sentence by Paul summarized a 5k words RIP Transparency Manifesto .

Ok, time to talk about the birth of Y Combinator .

Of course it happened “by chance”, but at this point he built his luck enough that opportunities were chasing him , and not the other way around. To improve his writing quality he gave talks, and one of this talks were about “ how to start a startup “.

This talk/essay kind of evolved into Y Combinator.

This reminds me of the rarest kind of luck, the one that according to Naval Ravikant finds you .

Yes, Paul got lucky a couple of times early on his career.

A bit of “blind luck” at the beginning (especially in the form of being at the right place at the right time), a lot of “persistence luck” during his startup years, but at this point he started attracting luck.

Luck of others became luck of him as well.

In March 2005 , Paul and his three partners (Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris) founded Y Combinator , the most famous (the first?) startup accelerator and one of the top Angel/Venture Capital firms in the world.

They gave birth to Reddit , Stripe , Airbnb , DoorDash , Coinbase , Instacart , Dropbox , GitLab , Substack , and Twitch to mention some.

There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn’t figure them all out at once. The part we got first was to be an angel firm . In those days, those two words didn’t go together. There were VC firms, which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big, million dollar investments. And there were angels, who did smaller investments, but these were individuals who were usually focused on other things and made investments on the side. And neither of them helped founders enough in the beginning . We knew how helpless founders were in some respects, because we remembered how helpless we’d been.

This seems obvious, “the norm” today. But just 15 years ago there were no “startup incubator”. They kind of coined the term.

We’d use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We’d all have dinner there once a week — on Tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the Thursday diners on Thursdays — and after dinner we’d bring in experts on startups to give talks.

Yeah, In forgot to mention that he used to host interesting people and their friends in a second-degree dinner habit at one point of his life.

Now I need a time machine more than ever 🙂

Fairly quickly I realized that we had stumbled upon the way to scale startup funding . Funding startups in batches was more convenient for us, because it meant we could do things for a lot of startups at once, but being part of a batch was better for the startups too. It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders: the isolation . Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them.

I have this bittersweet feeling when I read about startups, especially startups in the “good old days” after the DotCom bubble. I’ve never worked at one , even though I think I’m a startup person.

If I’ll leave my tech career for good, not having tried to found a startup would be my biggest regret.

Never say never though 🙂

I had not originally intended YC to be a full-time job. I was going to do three things: hack , write essays , and work on YC . […] In the summer of 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of Arc. This one was reasonably fast, because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new Arc, I wrote Hacker News in it . It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus it wasn’t startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one’s intellectual curiosity.

Hacker News (HN) is still, today, the main source of information for Tech topics in general. It’s like a giant tech/startup subreddit .

When my own career was taking off, HN, StackOverflow , and r/programming were my places.

Paul worked incredibly hard on YC for several years, and in 2010 Robert Morris, friend, co-founder of YC, and renown hacker (in both the good and the bad meaning of the term) suggested him:

Make sure Y Combinator isn’t the last cool thing you do.

This speaks to my heart as well. Commit all of yourself to what you love right now, but please, do respect your future lifetimes .

It was true that on my current trajectory, YC would be the last thing I did, because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten Arc, and was in the process of eating essays too . Either YC was my life’s work or I’d have to leave eventually . And it wasn’t, so I would.

In October 2013 (Paul close to turn 49), with the benevolence of the other founders, Paul offered the presidency of YC to Sam Altman .

Paul still works few hours a week with founders but he’s not deeply involved with YC anymore.

I must admit that I didn’t know Paul was not leading YC anymore. I discovered it thanks to this essay.

What should I do next? Rtm’s advice hadn’t included anything about that. (RIP Note: RTM is Robert Tappan Morris, his co-founder at ViaWeb and YC) I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I’d paint . I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it. So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty and it took a while to get back into shape, but it was at least completely engaging.

Still chasing his teenager dreams. It is romantic, it really is. But it’s the dream of a different, younger Paul. Not his anymore.

He had fun for a while though:

I spent most of the rest of 2014 painting. I’d never been able to work so uninterruptedly before, and I got to be better than I had been . Not good enough, but better. Then in November, right in the middle of a painting, I ran out of steam. […] I stopped working on it and cleaned my brushes and haven’t painted since .

Lao Tzu is credited with the quote “ When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be “.

I think it fits Paul perfectly.

Attention is a zero sum game . If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that’s not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it’s getting in the way of another project that is . And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.

Oh shit, this hit me like a punch in the face.

There’s no time to waste. Once you “solved” your money problems you must work only on what matters most.

Derek Sivers would say it’s either Hell Yeah or No .

I started writing essays again, and wrote bunch of new ones over the next few months. I even wrote a couple that weren’t about startups.

… and we’re so grateful 🙂

Then in March 2015 I started working on Lisp again.

Writing essays, and writing software for his own pleasure, in the least corporate way possible. He’s definitely living the professional life of my dreams.

Many 20-years-younger-than-me readers reached me out to tell me I’m an inspiration for them. It’s an honor, but I don’t feel like I’m worth being put on a (small) pedestal.

I’m only geometrically halfway between you, average Italian young adult, and people like Naval and Paul, whose accomplishments (and Net Worth ) are few orders of magnitude mine.

Maybe if Paul would accidentally find this post he’d think I’m exaggerating with my idolatry. He’d probably think that he’s nothing special, that he’s just geometrically halfway between me and Elon Musk for example.

Hey Paul, if you’re reading this: Elon’s nowhere near to you in my Olympus!

(Wait Elon: I didn’t mean Olympus Mons … please, don’t send the Starman wandering on your Roadster to crash into the surface of Mars for the sake of winning this fake competition, please)

It took 4 years, from March 26, 2015 to October 12, 2019. It was fortunate that I had a precisely defined goal, or it would have been hard to keep at it for so long. I wrote this new Lisp, called Bel , in itself in Arc.

We’re close to the end of this long trip.

Paul reminds us about the importance of Deep Work , and the dangers of Multitasking:

I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time , or I would never have finished. In late 2015 I spent 3 months writing essays, and when I went back to working on Bel I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you’re working on an interpreter written in itself, it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening at what level, and errors can be practically encrypted by the time you get them.

Luckily for us, the essays he’s written during his ban were still extremely good .

But he’s right: you need to clarify your goals, trim the unnecessary, and focus. Maybe I’m doing too many things, none with the required quality. Thanks once again Paul, I’ll think about it.

Working on Bel was hard but satisfying . I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools. It felt like I was doing life right . I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years.

Flow State becoming permanent state of being. This is amazing!

In the fall of 2019, Bel was finally finished. […] Now that I could write essays again , I wrote a bunch about topics I’d had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on. How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question , and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be. If this surprised me, who’d lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it .

And I’m thankful you wrote this amazing essay Paul, which is jumping directly into my Top10 list, among the others listed in the final paragraph of this post .

Fun fact (that I discovered only thanks to this rabbit hole ) is that Jessica Livingston, one of YC co-founder, is also Paul’s wife and mother of their children .

I happen to have read few chapters of Founders at Work without knowing the author was Paul’s wife 🙂

That’s it!

I hope you enjoyed this trip into one of the most brilliant minds we have the pleasure to share our short ride on this rock around the Sun with.

Here’s a 2014 guest lecture at Stanford University in the How to Start a Startup course by Sam Altman (soon to become Y Combinator President). This lecture became Paul’s “ Before The Startup ” popular essay. Enjoy:

If you want to start reading Paul’s essays I recommend the following ones, split by category.

Creativity and writing :

The age of the Essay : why you should write. Why writing is amazing. This essay inspired me to start blogging back in 2016.
How to Write Usefully : an essay should be useful: correct, precise, important, novel.
Writing, Briefly : write a bad version 1 quickly, and rewrite it many times over.
Write Like you Talk : write in spoken language.
Writing and Speaking : good ideas are more valuable for a writer, and Paul wants to improve his idea quality (on the same page, take a look at Derek Sivers: “ I’m a very Slow Thinker “).

Life Design

How to do what you Love : if you’re in your late teens or early 20s this is the essay you should read and re-read few times over. How to do what you love.
What you wish you had known : to be broadcasted in every high school in the world.
What I worked on : a.k.a. Paulmanack 🙂
Having Kids : on becoming a parent.
Life is Short : yeah, literally.

Critical Thinking :

How to Think for Yourself : first principle thinking, critical thinking, and much more.
Keep your Identity small : keep your ego at bay.
How to study Philosophy : how to tackle the important questions in life in a practical way.
How to Disagree : A short but effective guide on argumentative Logical Fallacies. Add Steel Manning on top of it and you’re done.
The Two Kinds of Moderate : Paul defines himself as an “accidental moderate”. Same here.
The bus Ticket Theory of Genius : what people call “talent” is most of the time just obsession.
How You Know : and how you learn and retain things.
Is it Worth being Wise? : about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.
The Lesson to Unlearn : stop learning just to get good grades.
What you can’t say : another great essay on conformism.

Startupping :

Before the Startup : advice to wannabe startuppers.
Do Things that Don’t Scale : it seems counterintuitive, but you don’t have to dream big at the beginning. That’s exactly what I am doing at the moment.
The Top Idea in Your Mind : what you think about when you take a shower is what you should work on.
Be Good : or at least don’t stop not being evil (sad face).
You weren’t meant to have a Boss : exactly!
How to Make Wealth : warning: wealth is not what you think it is.

Yeah, some of the links point to my previous dissertation on the relative essays, but from there you can find the right link to Paul’s website.

It’s been an amazing trip, and I had a lot of fun!

I hope you enjoyed it as well 🙂

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13 comments

Wow, this is great! I need to read many of these essays. It looks like PG has hacked how to live life!

Also, just to keep the record straight: the whole “almanack” concept (i.e the Navalmanack) derives from “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” (i.e all the wisdom of Charlie Munger) which itself was a reference to “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, written by Benjamin Franklin 😉

I knew about the Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I didn’t know about the Poor Richard’s Almanack! I thought everything started with Mickey Mouse Almanack 😀

This is terrific… rabbit hole 😂 I have started reading this article two hours ago and have not finished yet. I did not know who Paul Graham was and I now I already read so many of his essays. I especially loved The Age of the Essay, Life is Short, What You’ll Wish You’d Known. And I must admit that the 10-year-old me would have devoured an essay on “The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble”, too. I have 5 more essays waiting for me on my browser tabs. Thank you for writing and sharing this. It has been an incredibly sobering trip 🙂

You’re welcome 🙂 Read “How to do what you Love” next, that’s probably one of his best!

I read it. And I have mixed feelings about it. It is one of those piece of work you know you have to let sink in, and re-think about days (months? years?) later.

My father always told me that “When you love your job, you won’t work a day in your life”. and he truly loves what he does. Despite this kind of upbringing, I have a different approach to work life. I think that anything I truly enjoy doing will be spoiled if money ever get involved. I kinda liked Mark Manson take on it (Screw Finding You Passion). What do you think?

Anyway, I know I will reflect upon this topic for a long time from now on xD Thanks again for sharing. (And I really appreciated your notes on the essay!)

You should be aware that Mr. Graham is the guy who took a vendetta against your Google ex-colleague Michael O. Church just for having a different opinion on the VC world. He managed to ban him from a couple of platforms like Quora, etc. and made his life miserable when looking for employment. While I don’t agree with Michael Church on many topics, I think Michael is a talented decent guy and you need to be a psychopath to give him such a treatment.

I used to read Mr. Graham books when I was younger, I admit he is a talented writer. Now after a certain amount of life experience I find most of his text platitudes or even untruthful given his course of actions. And yes, Michael is right about the VC world. I speak here from my own experience.

I know nothing about Graham vs Church, and I don’t expect anyone in particular to be Jesus Christ. If the two guys had a fight over the internet… well… whatever!

Well, you know now. Mind you the fight got from the internet to the real world. To make this happen it certainly doesn’t need a Jesus Christ, but a psychopath.

This is great. I’m a huge fan of Paul’s writings. I ‘m sure that in my 20s I would have reacted differently to Paul’s (and Naval’s) word. And probably lost many of the messages. I’m glad I found their writings now that I’m in my 40s. To find what you look for you should know what you need. And you appreciate what you find when you need it, and I was exactly expecting these words now, in my midlife crisis and halfway in my FIRE journey.

Thanks for your effort. What I am missing right now is : “what do I do now with this knowledge and how does a terrible procrastinator like me apply that to my life decisions now that I’m paralyzed by fear of the unknown and by choice paralysis with all the projects and ideas I have in my head? Where to point my focus?” The obstacle is in our head, and probably the right answer is already there too, I know, and we fear to say it aloud, but maybe sometimes we just need a gentle push from behind from someone, to start going in a new direction, and I feel that belonging to a community of like minded people can help a lot.

This is a very good point. I like to imagine that I’d have benefited by having these writings available 20 years ago but maybe I wouldn’t 🙂

About procrastination I know what you mean. Having this blog and other creative outlet is my best antidote to chronical procrastination.

Create. Do stuff. Don’t aim to perfection, just get started. Feedback will guide you somewhere.

I’m a big fan of Paul since i cofounded my first startup! (My exit strategy for FIRE)

Hoping an Y combinator style since when i became an angel investor and mentor in early stage/seed startups in Italy

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I assume it’s Blas Moros ( https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-14-5-4-2021/#Blas_Moros_is_writing_the_Paulmanack_Yes_but823010 )

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Pittsburgh (Man cutting grass), 2004 by Paul Graham from a shimmer of possibility

Photographer Paul Graham: fragments of life

I n the mid-1970s, a new generation of photographers emerged in Britain. They had the legacy of black-and-white social documentary photography at their backs, but before them lay the wider opportunities already enjoyed by photographers in America: sponsorship by wealthy arts foundations; exhibition of their works in museums; publication of their pictures in monographs; sales, even, of their photographs as individual works of art. Among them were Martin Parr , who graduated from Manchester Polytechnic in 1973, and Paul Graham , who left Bristol University in 1976.

In the three decades since then, Parr's work has become widely known, particularly after the mid-1980s, when he developed a signature style of highly coloured photographs that concentrated on consumerism, tourism and class. Graham, meanwhile, has been more elusive, his work less popular, and progressively less grounded in the country of his birth, though this has done nothing to halt the growth of his reputation.

Burning fields, Melmerby, North Yorkshire, September 1981 by Paul Graham from A1

Graham was one of the very first British documentary photographers to work in colour. His first major series of pictures, made in 1981-2 along the A1 motorway in England, later published as A1 – the Great North Road , caught the country on the cusp of a new mood. In the motorway cafes of the industrial north, customers, mainly men, sat alone, detached from and somehow mocked by the brightly coloured, pre-formed plastic interiors, the brand names and neon signs. It was the beginning of service-industry Britain, and as such was the perfect preparation for his next book, Beyond Caring, made inside British DHSS offices, where men and women – many of them from the suddenly unemployed industrial working classes – sat bored and hopeless and fuddled by red tape. A traditional preserve of black-and-white reportage, Graham's use of colour forced the reality of these torpid places into the present. Taken as he sat with his camera in the rows, his pictures showed the same mind-numbing vistas that faced the unemployed: stretches of dirty lino floor, outstretched legs, metal chairs, hunched bodies, stray toddlers. Official attempts to "brighten up" these spiritually grey interiors only made them worse. Published in 1986, Beyond Caring was a detailed, documentary indictment of Thatcherism, made in anger. When the photographs were shown at Tate Modern in 2003 , they had lost none of their power; they still felt as if they came, above all, out of a strong sense of personal disgust.

Union Jack flag in tree, County Tyrone, 1985 by Paul Graham

In Troubled Land, published a year later, Graham used a different approach to examine the political situation in Northern Ireland. His photographs surveyed the everyday landscape from a distance and found tiny, telling details – soldiers running through residential streets, a union flag flying high in a distant tree, faded posters stuck on the reverse of a roadside sign – that reflected how the conflict had insinuated itself into the minutiae of ordinary life.

"Without the energy to interrogate yourself, you're dead," Graham once said, and one of his strengths as an artist is his mutability. He is constantly testing what photography is capable of. All his books have an air of experimentation. He has never settled into a niche, but continues to move on. And he has been amazingly, consistently productive: 12 books in just over 25 years, and now, a new book, Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006, which puts all his work into context.

This year is a big one for Graham: he has three exhibitions running concurrently. A retrospective is on its first leg at the Folkwang Museum, Essen , and comes to the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2011. His most recent work, a shimmer of possibility , is at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and some sections of it are at the Photographers' Gallery in London, where Graham has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse prize.

Since the late 1980s, as the concerns of Graham's work shifted further away from Britain to Europe, Japan and America, where he now lives, his pictures have become more meditative, more metaphorical. He has chosen to work in an area, as many contemporary writers did, between documentary realism and fiction, where the observance of an everyday occurrence might be made to stand for something more universal. In other words: to make art from life. But, as the critic Russell Ferguson writes in this new book about Graham's work, photography has always encountered difficulty when attempting to transcend its representative abilities, and claim "the status of art".

This book of the retrospective has nothing experimental about it. It is a solid, well-conceived, thorough examination of 25 years' work: 11 series of photographs, divided chronologically into three sections, each section introduced by an essay. It is beautifully designed with the minimum of fuss; the emphasis is on the colour photographs. As a useful bonus, each of his books is reproduced in miniature, spread by spread, at the back.

What it makes clear is how Graham's work developed at an oblique angle to that of his peers, and sometimes in direct reaction to it. By the end of the 1980s, he already felt the need to escape what he describes to David Chandler, in the first of the essays, as "the juggernaut of British colour documentary". It is a comment that shows just how far things had shifted in British photography in less than a decade.

In the next 10 years he travelled: to Europe, as it began to expand into its post-communist future; to Japan, where ritual and manners, in particular the delicate gestures of young girls, seemed to mask the underlying power of a nation still in recovery from the second world war; and, to America. In his series of "television portraits" and his 1999 book End of an Age , he produced a sequence of close-up portraits, in the first, some of his most tender pictures, of friends watching television, that offered the rare, intense experience of looking at people looking. The second series of portraits was of young men and women in nightclubs in European cities. The pictures were edited to form a circle, as their faces turned gradually away from the camera and then came to face it again: half hidden by the darkness or drenched in the colours of disco lights and strobes, the photographs became more intimate, and the people in them more vulnerable.

In 2002 Graham moved to America. In 2003 he published American Night , which took as its subject the invisibility of the American poor. A third of the pictures were over-exposed and printed milky-white, making the solitary figures in the urban landscape hard to distinguish. They were punctuated by pin-sharp, colour pictures of suburban houses, and by street pictures of the poor, the disabled, and the blind. A passage from José Saramago's novel Blindness, printed white-on-white, was almost impossible to read. Of all Graham's books, this was the one I had most difficulty with: all the technical manipulation made its concept harder, rather than easier to assimilate. Perhaps it is due to familiarity, but in this new book, the passages from American Night, printed at a much smaller scale than the original, make it much easier to comprehend.

The final series of pictures in the book comes from Graham's latest work. Published in 2007 as 12 volumes of photographic "short stories" made in different parts of America – Minneapolis, North Dakota, Texas, California – a shimmer of possibility is a new, very successful shift into a narrative, almost cinematic space. Some books involve sequences of pictures; in one volume there is only one. The mini-narratives are, on the face of it insignificant: a couple makes a trip to the supermarket; an overweight white man leans against a wall and smokes a cigarette; a black man mows the grass verge of a highway; the sun rises and sets in spectacular skies. Even those who haven't read the stories of Raymond Carver, or Chekhov, whom Graham cites as an inspiration, will recognise the truth to human existence in these fragments of life. They are so rich and so light, so perfectly pitched, and for this retrospective book they make a fine resolution.

Paul Graham: Photographs 1981–2006, with essays by David Chandler, Russell Ferguson and Michael Almereyda, published by SteidlMACK , £40.

Photography

Summaries of Paul Graham's essays

See the originals here .

After The Ladder
An Alternative Theory of Unions
Cities and Ambition
How to Do What You Love
How to Get Startup Ideas
How to Make Wealth
How to Start a Startup
Inequality and Risk
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
What You Can't Say
What You'll Wish You'd Known
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Why Startup Hubs Work
Writing and Speaking

Computers & Technology
Computer Science

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Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

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The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

ISBN-10 1449389554
ISBN-13 978-1449389550
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (July 6, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
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ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449389550
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Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
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Paul graham.

Paul Graham (born 13 November 1964) is an English computer scientist, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is known for his work on Lisp, for co-founding Viaweb (which eventually became Yahoo! Store), and for co-founding the Y Combinator seed capital firm. He is the author of some programming books, such as: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53

His 2004 film followed Mr. Spurlock as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month. It was nominated for an Oscar, but it later came in for criticism.

Morgan Spurlock, a young man with brown hair, sideburns and a long mustache, poses with French fries in his left hand and a hamburger in his right. He wears a red T-shirt with a picture of a burger on it.

By Clay Risen and Remy Tumin

Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker who gained fame with his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “ Super Size Me ,” which followed him as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days — but later stepped back from the public eye after admitting to sexual misconduct — died on Thursday in New York City. He was 53.

His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.

A self-described attention hound with a keen eye for the absurd, Mr. Spurlock was a playwright and television producer when he rocketed to global attention with “Super Size Me,” an early entry into the genre of gonzo participatory filmmaking that borrowed heavily from the confrontational style of Michael Moore and the up-close-and-personal influences of reality TV, which was then just emerging as a genre.

The film’s approach was straightforward: Mr. Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, and if a server at the restaurant offered to “supersize” the meal — that is, to give him the largest portion available for each item — he would accept.

The movie then follows Mr. Spurlock and his ever-patient girlfriend through his 30-day odyssey, splicing in interviews with health experts and visits to his increasingly disturbed physician. At the end of the month, he was 25 pounds heavier, depressed, puffy-faced and experiencing liver dysfunction.

The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry — though only temporarily ; today, McDonald’s has 42,000 locations worldwide, its stock is near an all-time high, and 36 percent of Americans eat fast food on any given day.

“His movie,” the critic A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times , “goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.”

The film became a touchstone in American culture. By making himself a part of the story, Mr. Spurlock could be considered a forerunner of TikTok influencers and citizen-journalist YouTubers.

And even after the backlash against fast food subsided, “Super Size Me” remained a staple in high school health classes and a reference point for taking personal responsibility for one’s own diet.

But the film also came in for subsequent criticism. Some people pointed out that Mr. Spurlock refused to release the daily logs tracking his food intake. Health researchers were unable to replicate his results in controlled studies.

And in 2017, he admitted that he had not been sober for more than a week at a time in 30 years — meaning that, in addition to his “McDonald’s only” diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that most likely skewed his results.

The admission came in a statement in which he also revealed multiple incidents of sexual misconduct, including an encounter in college that he described as rape, as well as repeated infidelity and the sexual harassment of an assistant at his production company, Warrior Poets.

The statement, which Mr. Spurlock posted on Twitter in 2017, came as he was gearing up for the release of a sequel to the film, “ Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! ” on YouTube Red.

He stepped down from his production company, and YouTube dropped the film; it was instead released in 2019 by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Morgan Valentine Spurlock was born on Nov. 7, 1970, in Parkersburg, W.Va., and grew up in Beckley, W.Va. His father, Ben, owned and operated an auto-repair shop, and his mother, Phyllis (Valentine) Spurlock, was a junior high school and high school guidance counselor.

He later said he grew up as a fan of 1970s and ’80s British comedies like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Blackadder.”

“I was doing funny walks round the house at 6 or 7,” he told The Independent in 2012 .

He studied film at New York University and received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1993, then began his career as a production assistant on film projects around New York City, beginning with Luc Besson’s “Léon: The Professional” (1994).

He also began writing plays, including “The Phoenix,” which won an award at the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival.

Mr. Spurlock’s first foray onto the screen was a proto-reality show called “I Bet You Will,” which was also one of the first web-only programs. In five-minute segments, he would dare people to do something gross, or humiliating, or both — eating a “worm burrito,” for example — in exchange for a wad of cash.

The show drew millions of viewers, as well as the interest of MTV, which bought the program a few months after it debuted.

During a Thanksgiving visit to his parents in 2002, Mr. Spurlock saw a TV news story about two women who had sued McDonald’s, claiming that the chain had misled them about the nutritional value of its hamburgers, fries and sodas and caused them to gain significant weight.

“A spokesman for McDonald’s came on and said, you can’t link their obesity to our food — our food is healthy, it’s nutritious,” he told The New York Times in 2004 . “I thought, ‘If it’s so good for me, I should be able to eat it every day, right?’”

And thus, “Super Size Me” was born.

Mr. Spurlock took to fame eagerly, and, with his wide smile and handlebar mustache, was hard to miss. He became an unofficial spokesman for the wellness movement, hobnobbed with celebrity chefs — and scrambled to find a new project.

He did not want to lose the momentum generated by “Super Size Me,” nor did he want to go down in history only as the guy who ate a lot of Big Macs.

“I’ll be that guy till I die,” he told The Independent.

A follow-up film, “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” (2008), was not nearly as well received. Critics assailed him for making light of an international terrorist and for oversimplifying complicated global politics. More bricks were thrown when it emerged that he had put himself at significant personal risk while in Pakistan while his wife was at home with their newborn son.

Eventually, he did get somewhat past the shadow of “Super Size Me”: He teamed up with the actors Jason Bateman and Will Arnett to explore the male grooming industry in “Mansome” (2012) and followed the band One Direction around, resulting in the film “One Direction: This Is Us” (2013).

He produced films by other documentarians, including “The Other F Word” (2011), directed by Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, about punk rockers who became fathers, and “A Brony Tale” (2014), directed by Brent Hodge, about the subculture known as Bronies — adults, mostly men, who love the animated series “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”

And he continued to make projects that leaned on the participatory style of “Super Size Me.” He created and starred in a series called “30 Days” for FX, in which a person, often Mr. Spurlock himself, would spend about a month embedded in a community much different from his own. One episode saw him spend 25 days in a Virginia jail.

Mr. Spurlock was married three times, to Priscilla Sommer, Alexandra Jamieson and Sara Bernstein; all three marriages ended in divorce. Along with his brother Craig, he is survived by another brother, Barry; his parents; and his sons, Laken and Kallen.

His decision to discuss his sexual past, which came at the height of the #Metoo movement, was met with a mix of praise and criticism. Though many people lauded him for coming forward, critics suggested that he was trying to get ahead of a story that was going to emerge anyway.

All agreed, though, that the decision came with consequences: “Career death,” The Washington Post declared it in 2022 , noting that the once-ubiquitous Mr. Spurlock had largely disappeared.

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen

Remy Tumin is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics. More about Remy Tumin

COMMENTS

The Age of the Essay
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. Notes [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 ...
Essays
The Age of the Essay: The Python Paradox: Great Hackers: Mind the Gap: How to Make Wealth: The Word "Hacker" What You Can't Say: Filters that Fight Back: Hackers and Painters: If Lisp is So Great: The Hundred-Year Language: Why Nerds are Unpopular: Better Bayesian Filtering: Design and Research: A Plan for Spam: Revenge of the Nerds ...
Paul Graham's 'The Age of the Essay'
Paul Graham's 'The Age of the Essay'. Posted on August 4, 2014. A number of things struck me in Paul Graham's essay titled The Age of the Essay. Prehaps most importantly, this line: "Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not ...
Paul Graham and not being as right as he could be in "The Age of the Essay"
Graham is right that he hasn't directly said that school writing should be more like real writing, but it's an obvious inference from this and other sections of "The Age of the Essay," which I'll discuss further below. He also does a lot with the word "Oy:" it expresses skepticism and distaste wrapped in one little word.
Life is Short
That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short. Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times.
Paul Graham (programmer)
Paul Graham (/ ɡ r æ m /; born 1964) is an English-American computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur and investor.His work has included the programming language Lisp, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.. He is the author of the computer programming books On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp ...
The Age of the Essay
In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum - Paul Graham. In this quote from The Age of the Essay, Paul Graham explains how knowledge and writing ...
Esej, Paul Graham
Esej, Paul Graham - The Age of the Essay - Free download as Word Doc (.doc), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. This document summarizes the key differences between real essays and the structured writing assignments students are given in school. It discusses how the teaching of writing became intertwined with English literature due to historical accidents.
The Age of the Essay
In The Age of the Essay, Paul Graham insists that we should start writing about what we generally don't notice. Rather than just containing one specific and expected answer, essays should ...
YC's Paul Graham: The Complete Interview
Dec 26, 2013, 11:10am PST. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham isn't your typical startup guru. For eight years he's been at the helm of what's now the industry's most prominent accelerator and a lightning rod for frustrations with entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham.
The Age of the Essay Paul Graham
The Age of the Essay By Paul Graham September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick 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 ...
The Age of My Essay. Paul Graham's piece, "The Age of the…
Paul Graham's piece, "The Age of the Essay", whether it was through its format, word choice, or overall vibe, was an extraordinary piece to read. I'm dazzled because even though it seemed ...
Michael Tsai
The Age of the Essay. Paul Graham: 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 ...
Retire In Progress
Paul Graham's Theoretical Minimum. If you want to start reading Paul's essays I recommend the following ones, split by category. Creativity and writing: The age of the Essay: why you should write. Why writing is amazing. This essay inspired me to start blogging back in 2016.
Hackers & Painters
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age is a collection of essays from Paul Graham discussing hacking, programming languages, start-up companies, and many other technological issues. "Hackers & Painters" is also the title of one of those essays. The image on its cover is 'The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brugel.
Photographer Paul Graham: fragments of life
Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006, with essays by David Chandler, Russell Ferguson and Michael Almereyda, published by SteidlMACK, £40. Explore more on these topics Photography
PDF The Age of the Essay
The Age of the Essay Paul Graham September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like gure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay
Paul Graham Essay Summaries
It's Charisma, Stupid. Schlep Blindness. Startup = Growth. Taste for Makers. The Age of the Essay. The Python Paradox. Two Kinds of Judgement. Undergraduation. What You Can't Say.
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age: Graham, Paul
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West." ... This book has some essays not ...
Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for 'Super Size Me,' Dies at 53
The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a ...
Writing, Briefly
Writing, Briefly. March 2005. (In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.) I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them.
Before the Startup
(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) ... age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth ...