Paul Graham - Real Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

View all Paul Graham Quotes
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.

Paul Graham
If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.

Paul Graham
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
Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.

Paul Graham
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