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Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

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41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#41

Off-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).

The 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.

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#42
post #21

Full-of-himself !

Right?? 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.

Which parts of the interview made you feel that he was narcissistic?

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#45
Reading 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...

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#46
I 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.

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#48
post #46

I 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.

yeah 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).

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#49
post #46

I 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.

Depends 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...

Re: Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident

#50
post #4

This 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 e…

Absolutely, people seem to find/get jobs for reasons that look very much like insane luck. I found my current job through a long chain of "crazy" coincidences.

In reality, what looks like luck is very normal. Humans are prone to think coincidence is much less likely than it actually is. This is where most religious belief and conspiracy theory come from.

Or, often, what seems like a coincidence is actually a predictable systematic phenomenon that we cannot yet explain. E.g. The regularity of comets was once thought merely a coincidence. Edmund Halley was the first to posit a system behind their regularity.

People don't like to tell of the coincidences that led them to their jobs because other people are liable to over-estimate the effect those coincidences had to said person's career.

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