Quotes from Paul Graham

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

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.

To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

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

Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don't let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

Learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.

Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

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

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean "outsource" in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)