Paul Graham Quotes

Core Life and Work Philosophy

From "Superlinear Returns":

"Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they're full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you're lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing occasionally you're probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to."

On Superlinear Returns

One of Graham's most important insights about how the world actually works:

"One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. 'You get out,' I heard a thousand times, 'what you put in.' They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business."

On Curiosity and Following Your Interests

"Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to."

On Writing and Thinking

From "Writes and Write-Nots":

"The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard."

"writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking."

And from another highlight:

"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 like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated."

On New Ideas and Innovation

"The best new ideas always have unanticipated benefits. So it's stupid to require people who want to do new things to enumerate the benefits beforehand. The best you can do is choose smart people and then trust their intuitions about what's worth exploring."

"A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing."

These highlights capture Graham's key insights about work, creativity, writing, and understanding how success actually works in the world. His emphasis on following curiosity, taking calculated risks, and understanding the non-linear nature of returns are particularly valuable for anyone interested in entrepreneurship or doing meaningful work.