Paul Graham: Doing

Paul Graham is English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

Paul Graham: 86 quotes4 likes

“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.”

"Good And Bad Procrastination"], December 2005

“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.”

"How To Lose Time And Money", July 2010

“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.”

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

“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.”

"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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

“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.”

"Mean People Fail", November 2014

“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.”

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

“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.
"Good And Bad Procrastination"], December 2005

“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.”

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

“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.”

"Two Kinds Of Judgment", April 2007

“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.”

"Good And Bad Procrastination", December 2005