The Best of Paul Graham
10+ most popular Paul Graham articles, as voted by our community.
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Superlinear Returns
October 2023One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.Teachers and coaches implicitly…
Paul Graham on Career
What You (Want to)* Want
November 2022Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I…
Paul Graham on Creativity
How to Get New Ideas
January 2023(Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said.…
Paul Graham on Functional Programming
Beating the Averages
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2001, rev. April 2003(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend…
Paul Graham on Paul Graham
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2009One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them…
Startup = Growth
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary…
Paul Graham on Procrastination
Good and Bad Procrastination
December 2005The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?Most people who write about procrastination write about how to…
Paul Graham on Reading
The Need to Read
November 2022In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a…
Paul Graham on Religion
Heresy
April 2022One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.In his excellent life of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was…
Paul Graham on Startups
Do Things that Don't Scale
July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build…
«It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that»
How to Do Great Work
July 2023If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.Partly my goal was to create…
«The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve»
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These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
A Project of One's Own
June 2021A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've…
How to Write Usefully
February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should…
«Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.»
How People Get Rich Now
April 2021Every year since 1982, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big…
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
December 2014If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false.…
Crazy New Ideas
May 2021There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very…
«When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed.»
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