Essays, PG 101, back to inspiring people
My favorite essays:
The top of my to do list
Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy
Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule
Managers schedule things every hour.
Programmers use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
One meeting can sometimes affect a whole day.
Managers should understand this cost.
Good and bad procrastination
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading.
In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they’re working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?
What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?
Another reason people don’t work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won’t be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)
Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you’ll leave the right things undone.
The top idea in your mind
Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else.
Most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time, which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
There are two types of thoughts worth avoiding: thoughts about money and disputes.
I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
How to do what you love
As a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition.
If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.
It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken
If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
Try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
You shouldn’t worry about prestige. This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young.
The other big force leading people astray is money.
Try to do a good job at whatever you’re doing, even if you don’t like it. Always produce
The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t.
The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do
In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
Early on, seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.
How to lose time and money
The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly.
And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. But the alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.
How to work hard
You have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong.
I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn’t achieving anything.
You have to notice when you’re being lazy, but also when you’re working too hard. And if you think there’s something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head.
The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting.
Writing, briefly
How to write well: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don’t (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don’t try to sound impressive; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.
Life is short
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that’s bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
If you’re a freelancer or a small company, you can fire or avoid toxic customers.
Things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions.
In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.
Ask yourself whether you’ll care about it in the future.
You take things for granted, and then they’re gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die.
Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.
Do things that don’t scale (startup advice)
The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.
Founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can’t be how the big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth.
Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure.
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy.
One should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later.
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn’t work: the Big Launch.
What I worked on [for this quote:]
One day in 2010, when he was visiting California for interviews, Robert Morris did something astonishing: he offered me unsolicited advice. I can only remember him doing that once before. One day at Viaweb, when I was bent over double from a kidney stone, he suggested that it would be a good idea for him to take me to the hospital. That was what it took for Rtm to offer unsolicited advice. So I remember his exact words very clearly. “You know,” he said, “you should make sure Y Combinator isn’t the last cool thing you do.”
Leo :) 