What I learned from reading How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham.---Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book---(2:00) All you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.(2:10) Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible.(4:15) How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.  —How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham(5:10) Always preserve excitingness. (Let what you are excited about guide you)(8:15) If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find.(9:15) How To Work Hard by Paul Graham(10:05) When you follow what you are intensely interested in this strange convergence happens where you're working all the time and it feels like you're never working.(10:20) You can't tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. You may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it.(13:00) When it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own.(14:00) Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain by Roy Morris Jr. (Founders #312)(17:15) One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.(17:50) Make what you are most excited about.(19:00) If you're interested, you're not astray.(19:30) Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #300)(20:15) At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it.(22:50) In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.(25:00) A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy(26:00) Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem.(26:30) The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.(27:10) Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started.(27:30) Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version)(30:00) If you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true.(36:00) Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on.(38:00) Change breaks the brittle.(43:45) What might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game.(45:00) Being prolific is underrated. + Examples of outlandishly prolific people(48:30) Just focus on the really important things and ignore everything else.(50:30) One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors.(51:30) Seek out the best colleagues.(54:30) Solving hard problems will always involve some backtracking.(56:30) Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.(57:50) The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.(58:00) Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on "curiosity."The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

What I learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[4:52] My father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.[5:49] Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second.[7:41] To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.[8:00] You should not worry about prestige. This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow.[10:22] You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.[12:18] Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail.[16:46] How To Do What You Love by Paul Graham [16:34] What Doesn’t Seem Like Work by Paul Graham [17:16] If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.[17:42] Michael Jordan said what looked like hard work to others was play to him. Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. (Founders #212) and Driven From Within by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil. (Founders #213)[20:53] How Not to Die by Paul Graham [23:00] All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words. — Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson (Founders #224)[24:49] You have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and that's why I've never done another startup.[27:31] If a startup succeeds, you get millions of dollars, and you don't get that kind of money just by asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.[28:17] So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand.So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up.[28:45] Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy by Paul Graham [30:23] If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.[31:15] If you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.[34:10] The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.[35:43] Relentlessly Resourceful by Paul Graham [35:43] I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.[37:20] If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.[37:40] The Anatomy of Determination by Paul Graham [37:45] David’s Notes: A Conversation with Paul Graham[39:50] After a while determination starts to look like talent.[42:12] Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.[43:21] One of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. (Founders Podcast Conference?)[45:21] What Startups Are Really Like by Paul Graham [49:00] The Entire History of Silicon Valley by John Coogan[49:50] Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #73)[55:08] You need persistence because everything takes longer than you expect. A lot of people (founders) were surprised by that.[57:18] Estee Lauder was a master at doing things that don’t scale. Estée Lauder: A Success Storyby Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)[58:45] What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders. A lot of times founders are worried about competition. YC has founded 1900+ companies. 1 was killed by competitors. You have the same protection against competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft. Do you know what the protection is? Space is large.[1:01:00] Paul on what he would do if he was strating a company today: If I were a 22 year starting a startup I would certainly apply to YC. Which is not that surprising, since it was designed to be what I wish I'd had when I did start one. But (assuming I got in) I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar.Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.When I say small, I mean small in employees, not revenues.[1:05:07] Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #200)[1:07:00] A Word To The Resourceful by Paul Graham [1:08:07] We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.[1:09:00] Understanding all the implications of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness.[1:11:00] Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham [1:11:00] Startups take off because the founders make them take off.[1:16:00] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.[1:16:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)[1:21:00] The world is complicated. It is noisy. We are not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. —Steve Jobs[1:22:00] Any strategy that omits the effort is suspect.[1:23:00] The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.Now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative about the second as well as the first. Founders need to work hard in two dimensions.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

What I learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[4:01] You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have but that you know isn't to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea.[5:20] The independent-minded are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly.[6:20] Founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees.[7:40] There are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.[8:30] How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something.[9:00] How To Think For Yourself by Paul Graham[9:00] How To Work Hard by Paul Graham[10:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham[11:00] Paul on Twitter: "Maybe better founders could have..." Presumably Patrick knows what he means by that, but in case it's not clear, he's describing the empty set. If Patrick and John Collison had to work long hours to build something great, you will too. Link to tweet[13:00] Less is more but you have to do more to get to less. — Rick Rubin: In the Studio by Jake Brown. (Founders #245)[13:00] If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.[14:30] Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins[15:30] Aliens, Jedis, & Cults[16:30] How To Do What You Love by Paul Graham[19:00] Fear's a powerful thing. I mean it's got a lot of firepower. If you can figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind rather than to stand in front of you, that's very powerful. I always felt that I had to work harder than the next guy, just to do as well as the next guy. And to do better than the next guy, I had to just kill.And you know, to a certain extent, that's still with me in how I work, you know, I just go in. —Jimmy Iovine[20:00] Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.[22:00] Find work that feels like play. —The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. (Founders #191)[23:00] A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.[23:00] Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson. (Founders #240)[25:00] Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clearsighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are.[26:00] How to Lose Time and Money by Paul Graham[30:00] Schlep Blindness by Paul Graham[31:00] A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great.[33:00] What I’ve Learned From Users by Paul Graham[34:00] The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but it's surprising how much the problems remain the same, regardless of what they're making. Once you've advised 100 startups all doing different things, you rarely encounter problems you haven't seen before.[34:00] Today I talked to a startup doing so well that they had no current problems that needed solving. Profitable, growing ~20x a year (not a typo), only 9 employees. This is so rare that I didn't know what to do. We ended up talking about problems they might have in the future.I advised them never to raise another round, so to get equity you're going to have to get hired there. So learn to program. Link to tweet[35:00] But knowing (nearly) all the problems startups can encounter doesn't mean that advising them can be automated, or reduced to a formula.[37:00] It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want.And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. —Steve Jobs[39:00] That was another big surprise: how often founders don't listen to us.[39:00] Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe. (Founders #221)[40:00] The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what it's like except those who've done it.[42:00] Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.[42:00] Alexander combined an excessive tolerance of fatigue with an intolerence for slowness. Alexander the Great: The Brief Life and Towering Exploits of History's Greatest Conqueror--As Told By His Original Biographers (Founders #232)[43:00] However good you are, good colleagues make you better. Indeed, very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else, because they're so starved for them in everyday life.[45:00] Leading By Design: The Ikea Story (Founders #104)----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham ----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[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.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

Renowned writer and entrepreneur Paul Graham shares 11 key lessons on writing, emphasizing simplicity, editing rigor, and embracing the creative process. He discusses the importance of identifying valuable problems, enhancing writing through observation and imagination, and developing a personal writing style.

Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what's gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he's optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we're underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded July 15th, 2023. Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Follow Paul on Twitter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Photo credit: Dave Thomas

Today, we're doing something I do every day: talking to Paul Graham, who as well as being one of the founders of Viaweb and Y Combinator is also my husband. Paul has been involved with startups since 1995; before he invented the accelerator, he invented the web app. So there's a lot of information in this episode, but it was also, as you'll see, one of the funniest.

Paul Graham, an influential entrepreneur and essayist known for his insights on startups and technology, discusses transformative leadership concepts with Kipp and Kieran. They explore 'Founder Mode' versus traditional management, arguing that hands-on leadership fosters innovation and productivity. The trio emphasizes prioritizing customer needs over peer opinions and the importance of hiring for a growth mindset. They also highlight how discomfort and constructive feedback can drive personal and professional growth, making leadership more effective.

YC Partner Geoff Ralston talks with Paul Graham, one of the founders of YC, and tries to draw out as much startup wisdom as possible in 1/2 hour of conversation.TranscriptVideo Link

Entrepreneur Paul Graham discusses his essay on 'How To Do Great Work,' exploring curiosity, originality, breaking rules, and being self-indulgent. He emphasizes the importance of asking big questions, iterative progress, and surrounding oneself with talented individuals for growth.