11 Lessons from Paul Graham's Essays

A summary of the key lessons I've learnt from Paul Graham's essays.

lifeentrepreneurship

Introduction

I recently stumbled upon Paul Graham’s essays and got hooked almost immediately. I loved the unostentatious style of writing and the immense amount of knowledge each essay contained.

I’ve been reading a few daily for about 2 weeks now and thought it would be a good idea to summarize the key lessons I’ve learnt, for the benefit of myself as well as those who aren’t huge fans of reading long essays (or who don’t have the luxury of time).

1. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

If you’re having fun doing self-indulgent stuff like binge-watching a show or going for parties every night, you’ll quickly (or at least, you should) start feeling guilty about it. At the very least, you know that you’re not doing work and you’re being unproductive. Once you know it, you can do something about it.

What’s much worse is doing “work” that, at least on the surface, appears to be meaningful - such as replying to emails, reading the newspaper, doing unimportant tasks.

It’s dangerous to be engaged in “fake work” because you don’t even realize that it’s fake. You’re probably giving yourself a pat on the back for getting through your inbox - without realizing that it’s not even important. Imagine doing such fake work for your entire career - yeah, that’s a scary thought. That’s why it’s important to objectively consider whether what you’re doing adds any value to society, or if it’s aligned with your long-term goals. If not, it’s probably fake work.

2. If you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain

Everyone knows that there’s no escaping hard work if you want to be successful. But this one sentence just hits different. It makes you realise that it’s possible to achieve success faster by enduring the same pain in a shorter duration. That is, you can become rich by working like crazy for 3 years or by working moderately for 30 years.

In fact, that’s the key difference between startups and big companies. The term “high-growth” when describing a startup basically means working as hard as you can (because you can bet that if you don’t, your competitors will beat you) and generating wealth rapidly.

3. Run upstairs

If you’re a startup and you’re faced with a choice - do something hard (i.e., run upstairs) or do something easy (run downstairs) - and the value of each of those options were proportional to the difficulty of the task, you should always pick the harder one. Why? Because if it’s hard for you, as a fast-paced start-up, it’s probably going to be next to impossible for the big companies to follow you.

This is good advice for life too. Whenever you have to make a choice, choose the harder option. Chances are the only reason you’re even considering the other is because you’re lazy. Choosing the harder option takes care of this - you know it’s the right thing to do. So, if you’re deciding whether to go watch a movie or go to the gym, now you know what to do.

4. Users, users, users.

Any company, or more generally, any product is measured by the number of users it has and the value it adds to each of it. There’s no point building a product that (you claim) has the best features and technology but no one’s interested in it.

Having users is the only true measure that your product is actually solving a real problem. It’s the only way to validate that your work has added some value.

Don’t be obsessed with features; be obsessed with users.

5. Time Quanta of Hackers

Some jobs have a small time quantum - which means it generally takes a small amount of time to complete a task (or at least a subtask), and even if you’re interrupted midway through that job, you could continue almost unaffected after that.

But that’s not the case for hacking. It might take an hour just to load the problem into your head (simply because some technical problems are hard). When you’re interrupted, you lose your train of thought and it takes a lot of time reload the context into your head.

Tip: keep chunks of uninterrupted time if you plan to hack.

That’s why many hackers work at night when everyone’s asleep.

6. Write Simply

The goal of writing should be communicate ideas - not to impress people. Anyway, people are more impressed by ideas than merely tough-to-follow language.

The more convoluted your writing is, the more effort readers have to put in to understand (some may not bother and just stop reading) and the more likely it is that you can’t explain it well enough. Don’t pretend.

When it comes to writing, less is more.

7. Life is Short

Don’t waste your time on bullshit. Before doing something, ask yourself: “Is this really how I want to spend my time?” A good heuristic to decide whether something maters or not is to think whether you’ll care about it in the future.

8. Forget Prestige

Don’t care whether the world thinks you’re an important person or not - that’s a sure way to fall into the trap of doing what you don’t like (or at least stuff that isn’t important).

If there are 2 jobs that you’re considering and one has higher prestige associated with it - pick the other one. You’re likely more interested in the other one (with lower one) and you’ll enjoy it more.

It’s important to have a sense of fascination with the work you’re doing - at the end of the day, you should be able to say “wow, that’s pretty cool”.

Chasing your dreams and passion is better than chasing money. Do what you like and let prestige take care of itself.

9. Work ≠ Pain

As much as schools reinforce this idea that work is different from play, and is more like pain (because for most people, doing schoolwork is pain), that is simply not true. You can decide what you want to work on.

People often lie that they enjoy their work when they’re actually miserable - mostly due to social pressure (and if doing well requires you like what you do, then not liking it means you aren’t doing it well - which is difficult to accept). It’s hard to find work that you love, but it’s worth it.

No matter what you’re doing (even if you don’t like it), do it well. That way you can be sure that you aren’t just being lazy and making excuses. In short, always produce.

10. Good Ideas vs. Bad Ideas

It’s very difficult to distinguish between good, crazy ideas that can work and bad ideas. The reason is simple: if it were obviously good, someone else would’ve done it already. Only the unconventional and risky ideas haven’t been tried yet (though in hindsight, they too tend to seem like obviously good ideas once they are implemented successfully).

Being correct is not a sufficient condition for success - you need to be right and most other people need to be wrong. It’s only the crazy novel ideas that matter - these are the black swans that have a huge impact.

So, if “someone who’s both a domain expert and a reasonable person presents a crazy new idea to you, chances are that it’s a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). If the person proposing ideas is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds - and yet, they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests that they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.”

Don’t dismiss ideas just based on the person who had them - judge them based on their merits.

11. Good Founders

Conclusion

Paul gave a list of 5 commands that constantly remind you to focus on stuff that matters (which he puts on top of his to-do list, and you should probably too):

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