Sublime

The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.

But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things.

Paul Graham said, “when people visit your startup, they should be surprised how few people you have.”

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they ... See more

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things,

even by their discoverers

, because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.

That initial fragility was not a unique feature of Airbnb.