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Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident
- aws_ls 11y agoI guess PG is a genius. I realized a bit painfully, that I may be much mediocre in comparison. I know comparison is wrong/etc. But what the heck? I also wonder now, that what I think (and say to friends) of as my life style business tech startup, is actually a Zombie? Did we really manage to hit the magic break even (revenue = comfortable salary + expenses). Hmm...But something in me tells me that, there's more to it, as my effort has been ongoing, although its little less than thrice of the time PG spent on Viaweb. One motivation, which also contributes to make me keep working in it, is my earlier partners, who still have a stake, and they contributed a lot, to this in the early years. Somehow, there's a feeling in me that they should get a good return on that effort. Which also means that my returns will be more, so its not a pure selfless line of thought there. Just some musings, after reading the very good interview transcript. And just want to assure that there is no irony/sarcasm in my post (I think, it may come across like that in the early part). And also no "sympathy" replies please. As I actually feel quite upbeat about things. Apologies for being tangential (if I have been), just felt like writing this.
- pkrumins 11y agoThat reminds me of this amazing talk called Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI TLDV: Innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort. We'd be wiser and the outcomes would be better if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. We can potentially achieve more by following a non-objective yet still principled path, after throwing off the shackles of objectives, metrics, and mandated outcomes. This also matches my experience 100%. All my best discoveries are accidental.
- visakanv 11y ago+1. As a writer, literally all of my best work is completely unplanned. On hindsight there was preparation, background, context, etc, but still.
- Outdoorsman 11y agoCongrats on being a Quora Top Writer! I agree...the best ideas "come in on little cat feet"...
- visakanv 11y agoThanks! And to riff off of the cat feet analogy, you have to be comfortable enough to let the cat come to you. You can't scare it away by getting anxious. That sort of calm comes with lots of practice.
- meowface 11y agoI've heard this sentiment expressed for the creation of music and art as well.
- telesilla 11y agoI'm a composer as well as a software developer. There is no way in hell I could plan an interesting piece of music. You really just have to wait for it to come, however importantly it does mean you have to be ready to listen: i.e. put yourself in environments and states of mind that are most receptive and be extremely well-honed on your craft on a technical level so you can execute well.
- derefr 11y agoI think this is a sentiment most people share, because most creative people only output—at most—a few masterworks in their lifetimes. I bet the people who are constantly pumping out works that, on their own, would be considered achievements—the Picassos and Frank Zappas and Stephen Kings of the world—have a pretty different view on how much of creating something good is inspiration vs. a schlepp.
- Swizec 11y agoAny famous writer I've ever read about has said that the amateur waits for inspiration, whereas the professional just sits down and gets to work. 12 months from now you won't be able to tell what you wrote while inspired and what while schlepping.
- steveeq1 11y agoDude, this is an awesome talk! Kinda reminds me a lot about Edward DeBono: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFZ0XSfCRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFZ0XSfCRw He was, in turn, recommended by Alan Kay for learning and creativity: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp ) Now going to order "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned".
- dang 11y agoDiscussed a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11078635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11078635.
- mentos 11y agoGreat video! Everyone on HN should watch this.
- agumonkey 11y agoIt's a profound talk, but incomplete in my view. It's mostly that we're culturally far too used to linear and predictable (culturally only because we know very well about randomness, laughter and surprise is wired in our brains). Also, we cannot predict the path, nor the number of possible paths that will approach a given structure.
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- Terr_ 11y agoThis reminds me of a bit from "The Dilbert Future" (1997): > Most people won't admit how they got their current jobs unless you push them up against a built-in wall unit and punch them in the stomach until they spill their drink and start yelling, "I'LL NEVER INVITE YOU TO ONE OF MY PARTIES AGAIN, YOU DRUNKEN FOOL!" > I think the reason these annoying people won't tell me how they got their jobs is because they are embarrassed to admit luck was involved. > I can't blame them. Typically the pre-luck part of their careers involved doing something enormously pathetic. Take me, for example. I'm a successful cartoonist and author because I'm a complete failure at being an employee of the local phone company.
- dec0dedab0de 11y agoI have been lucky quite a few times along my career path. However that "luck" was usually the result of identifying a good opportunity, and taking a risk. There are many people "stuck" in their current jobs because they don't see opportunities for what they are, or because they're too afraid to act on them. Fortune favors the bold.
- Ma8ee 11y agoAnd some bold people lose or never get the opportunities. I don't claim that character isn't an important factor, but what we normally would call pure luck is also an important one. That someone is stuck doesn't mean that they don't dare or don't see the opportunities. They might just be unlucky.
- ThomPete 11y agoWhich other people have also done and so you just ended up being the lucky one who got it.
- MawNicker 11y agoMisfortune also favors the bold. Sustained boldness depends on the capacity to withstand misfortune. That is to have been fortunate.
- hodwik 11y ago
- Outdoorsman 11y ago>>Paul : It is actually a trick for interviews. If someone asks you a boring question, just answer the interesting one they might have asked, and nobody complains.<< That's classic... An example of how to actually live "your" own life in this world...not paying a great deal of attention to uninteresting things that others bring up; rather molding those same things so that they become interesting, and illuminate parts of your life and the lives of others... In my estimation, my life is what it is--one I'm very happy with--because of my having just that attitude... And, yes, I totally agree: >>Paul : When I was a kid at Christmas, the Sears Catalog was your reference work.<<
- chubasco 11y agoWhen I was practicing law, my first job out of law school was working for a local defense lawyer who was somewhat of a celebrity. He always told me the trick to dealing with the press is not to answer the question you were asked, but rather the question you wish you were asked. He was right.
- moeamaya 11y agoI generically agree with your sentiment, but there are often times where a simple question causes me to reconsider humanities' goals. These "boring" questions become stratified and ultimately challenge and provide friction to my strongly held beliefs, where that which was once uninteresting has become supremely relevant. PG is a boss and has done more for startups than anyone I know, but he isn't beyond critique. Boring questions are ripe with depth outside the capacity of CS and tech entrepreneurs, and deal with the realities of everyday people.
- aresant 11y ago"Plus, then, I had given this talk about the Harvard Computer Society, and I said, “If you want to raise money, raise money from people who made the money doing startups. And then, they can give you advice, too.” And I suddenly noticed, they were all looking at me. And I had this horrifying vision of them all e-mailing me their business plans. Which is funny, because that’s what YC turned into." That gave me chills. The entire startup experience, the essence of being an entrpepreneur for me is in that moment when your brain subconsciously processes all the data around a problem and throws out something obvious and audacious in the same breath. And before you can conciously object BAM you have said it outloud and the adventure begins.
- bcook 11y agoPlease, for the ignorant (no offense intended, as I am an entrenched member), can you more precisely/consisely explain your critiques? The reasons behind your "chills" are foreign to me. My intuition often betrays my experience.
- ktRolster 11y ago"Gives me chills" in that context is not a criticism, it means (roughly) that he really liked and related to it.
- bootload 11y ago"Early-stage startups are just fast-moving chaos. That is a constant. That was true in Henry Ford's day, it was true when we started YC." Interesting quote. There must be some organisation to early startups, otherwise they wouldn't work. Is the chaos just a description of what cannot be observed and described? Fantastic read. Liked the bit about straw-drawing to talk to customers.
- Hermel 11y agoThe "organization" at startups is to do whatever makes sense and to not waste energy on internal politics. Obviously, that requires the founders to be naturally well-aligned in what they do.
- bootload 11y ago"do whatever makes sense and to not waste energy on internal politics." Your right, small team organisation is what startups must succeed in. So obvious, I missed this.
- vidoc 11y agoFull-of-himself !
- vixen99 11y agoI guess I'm odd but I rather like it when the contents match the title. Best advice to you is 'avoid clicking that link when you have no interest in the subject'. Great interview!
- dominotw 11y agoRight?? I was sitting here reading this and going I cant be the only one thinking this guy is some sort of a narcissist. And all the ridiculous sycophancy of poeple here trying to infer secret wisdom in his uninspiring answers only makes the whole thing even more bizarre. Poverty is poverty only when you have no means to make your life better. Suffering form special snowflake syndrome is not poverty.
- dang 11y agoHard to know what you're referring to, but it's surely a case of incomplete information. pg is one of the least full-of-himself people I've ever met. I don't say that lightly. When someone cares so much about figuring things out and so little about superficial nicety, they can seem full of themselves, but that can also be a red herring. The real tests of fullness-of-oneself are in how they personally interact with others.
- JohnD19 11y agoI stopped reading this "treatise" when in the first paragraph Aaron spoke highly of the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld.
- terravion 11y agoAaron specifically says you might not want to emulate Donald Rumsfeld. I'm really starting to think that conservatives might have a point that the 21st century left has a problem with name calling and ad hominem to shut down debate. It is possible to think that Donald Rumsfeld should be on trial and still be willing to learn from him.
- deciplex 11y ago> I'm really starting to think that conservatives might have a point that the 21st century left has a problem with name calling and ad hominem to shut down debate. Most of that is movement conservatives complaining that their days of hijacking American culture seem to be in jeopardy (they think - I am not so optimistic).
- JohnD19 11y agoYou might be willing to learn from him if you want to be like him. And expressing how one feels about Rumsfeld because of extensive research done on the "subject", does not in anyway invalidate the purpose of argument. By saying "21st century left, ad hominem, etc,etc" proves you are no more than a provocateur
- S4M 11y agoWell, Hitler was one of the worse individual the world has ever known, but if I had to research on charisma he would be among the people I would study.
- 50CNT 11y agoDid you make that account just to dismiss the entire interview on misinterpreting a minor point and then be inflammatory about it? That makes the provocateur comment of yours a bit ironic doesn't it.
- z3t4 11y agoI love listening to (success) stories. You should make more of those.
- babersidd 11y agoGood Earning Opportunity..For More Detail https://www.facebook.com/USA-Onilne-Free-jobs-1768497070045507/?sk=app_190322544333196&ref=s https://www.facebook.com/USA-Onilne-Free-jobs-17684970700455...
- peterclary 11y agoOff-topic but: Hooray for transcripts! I can see the benefits of being able to hear the pauses, tone, inflections, etc. but even leaving aside the deaf and hearing-impaired, there are so many advantages to having the text (it's searchable, you can read it while listening to music, it's quicker to read it than to listen to it).
- Yaggo 11y agoAlso much easier to understand for us with English as secondary languge.
- miseg 11y agoThe color codings with the names of the speakers helped a lot too. Very different to an unformatted wall of text, which you'll often see with podcast transcripts.
- Terr_ 11y agoFun fact: The HTML5 video stuff has a Javascript API so that you can access the subtitle-data. This means if the subtitles are well-made, you can "re-generate" a searchable/seekable "transcript" from the same data. Example: https://gist.github.com/DHager/2e01f0b82e5d3f5a39e6 https://gist.github.com/DHager/2e01f0b82e5d3f5a39e6
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- notahacker 11y agoReading about how his original motivations were purely pecuniary, he was keen to sell his company as quickly as possible and his ambition was to go back to essay-writing and hobbyist programming, I can't help thinking young PG probably wouldn't get accepted into YC these days...
- f14ist 11y agoThis is an interesting thought. Might be the kind of thinking that led to the YC fellowship?
- Kenji 11y agoI can't believe one of the founders was doing this alongside grad school and PG was like yeah you know, you have a lot of spare time there. And here I got so much work with full time studying that I can barely finish reading a single book alongside. How can people say university is enjoyable, fun, lots of spare time? For me it's just endless hard work and barely any breaks inbetween.
- Patient0 11y agoyeah that bit didn't ring true to me either - I can't imagine Grad school being "loads of free time" unless perhaps you didn't care when/if you got your masters/PhD (and so just let everything slide).
- tinkerdol 11y agoDepends on what program you're in? In general I think grad school (esp. the PhD level compared to Master's) typically gives the student a lot of freedom. At the PhD level often you are basically an independent researcher and might meet with your advisor once every three weeks or so. If that were the case, and you could complete enough work to keep your advisor happy within one week, that gives you two weeks of time to use...
- beambot 11y ago> might meet with your advisor once every three weeks or so. Only if your advisor is fairly senior (ie. Not pre-tenure)!
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- atom-morgan 11y agoIt was definitely true for me. College didn't take that much effort in terms of learning. Most of it was busy work using the term homework.
- known 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- alanwatts 11y ago"Superior work has the quality of an accident" -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
- S4M 11y agoI find interesting the part where PG says that a startup either makes its founders rich either goes down, and basically discards the possibility that it ends up to be just enough to pay its founders a good salary. I think it can be a pretty nice outcome but then again YC must select founders who are very ambitious.
- pc86 11y agoIt has to do with what YC selects for in part, but no startup in the PG sense of the word (hyper growth, mass adoption/virality, high risk) would ever give the founder(s) a good job and nothing more. YC is not in the business of pulling off $30k a year in draws from a sustainable business. You have the big exist or you shut it down and try something else. There's no middle ground, which is part of why "startup" has a very specific definition, and why YC doesn't invest in SMBs.
- darshanp 11y agoOne of the best things I've read in a long time. Paul Graham is God!
- EGreg 11y agoe-commerce was not my life’s work. I didn’t actually want to spend my life working on this. I did it to get money and make that money. Aaron : Yeah. This is such an interesting thing because it’s so opposite from what you tell people a lot of the time, what YC tells people, certainly, of “Don’t do things just because there’s a business there,” right? This is it, right here. If you want to know what most successful businesspeople have in common - not the unicorns - it's that they were prepared to sell their first venture and/or give away a lot of equity to the right people to make it work. Once they have the money, comnections and track record, they can have much more control in their next company. We went a completely different route. We've tried to change the world... :)
- lsniddy 11y agoluck = opportunity + preparedness
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIt's amazing the lengths to which people will go to avoid Windows programming. I know I have :)
- cableshaft 11y agoI've done a good amount of mobile and python development, and Windows programming used to be awful, but it seems to have gotten a lot better, especially with ASP.NET. I prefer it and I'm a lot faster programming using C#/Visual Studio than I am with Javascript + framework + text editor.
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