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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#191

Post by dang »

mdorazio wrote: post #170

This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…

I think we see what we're predisposed to see in these things. When I read the essay, what stood out to me was how long he got by with almost no money. Living on $7 a day etc.

If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg has clearly always been single-minded about doing what he wanted to do / was interested in, and stubborn as hell about not doing what he didn't want to do. That mindset may be part nature and part nurture, but at least his upbringing didn't damage it, as many other people's would have.

To me the key detail is not that pg nagged his father into buying a TRS-80, not that he learned to program with it, but that his father used one of pg's own programs to write an entire book. That's a hell of a success for a kid, and it says something significant about their relationship. Many of us had a similar path to the first two of those steps, but that third step branches somewhere different—perhaps life-changingly different.

Edit: btw, on the matter of luck, I always remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768.

Re: What I Worked On

#192

Post by aerosmile »

mdorazio wrote: post #170

This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…

This is a chicken or the egg problem. Is the type of a person who has the intellectual capacity to invent the SaaS model and angel investing at scale just purely lucky to have the right timing for his inventions, or would that same person have invented something else in case that their life was time-shifted by a few years or decades or even centuries? People often say that once you're lucky, twice you're good.

Re: What I Worked On

#193

Post by breck »

vonnik wrote: post #11

I think it's important that PG published this essay this week. And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To me it shows two things: 1) that some of the most successful people make miscalculations about what the world needs. 2) that a few of them, like PG, are courageous enough to admit that. Personally, reading PG's essays and then…

> as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel)

Was traction his goal? I'm not sure about that. I think the ROI on Bel is extremely high. It only looks small if you compare it to something like YCombinator.

Re: What I Worked On

#194

Post by Dudeman112 »

breck wrote: post #127
nostrademons wrote: post #60

This is a good essay. It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little…

The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some of those points are outside of your control, but some are points where you made an important decision that correctly anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can’t connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look back.

What do you mean by non linear there?

Re: What I Worked On

#195

Post by abhinav22 »

dang wrote: post #191
mdorazio wrote: post #170

This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…

I think we see what we're predisposed to see in these things. When I read the essay, what stood out to me was how long he got by with almost no money. Living on $7 a day etc. If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg has clearly always been single-minded about doing what he wanted to do / was inter…

I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the hard work element.

I agree with you - people are missing the fact that the author was able to live on a very meagre salary for years.

Re: What I Worked On

#196

Post by breck »

theunixbeard wrote: post #171

Great article, especially the ending sentence cracked me up. pg is such an inspiring person. Walking away from $2M per month at Yahoo. To now most likely being a billionaire from personally funding the YC LLC. And then spending 6 years just painting, coding, writing and raising a family. Living the dream. Sure Elon Musk is a “cool billionaire”, but in my book pg is even cooler.

> $2M per month at Yahoo

I had to reread this like 3 times. "per month", "per month"! PG, pay me $100K and I will install some secret video game room somewhere on Yahoo's campus for you to hang out a little longer.

Re: What I Worked On

#197

Post by hardwaregeek »

What's interesting is how much of pg's early life was spent in preparation. Of course, it wasn't obviously preparation at the time, but art school + computer science PhD is a rare and effective combo. It's almost the complete opposite of the standard college dropout founder archetype. I recently read a hilariously titled book, "What Tech Calls Thinking" that's a pretty scathing analysis of the tech world. But one accurate point the author makes is that the college dropout founder usually doesn't have that much domain specific experience. Unless you come into college extremely well prepared, you're probably going to spend your first few years doing core and introductory classes. It's pretty unlikely you're going to get to the top 1% of a field within the first two years of college.

With pg, it's at the complete opposite extreme. I mean, ffs who does an PhD and then decides to go to art school? I'm curious on whether pg believes he would have done well had he done a startup immediately after undergrad. Considering how much Lisp played a factor, I doubt it. What about post-PhD and pre-art school? I'm not sure either; the art school did have a strong influence as well.

Another aspect that I liked was the duality of art and CS. I can relate to it, as I have a pretty big obsession with film and CS. Sometimes it feels like an endless tug of war between the two; one always distracting me from the other. It's fascinating seeing someone else handle that struggle.

Re: What I Worked On

#198

Post by monadic3 »

> But there's nothing like writing a book about something to help you learn it.

This is the motto of silicon valley if I've ever heard it—all the good parts and bad parts smushed into a singular brand. The bad parts are pure narcissism; the good parts are more or less asking "am I doing harm by investing in this predatory business"? Unfortunately, the answer is mostly "yes".

Re: What I Worked On

#199

Post by yters »

slibhb wrote: post #148
yters wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I belie…

He doesn't come off as uninformed. Plenty of philosophers who were well informed have variously proclaimed the death of philosopy or that philosophy is useless or that it has reached the end of its usefulness. Hume foreclosed on the possibility of metaphysics altogether. Kant disagreed but considered all metaphysics prior to him a failed project. Since Kant we've burrowed into the human mind and into human language.…

Alright, I will abrogate uninformed to misinformed. The latter is worse because it blinds PG.

Yes, exactly, Aristotle's project was supremely successful and one of its fruits is the calculus that underlies modern science and technology. How is that for immortality? I'd like to see PG discard that part of ancient philosophy.

Re: What I Worked On

#200

Post by robocat »

DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Some people live without fear for their future and explore their world.

Edit: PG wrote something relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html

The mindset is commonly trivialised as a class[1] issue, but that is easily debunked because people from poor, middle-income or rich backgrounds can live like PG has. Different wealth levels lead to different explanations for why someone lives more conservatively. Rich people are often trapped by social ranking or lack of motivation even though they have a financial backstop in theory. It is commonly said that the middle-class are the most trapped, yet plenty of middle class tune out and go beat their own drum. Poor people sometimes have nothing to lose, but perhaps they have to run two jobs just to stand still. The poor generally lack the opportunities (such as access to a PC or University) but sometimes make up for it with motivation and in some first-world countries they can freelance while on the dole (common with artists).

[1] class in the sense used within US English.

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