Letters Remain

Tag: paul-graham

  • Prioritising the Search for Good Books

    A favourite hobby of mine is research. Structured or unstructured, informal or scholarly. Deep diving on a topic, old or new, is my jam. For that reason, I spend a lot of time reading about the thing, rather than actually doing the thing. The meta-activities. There are clear negatives to this approach (limited impulsivity, slower…

  • The Good and Bad of Enumerated Lists

    Writing by enumeration–writing a ‘list of n things’–restricts you to a structure that is easier to produce and is easier for readers to follow and comprehend, but limits free thought. That’s one of many points that Paul Graham makes in an essay discussing the merits and disadvantages of writing enumerated lists. One obvious negative that Graham points out…

  • How to Disagree

    To aid the understanding and construction of quality arguments, Paul Graham has created a “disagreement hierarchy”: a study on how (and how not) to disagree. We can use this classification system to ensure that when we respond to a person’s reasoning, we respond to it in a way that is constructive for the conversation (by…

  • Scheduling and Non-Hierarchical Management

    These two essays have been doing the rounds of late, and for good reason: Paul Graham’s comparison between the schedules of Managers and the schedules of Makers (creatives). The gist? A manager’s day is divided into hour-long blocks of time, makers work in much longer, relatively unconstrained and non-discrete units of time. The problem is…

  • Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems

    Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…

  • Frugality and Entrepreneurship

    Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Graham—author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…