This is Paul Graham.

People who've done great things tend

to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only

exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude

biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how

the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems

like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the m... See more

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

VCs are

like car salesmen or bureaucrats: the nature of their work

turns them into jerks.

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved.... See more

Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.

There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't.