Ask HN: Where do you get your inspiration from?

In a very general sense, the great systems of the past: Multics, ITS, the Lisp Machine, the Alto, UNIX(TM) and 2/4.x BSD, and early Windows NT. (Linux not so much.) Xen nowadays, perhaps. TeX, and let's add TCP/IP, Ethernet, and CHAOSnet. Public key cryptography and RSA. Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. The Whirlwind computer.

Hmmm, and of course the great languages, LISP, Scheme and Clojure nowadays, C, FORTRAN (each in their niches, of course). (C++ not at all, and I've sworn never to write another line of Perl after heavy use for more than half a decade. Hopefully the same with C++, but then there's LLVM....)

People who I only know through their books:

The great students of project success and failure: Fred Brooks, Gerald Weinberg, Richard Gabriel, Joel Spolsky, Ivar Jacobson, the Anti-Patterns crew.

The great explainers: Guy Steele, W. Richard Stevens, Harold Ableson (actually knew him, and we share first names :-) and Gerald Sussman, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrew Appel (compilers) and Richard Jones (GC), Paul Graham, Alan Kay, David Moon, some more Structured Programming types who's names may be less familiar: P. J. Plauger, Brian W. Kernighan for that (not the C book), and Edward Yourdon.

But to actually do something, it's to build something that's needed and has a shot at being enduring. From Perl scripts to manage my email, whatever a company needs to survive and thrive, to something open source.

I don't think any particular person inspired me in an overwhelming way, so much as the generally quiet competence of the programmers and system administrators I've worked with since 1977, the teachers and professors who knew their subjects, how to teach them well, and respected sincere students like myself, salesmen who could sell, small businessmen who could keep their companies afloat, etc. Solid competence with or without flair is highly underrated.

Spend the money on a good term life & a disability insurance policy. You'll sleep better.

A bunch of Chamath Palihapititya interviews. There are other people who I'm sure I would take inspiration from if I knew everyone, but it's easy for now to just point at someone with a lot of money who I feel is very focused on real value creation in philosophy and wants more investment opportunities that fit that philosophy.

I pretty well believed that the world would become meritocratic. At 25, things looked very non-meritocratic. Check boxes, hang your hat on superficial measures of success, stop thinking because you'll be wrong because you never took enough risks to learn to get anything difficult right.

I feel like there's this built-in notion among people who get their first taste of greed and fall victim to success bias where they start thinking that the highest aspiration in life is to build Comcast, be the cybernetic CEO for 400 years, outlive all the rest of the shareholders, and by virtue of becoming the entrenched player with all the cards stacked in their favor, have all the money on Earth at some point. If we can just hold onto our rent-seeking empire...

Meanwhile nothing interesting happens whatsoever.

As a simultaneous complete rejection of this nightmarish aspiration and an attempt to live as close as possible to the centers of real value creation, I find it very easy to stay devoted to a technology career with some entrepreneur splashed in.

If your highest aspiration is to own something and sit back comfortably as a good citizen, you should first fight for a strong social safety net, perhaps even guaranteed income, and then give away all your excess to people who will do things with it that add real entertainment to your life by building cool things that weren't possible with people like you clogging up the pipes.

I find entrepreneurship to be the one career where I can wake up, be at one with dissatisfaction or ambition because I feel very close to direct pathways of action instead of acceptance or just ranting on social media somewhere. Even ranting becomes an exercise in synthesizing knowledge together into a vision of a better solution. You can't lose.