#277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3

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Nov 17, 2022

Dive into the treasures of Paul Graham's insights on entrepreneurship and wealth. Discover how true wealth isn't just money but the stuff that enriches life. Explore the challenge of taking the hard path for startup success and the magic of small teams. Uncover the parallels between hackers and painters, emphasizing hands-on learning and collaboration. Learn about structured teamwork as a vital element for innovation and how recognizing flaws can drive improvement. Plus, get a sneak peek at a new resource aimed at personal growth!

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ADVICE

How to Make Wealth

Create wealth by making something people want.
Money is a way of moving wealth, but they aren't the same thing.

INSIGHT

Programmers and Wealth Creation

Programmers create wealth by making valuable software. There are large differences in wealth creation rates among programmers.

ADVICE

Startups and Wealth

Join or start a startup to significantly increase your wealth creation potential. Devote yourself fully to work and surround yourself with good people.

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In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World

Rama Dev Jager

Rafael Ortiz

This book offers an insider's view into the history and people behind today's greatest digital successes. Through a series of probing interviews, leaders such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, America Online's Steve Case, Dell Computer's Michael Dell, and others share their stories of successes, failures, and the people and attitudes that turned their ideas into influential companies. The book delves into the challenges faced by these trailblazers, their courage in taking risks, and their contributions to the evolution of the digital world[2][4].

Sam Walton

Made in America

John Huey

Sam Walton

In 'Sam Walton: Made in America,' Sam Walton shares his personal and professional journey, from his early life in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, to the founding and expansion of Walmart. The book is a first-person account supplemented by quotes from friends, family, and colleagues. It highlights Walton's core values, such as the importance of hard work, customer satisfaction, and competitive pricing. The autobiography also provides insights into Walton's leadership style, his approach to business, and the lessons he learned throughout his career. The book was published posthumously in 1993 and offers a compelling and inspiring look at the life of one of America's most successful entrepreneurs.

Go Like Hell

A.J. Baime

Jones Allen

Go Like Hell by A.J. Baime tells the story of Henry Ford II's ambitious quest to conquer the 24 Hours of Le Mans, challenging Enzo Ferrari's dominance. The book chronicles the development of the Ford GT40 and the strategic partnership with Carroll Shelby, highlighting the technological innovations and human determination that defined this era of motorsport. The rivalry between Ford and Ferrari not only reshaped the racing world but also left a lasting impact on the automotive industry.

Sam Walton

The Inside Story of America's Richest Man

Vance Trimble

This biography, written by Vance H. Trimble, explores the life and career of Sam Walton, from his humble beginnings to his success in building the Wal-Mart empire. The book is based on interviews with hundreds of Wal-Mart associates and provides insights into Walton's hard work, integrity, business acumen, and human relations skills. It also touches on his personal life, including his passion for quail hunting and tennis, and his preference for a simple lifestyle despite his immense wealth.

Hackers and Painters

Paul Graham

In 'Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age,' Paul Graham delves into the motivations and activities of hackers and programmers. The book is a collection of essays that cover various topics such as the role of 'makers' in society, the design and complexity of software, the importance of beauty in software design, and the open-source movement. Graham also critiques the current educational system and discusses the historical and cultural context of hacking and programming. The essays provide an insightful look into what Graham calls 'an intellectual Wild West,' highlighting the significant impact of technology on how we think, work, and live.

What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham

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[4:00] How To Make Wealth by Paul Graham

[4:01] Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

[6:00] All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want.

[7:00] It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much wealth as an average employee.

[8:00] And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.

[9:00] In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz. (Founders #208)

[10:00] A very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.

[10:00] Paul Graham’s Essays (Founders #275)

[11:00] What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things.

[12:00] Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.

[12:00] Sam Walton epiosdes

#150 Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble.

#234 Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton.

[13:00] Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

[14:00] So few businesses really pay attention to making customers happy.

[15:00] What people will give you money for depends on them, not you.

[16:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

[20:00] The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

[21:00] Relentelssness wins. A great product has to be better than it has to be.

[21:00] Relentlessness Wins: Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible.

[22:00] All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

[24:00] The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages.

[25:00] It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.

[25:00] You only get one life. You might as well spend it working on something great.

[26:00] The Other Road Ahead by Paul Graham

[26:00] Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily (my new daily podcast)

[29:00] Use your product yourself all the time.

[29:00] Mind The Gap by Paul Graham

[29:00] When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo da Vinci and second-rate contemporaries.

[32:00] Technology will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive.

[33:00] So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on.

[34:00] Paul Graham’s answer to how big of a difference can a single developer or a small team make?

The answer is increasingly much. Increasingly much.

Achrimedes said if he had a lever long enough he could move the world.

Well nowawadys from your bedroom —thanks to all the infrastucture that exists — a combination of open source and services like AWS — the lever is enourmoulsy long.

You could be sitting in your bedroom programming … a single person … and if you make something that people like and is novel it can really have a huge effect.

That is very exiciting. You guys may take this for granted but anybody who is as old as me realizes how that was not the case 20 years ago.

It will be interesting to see how far it goes because it is certainly not over yet.

(How far can it go?)

Always further than people expect.

[37:00] Beating The Averages by Paul Graham

[37:00] Paul Graham on Econtalk: I found that the interesting parts of programming you can’t make scientific. [Startups are the same.] What makes a programmer good at programming is more like what makes a painter good at painting. It is something a little less organized. It is taste. A sense of design. A certain knack.

[40:00] In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.

[40:00] A startup should give its competitors as little information as possible.

[41:00] Taste For Makers by Paul Graham

[42:00] Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better.

[43:00] It's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The same principles of good design crop up again and again.

[44:00] If something is ugly, it can't be the best solution.

[46:00] In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought.

[48:00] "It is my opinion," Ferrari once wrote, "that there are innate gifts that are a peculiarity of certain regions and that, transferred into industry, these propensities may at times acquire an exceptional importance... In Modena, where I was born and set up my own works, there is a species of psychosis for racing cars." — Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans by A.J. Baime. (Founders #97)

[50:00] The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

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