Our favorite Paul Graham Essays
Paul Graham has been a source of wisdom and advice for countless entrepreneurs over the past few decades. He started Y-Combinator, the world’s most successful startup incubator/accelerators and many of the most successful starts today were born at YC – from Dropbox to AirBnB and Stripe. His writings are available for free on his website and below we’ve highlighted a few of our absolute favorites.
How to Write Usefully
What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That’s what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful. Read More >>
How to Do What You Love
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. Read More >>
Six Principles for Making New Things
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. Read More >>
What Happened to Yahoo
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.
What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company. Read More >>
The Age of the Essay
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball. Read More >>
Defining Success
Work-Life Balance: is there such a thing?
Artists & creatives on why they pursued a creative career
Rolling the dice: conversations on risk
How did you come up with the idea for your business?
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12 Great Essays by Paul Graham
Life skills, is it worth being wise, keep your identity small, how to disagree, what you can’t say, good and bad procrastination, the submarine, taste for makers, the acceleration of addictiveness, post-medium publishing.
Words and Writing
The age of the essay, writing, briefly, writing and speaking, see also…, 10 great articles by venkat rao, 12 great articles by gary wolf.
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COMMENTS
There's a certain kind of idea that's best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are still unwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered. Notes [1] Put railings on the balconies, but don't put bars on the windows. [2] Even now I sometimes write essays that are not meant for publication.
(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and ...
Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school. The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant. It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were ...
So the lesson is this: Write what is true. And if the sentence is not true, rewrite it until it's true, or simply remove it from your writing. 2. Show Novelty. If you want to surprise readers, show novelty. Paul Graham says: "You should only write about novel ideas." Meaning, tell something your readers don't already know.
I really enjoy Scott Alexander's and Paul Graham's essays. They seem to have a boundless source of ideas, every paragraph is insightful, every idea is original - most of their thoughts seem like something they just came up with, not something they have learned elsewhere (through research or experience).
Paul Graham has been a source of wisdom and advice for countless entrepreneurs over the past few decades. ... The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write.
Words and Writing The Age of the Essay What an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. Writing, Briefly As for how to write well, here's the short version… Writing and Speaking Having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.
Writes and Write-Nots: When To Do What You Love: Founder Mode: The Right Kind of Stubborn: The Reddits: How to Start Google: The Best Essay: Superlinear Returns: How to Do Great Work: How to Get New Ideas: The Need to Read: What You (Want to)* Want: Alien Truth: What I've Learned from Users: Heresy: Putting Ideas into Words: Is There Such a ...
About 70% of Paul Graham's essays contain the word "example," usually within the phrase "for example." When he introduces an abstract idea, you're never more than a sentence or two away from a well-picked example. ... During our review of Paul Graham's writing, Dr. Jaworski identified this technique and explained it to me. As part ...
By Paul Graham September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one.