Great Throughts Treasury

"The key to being a good hacker may be to work on what you like. When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to. I don't know if this is cause or effect; it may be both."

"The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you."

"The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things."

"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about."

"The more you realize that most judgments are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors?that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate?the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome."

"The most important quality in a CEO is his vision for the company?s future."

"The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together."

"The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together."

"The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie?s How to Win Friends and Influence People."

"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. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong... But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work."

"The point is that we need the smart, erudite and eloquent people in the art world, the clever curators and writers, those who do get it, to take the time to speak seriously about the nature of such photography, and articulate something of its dazzlingly unique qualities, to help the greater art world, and the public itself understand the nature of the creative act when you dance with life itself - when you form the meaningless world into photographs, then form those photographs into a meaningful world."

"The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."

"The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers."

"The Summer Founders Program fixes the common problem with working at a startup, which is that it's very lonely. You do nothing but work and sleep and no one understands the situation you are in, and friends don't know why it takes three days for you to call them back."

"The very best ideas usually seem like bad ideas at first. Google seemed like a bad idea. There were already several other search engines, some of which were operated by public companies. Who needed another? And Facebook? When I first heard about Facebook, it was for college students, who don't have any money. And what do they do there? Waste time looking at one another's profiles. That seemed like the stupidest company ever. I'm glad no one gave me an opportunity to turn it down."

"The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better."

"The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse."

"Then I said jokingly, but not entirely jokingly, 'But not from me,' and everyone's faces fell, ... Afterwards, I had dinner with some of these guys and they seemed amazingly competent and I thought, 'You know, these guys probably could start companies.'"

"The way the failures die is they run out of money. So what could cause them to run out of money? They can either not make something people want or they can be bad at selling it. Sometimes, they're just bad at selling. But most of the time, start-ups fail for the same reasons restaurants do: Their food is bad. If a place has really good food, it can be in an obscure location, charge a lot, and have really bad service, and it will still be popular. If it has bad food, boy, it better do something really special to get anybody in there. Which is why we say, "Make something people want." That's the fundamental problem. If you die, it's probably because you didn't make something people wanted."

"The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans."

"There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student."

"There are several reasons that sponsors come to these events. Advertising. Exposure. To attract people to their product and interaction with other businesses."

"There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere."

"There are all these great programmers out there who think starting a startup requires esoteric business knowledge,"

"There is nothing particularly grand about making money. That is not what makes startups worth the trouble. What is important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that."

"There remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself -photographs taken from the world as it is? are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ?documentary? tag."

"There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now."

"There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age."

"To be fair, pros come out. They wear shorts. They have a good time. A lot of times if the guest hits a good drive, the pro will just say: 'Let's go.' It's just fun."

"These last games are the most important. We want to be at the top, not at the bottom."

"We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler."

"When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project."

"When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets. I didn't realize there were power plants out there generating it. Likewise, it doesn't occur to most kids that wealth is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something that flows from parents."

"What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is."

"When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."

"When technology makes something dramatically cheaper, standardization always follows."

"When I was a kid, your prestige was the prestige of the company you worked for. Part of the problem with starting your own company was that you wouldn't have any prestige. Now that people are starting more companies, I could easily imagine a world in which the number of successful start-ups is 10 times or, conceivably, 100 times what it is now. There are tons of Brian Cheskys (CEO of Airbnb) and Drew Houstons (CEO of Dropbox) going off to work for Microsoft or Google right now. They could start their own companies if they wanted to. We might have to figure out how to grow, too. Maybe there's some crazy future in which Y Combinator is 10 times as big. This is a world where shit like that is always happening."

"When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."

"When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand."

"While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please."

"Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children."

"Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives."

"Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I?m convinced, is a mistake."

"Why Nerds are Unpopular ? Their minds are not on the game. 1. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. 2. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. 3. Most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who ?can draw? like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that?s why they?re good at it. 4. Smart people?s lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after. 5. People unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. 6. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. 7. The most popular kids don?t persecute nerds, they don?t need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes. 8. I think the important thing about the real world is not that it?s populated by adults, but that it?s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That?s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they can do can have more than a local effect. 9. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children. 10. And as for the schools, they were just holding pins within this fake school. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. 11. What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren?t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend 6 years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they?re called misfits. 12. In pre-industrial times, (kids) were all apprentices of one sort of another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. / Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they?ll do as adults. 13. it?s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It?s all encompassing, like life, but it isn?t the real thing. It?s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you?re still in it. [paraphrased]"

"You can go anywhere in books."

"You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false."

"You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers."

"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible."

"Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office."