Paul Graham: Doing

“No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. 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.”

Paul Graham

"Good And Bad Procrastination"], December 2005

Question , Dependency

“If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.”

Paul Graham

"How To Lose Time And Money", July 2010

Money , People , Books , Color

“Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.”

Paul Graham

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

School , Time

“I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.”

Paul Graham

"Great Hackers" http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html, July 2004

“If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You [high school students] don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.”

Paul Graham

"What You'll Wish You'd Known", January 2005

Life , School , Learning

“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.”

Paul Graham

"What You'll Wish You'd Known", January 2005

Life , Age , School

“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.”

Paul Graham

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

Children , People

“Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.”

Paul Graham

"Mean People Fail", November 2014

Hate , People , Stupidity , Idea

“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.”

Paul Graham

"How To Lose Time And Money"], July 2010

Way , Feeling , Time

“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."”

Paul Graham

Just the wrong things.
"Good And Bad Procrastination"], December 2005

Feeling

“The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.”

Paul Graham

"The Other Road Ahead" http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html, September 2001

Way

“The more you realize that most judgements 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.”

Paul Graham

"Two Kinds Of Judgment", April 2007

People

“I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.”

Paul Graham

"Good And Bad Procrastination", December 2005

Way , Problem , Thinking