#276 Paul Graham’s Essays Part 2

There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You see this pattern with start-up founders. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't. Like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists or starting a site to let people rent air beds on strangers floors. These are referencing Microsoft and Airbnb there. Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? Independent mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture, which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research. One difficult to hear is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional to independent minded. Conventional minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional minded. It genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers. And the independent minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones. At least, till they state them publicly. Can you make yourself more independent minded? I think so. It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself with independent minded people, hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to and to think of more. The independent minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional minded people. A place where the independent and conventional minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent minded. Otherwise, the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional minded people greatly outnumber independent minded ones. So as the company grows, the original spirit of independent mindedness is inevitably deluded. This causes all kinds of problems, besides the obvious one, that the company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies. Then with their own employees, the importance of founders knowing other founders is repeated a lot in Paul's essays. I'm going to read that one more time because it takes important. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. You don't have to spend all your time with independent minded people. It's enough to have one or two who you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you are. They need you too. You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space by reading history. When I read history, I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is why I say every entrepreneur needs a library. It's a tool for entrepreneurs. Back to his idea about how to make yourself more independent minded. More generally, your goal should be not to let anything into your head on examine. And things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas. When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see these ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion. You notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more and more until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. There are intellectual fashions too. And you definitely don't want to participate in those. Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionate, oh my god this is so good. Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking. Novel ideas come from curiosity. Independent mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly. Everyone I know whose independent minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know whose conventional minded isn't. The independent minded are the glutton of curiosity who keep eating even after they're full. And this is what I think the most important sentence in this entire essay is. How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is not much, maybe you should change something. Curiosity is unlike most other appetites, indulging it tends to increase rather than to satiate it. Questions lead to more questions. So perhaps curiosity is the compass. Perhaps if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about." That is an excerpt from Paul Graham's excellent essay "How to Think for Yourself." And so before I jump into his next excellent essay, which is "How to Work Hard," if I sound funny, what I went through this week is going to be very familiar to anybody with school-aged children. My daughter brought home some kind of sickness. I was spread to my son, then spread to my wife, and then now I finally have gotten it. And so for the last few days, I've just been hold up in bed, reading and reading and reading, anytime I'm not asleep. So I have spent the last few weeks living inside the mind of Paul Graham. And it has been an amazing experience. So not only have I finished reading all of his essays, since I was sick in bed, I had the opportunity I've already finished reading his book, which is a collection of essays, too, called "Hackers and Painters," which would be the next episode of Founders. I also have a collection of essays that I read and highlighted and made notes on that I won't get to today. I'll probably do it in maybe like a few weeks, maybe a few months. I'll just do like bonus episodes on Paul Graham's essays, maybe every few months, because I do think they're extremely valuable for Founders. So let's jump into my apologies if I sound a little funny. Let's jump into "How to Work Hard." And so Paul writes, "It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard." Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now, then when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. One thing I know is that this is so good. I'm just going to repeat myself over and over again, because I'm a huge fan of his writing. One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Was there perhaps, I thought about this way, and you might have as well, when I was younger. I was like, "Everybody tell me it's like don't work hard. Don't work harder. Work smarter." And then what you realize is when you start studying people that reach the top of their profession. And if you want to be excellent at what you do and really do great work, that you do both. They all do both. They work hard and smart. And so Paul's kind of going back to his inner monologue, but he was having it as a kid. He's like, "Was there perhaps some way to evade hard work? Do cheer-billionths?" Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. In fact, Paul has this great quote where he's responding on Twitter. He's responding back to Patrick Carlson, the founder of Stripe, saying, "Hey, you know, Stripe was really hard to build. It took a lot of intensity and we had to work very hard." And he said something like, "Hey, you know, maybe better founders." "You're able to do, build something great without working hard, but we couldn't figure out a way to do that." And Paul's response was, "That's an empty set. If Patrick and John Carlson had to work both smart and hard, you're going to have to too." And so I feel that's where he's, that's very much his perspective in this essay. The recent famous adult seemed to do things effortlessly, was years of practice. They made it look easy because they were practicing in private. I mean, you talk about this all the time. There are three ingredients and great work. Natural ability, practice, and effort. This is really special to me because I feel, in the last like six months, maybe 12 months, I feel like, "You and I have been talking about practice just over and over and over again. I've become obsessed with the idea." You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work, you need all three. Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era. But he was also among the hardest working. I never took a day off of my 20s, he said. Not one. It was similar with Lionel Messi. When his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent, but his dedication and his desire to win. PG Woodenhouse, or Wodehouse, would probably get my vote for the best English writer of the 20th century. No one has ever made it look easier, but no one ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote, "With each new book of mine I have, the feeling that this time I've picked a lemon in the Garden of Lyscher." "A good thing, really, I suppose, it keeps one up on one's toes, and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times, or in many cases twenty times." That line reminded me of something Rick Rubin said back on episode 245 of Founders. And he says, "Less is more, but you have to do more to get less." And there's many examples when Rick is working with some of the best musicians that have ever lived, and they'll redo a section of the guitar 30 times. If they want ten great songs, they might have to write a hundred just to get able to reduce it down to ten. So this idea that keeps you on one's toes makes one rewrite every sentence ten times, or in many cases twenty times. That is somebody at the top of their profession, and had decades of experience at the time. He's 74 when he wrote that. It sounds a bit extreme, you think, and yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural abilities anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work. So remember, to go back to the title of the essay "How to Work Hard." They had as much natural abilities anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. And so you can't really change how much natural talent you have. In practice doing great work in so far as you can, reduces. to working very hard. What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work towards goals that are this is really the description of the founder's journey, right? He's saying you have the work towards goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things. When I'm not working hard, so this is he's describing his like what happens in his own mind. When he feels he's not working hard enough, I wrote this is a gift in the curse. I highly suspect that. I mean, I feel like this a lot. I'm highly suspect you do as well. When I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not. And it feels awful. The reason it's a gift in the curse because you have this fire in the belly, this internal drive, but you can't really turn it off. And in some cases, my own inner monologue I've told you before sounds a lot like David Guggen's book. You can't hurt me. And I also don't think that's healthy either. I think you have to moderate it because you can be extremely, I guess there's no other word. You should just be extremely mean to yourself. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust. See this exactly, I know exactly what you're talking about. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust, disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely datable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV at age 13, he's going to talk about he stopped watching. He got serious about his work at 13. So I'll talk about something Patrick Kalsen told him. So I'll just type, I'm going to leave a link in the show notes that you should read it. You can just Google if you want. It's called aliens, Jedi and cults. It is a way to think about people that build incredible, usually incredible companies or even incredible movements. Paul is an alien. If you read that quick post, you can read it in like five minutes. You understand what I mean by that. Patrick Kalsen is also an alien. So it says that one precisely datable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV at age 13. When I asked Patrick Kalsen, when he started to find it on this distasteful, and that's another theme. This is in the book that I'll talk about next week too. He talks a lot about like, I don't this is not, you're seeking it. It's not going to make you happy. He finds it, well distasteful. I guess the word he used there. He started to find it on this distasteful. He said, this is Patrick speaking now. I think around age 13 or 14, I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday. Back to Paul, strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school, which made work or what they called work seem boring and pointless. I talked about this really reference to Ethereal His Best Essay on this on last week's podcast. If you obviously this is part two, you don't really have to listen to him in order if you don't want to, but I would listen to them, I listen to all three of them, you can pick the order. It probably makes sense to go in order. But anyway, so that essay is how to do what you love. It talks a lot about this. The problem is we're teaching, we're confusing kids that they automatically associate work with something, oh, I have to do, I'm not supposed to like it. And let me just get it over with. And that way I can then go and do the play part of my day or do what I want to do. And Paul makes the point, well, you're never going to be great at what you do if you have that attitude. You have to be called to do it. It's almost like a I get pulls you down this path where you want to do it. But as I learned the shape of real work, I found that my desire to do it, slotted into it as if they'd been made for one another. And so that's what he's going to refer from here on in as a real work for work that you actually want to do. Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply working every waking hour because in many kinds of work, there's a point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline. This is very fascinating. He talks about the different limits that he's experienced his own life. I've done several different kinds of work and the limits were different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. So same thing for me, it's impossible. Like when I hear Warren Buffett say he can read 500 or 600 pages a day, there's no way I could read 500 or 600 pages a day. You know, for me, it's, you know, to read to four hours, it's very most of a book a day. So it's kind of very similar to what he's finding when he's programming. He's just, hey, my limit for programming is about five hours a day, whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. And then I like this point, the only way to find your limit for working is by crossing it. Honesty is critical here in both directions. You have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard, finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process and not something you do just once. Then he gets into your motivation for wanting to work this hard to begin with, but keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working at VioWeb, that was the startup that he sold to Yahoo. I was driven by the fear of failure. So I'm going to pause right there. This is something that was fantastic. Jimmy Iveen. There's a great documentary on HBO called the Defiant Ones. And Jimmy Iveen's had a very interesting career. Record producer, founder, winds up selling the company. He co-owned with Dr. Dre to Apple for billions, millions of dollars. But there's at the very beginning of this Dr. Dre song called All in the Days Work, there's a clip of Jimmy Iveen talking about how he utilized fear as a tool. And this is what he said. Fear is a powerful thing. I mean, it's got a lot of firepower. If you could figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind, rather than to stand in front of you, that's very powerful. I always felt I had to work harder than the next guy, just to do as well as the next guy. And to do better than the next guy, I just had to kill it. And you know, to a certain extent, that's still with me in how I work. You know, I just go in. And so the idea that fear is a powerful force if you can actually use that as a tool instead of a hinderance, something that Jimmy Iveen repeats over and over again in a lot of different contexts. When I was working on Vio web, I was driven by a fear of failure. I barely procrastinate at all then because there was always something that needed doing. And if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, then why wait? Whereas what drives me now, writing essays, is the flaws in them. So he is writing, I should tell you, because a lot of the essays I covered last week were a lot older. I do have some that are maybe over 10 years old in the selection today, but the one I started with came from to the, it isn't written in 2020, and this one is from 2021. So let's go back to this. Between essays, I fuss for a few days like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work, because there's always some error or a mission that is already pushing me. And in this next part, it's just absolutely excellence. I think that that is very common with high achievers or people that want to be higher achievers is this weird thing where you're almost more afraid of losing than you are. Like the, the, the pain of losing is almost greater than the thrill of winning. This part is excellent. Many problems have a hardcore at the center surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming towards the center to the extent that you can. So again, many problems hardcore at the center surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Of course, I think you know where he's going with this, most people are just going to nibble on the easy part, right? But you only, you make the, do a big jumps in the big progress by aiming towards the center. Working hard means aiming towards the center to the extent that you can't. Some days you may not be able to. Some days you'll only be able to work on the easier peripheral stuff, but you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling. That is an absolutely excellent couple of paragraphs later. I just keep repeating in the margins. Excellent. The consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken. Both in general and within specific fields. The consensus about which problems are the most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific fields. If you disagree with it in your right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new. If you discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, which we talked about echoes of this last week. And there's a vol-ravicon. Also talks about this a lot. That's episode 191. I think I went back and read my notes from the "Almond I Can Evolve" and there's a lot of overlap between "Navol's Perspective" and "Paul." I actually think reading these books maybe I'll reread it very soon. I actually think "Paul Grimm's Essays" and "Navol" and "Navol's Thoughts Go." There's a lot of overlap and they go hand in hand, I guess what I'm saying. Because this echoes a lot what "Navol" says. It's like you have to find work that feels like play. And the way to do that is there's something that you do that seems easier, quote unquote to you, but other people can't believe you can do it. So it says if you do see over some type of ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, either because of the ability to happen to have or because of some way of some new way you found our approach it, or simply because you're more excited about it. By all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard. This may be my favorite sentence in the entire. I can't like scream or jump up and down like I normally do, but this is just. I love this. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can. So imagine if you could find a deep. like you just you feel compelled. You have to do this. A deep interest in a topic and then you combine that with world class discipline. Some people figure out what to do is children and just do it like Mozart. That's a crazy life story. Episode 240 is the Mozart documentary. I got to go back. Mozart biography. I'm going to have to read more books on him because that's just. I think he starts doing it at what? Three years older from him or correctly. But others like Newton turn recessally from one kind of work to another. And so obviously I think Paul makes the point in this essay and if he doesn't I'm sure he would agree with it. Way more common for you to have a path like Newton than it is for people to have a path like Mozart. Along with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're doing you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not getting good enough results you should switch. It sounds simple express that way but in practice it's very difficult and unfortunately no one can tell you other than yourself. It's only works if you can trust your own judgment right? But how much time and what should you do if work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then? And when I like about Paul's, he's not saying, "Hey, I have the answers." He's got approximations. But again, this is the reason that goes back to one of the best things that I've been talking about in a conversation since that podcast came out. It's just his thought. It's like how many people truly get to do, like how many, first of all, how many people find work they truly love and then work themselves in a way, in a position to actually do work they love. And he's like, it's hundreds of thousands out of billions. This is so difficult. The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get. You're the one working on this stuff. Who's this kind of ran over his point here, right? Who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting. So one line I say over and over again that I try to use as a guide, not only for myself, but also who to spend time with, is the most interesting people are the most interested. So this idea is like who knows better new, what's better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting. And then this is just absolutely fantastic. Just what an ending to this essay working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work. See clearly what you're what kind you're best suited for. Aim is close to the true core as you can. Accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick a men. But if you're consistently honest and clear sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape and you'll be productive in a way few people are. Okay, so I want to skip to the next essay as with everything I will link all these essays down below. They're all free to read online even if you don't read the ones I covered. I would just go to pogramsprogram.com all the time and just pick an essay random. Like they're all listed there just what sounds like what headline or title sounds most interesting to you. And then I do think the benefit is like rereading them you know intermittently. They definitely change I've read that read some of them you know who knows how many times. And every time I learn something different because I've changed as a person since then. So this is how to lose time and money is written in 2010. And it says when we sold our startup in 1988 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before. How not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the past from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now in order to avoid them I had to learn where they were. So again how to lose time and money is any of the essay. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. I've read a bunch about this too it's it's fascinating. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not do excessive expenditure. But through bad investments this is also in line with the research I've done. I was shocked by it. I think I've told you in the past one of my oldest friends his dad played in the NFL. But this is like years before they made a ton of money. When he retired he started a non-profit. And that non-profit was was the fact that you know 90 something percent of them line up coming bankruptcy. And I think now they've expanded way past you know just this one form and to other sports and everything. They just been going on for quite a while decades. But I'll never forget this is probably I don't know 10 or 15 years ago when I learned this. But they said the same thing it's like they don't go you think they're going porkers are buying for Rory's is like no they gave their idiot cousin $250,000 to start a restaurant that tanked. It's all these investments. It's like here I'll give you 50,000 for this and it just goes up and smoke. So let's go back to that in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not do excessive expenditure. But do bad investments it's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Whereas if you start trading derivatives you can lose a million dollars or as much as you want in the blink of an eye. And he makes the point why this is so difficult because in most people's minds if you're spending you know a bunch of money There's like alarms that go off. It's like well I spent way too much money on luxuries or stuff. I don't actually need where if you you say now that money that money leaves your bank account right and it's going to leave your bank account For like a very fancy car or nice person like that. Hopefully if you have some kind of you know level intelligence like hey I wish probably not do that in relation to the wealth I have. But the problem what what the point Paul makes here is that when you reframe the money leaving your bank account as an investment It bypasses these alarms even if a lot of its investments are going to go to zero investing bypasses these alarms. You're not spending the money. You're just moving it from one asset to another. And this primary me laugh he says which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say quote it's an investment. And so this part of absolutely love a few days ago I realized something surprising. The situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is to not spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. If I woke up one morning and sat down on a sofa and watched TV all day I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince and so he ties us together. But if you do fake work kind of bypasses that alarm just like a fake investment right and yet I've definitely had days when I might as When I might as well sat in front of the TV all day days at the end of which if I asked myself what I got done that day the answer would have been basically nothing. 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 dealing with email for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun so it must be work with time as with money avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. The world has gotten more complicated. The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is they're not even fun. Okay so now I want to jump to an essay that I've read a bunch of times. It's called Shlep Blindness has written in January 2012. There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. Run reason we do not see them is a phenomenon I call Shlep Blindness. A Shlep it means a tedious and unpleasant task. This is going to remind you of something you and I talked about a bunch that business is problems and that companies are just effective problem solving machines. I learned from experience that Shleps are not merely inevitable but pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the Shleps it will undertake number tedious unpleasant tasks and Shleps should be dealt with the same way you deal with the cold. The cold swimming pool just jump in which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great what a fantastic line. It's not that you should seek out unpleasant work but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great. The most dangerous thing about our dislike of Shleps is that much of it is unconscious. You're unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful Shleps. That is Shlep, Shlep Blindness. And then he gives the greatest illustration of this idea and why it's a powerful and what he means by describing that stripe build their entire business on this idea. It really think about this as like it's a problem that is so hard that most people won't even consider it. The most striking example I know of Shlep Blindness is stripe or rather stripe's idea for over a decade every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem and yet when they started startups they decided to build a recipe site or an aggregator for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care about, few care much about and no one will pay for when you could fix one of the most important components of the world. Because Shlep Blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments. He gives a fantastic metaphor to describe the value and these really hard problems, problems so hard that were kind of ignoring their existence. That's scaryness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. They're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious idea you'll have less competition because everyone else would have been frightened off by the challenges involved. This is also true of starting a startup generally. And then this next paragraph I'm just going to read to you what I jotted down in the margin when I got to the section. I've read several examples in these biographies that say exactly this. How do you overcome Shlep Blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to Shlep Blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. And then he ends giving you an excellent advice. The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking what problem should I solve? Ask what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me? And then I absolutely love this next essay. It's essentially Paul giving us a summary of what he's learned by building a Y-combinator. It's called What I've Learned from Users is written in September 2022. And so he says, "What have I learned from Y-sees users?" Which are the startups that they funded. And this just jumps out to me as well. I've shared this with you before. After reading hundreds of biographies to founders, I noticed a very similar idea as what Paul says here. The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but it's surprising how much the problems remain the same regardless of what they're making. Once you've advised 100 startups, all doing different things, you rarely encounter problems you haven't done. scene before. And this happened to him recently, he tweeted out in August of 2022. He says, "Today I talked to a startup doing so well that they had no current problems that needed solving. They're profitable, growing revenue 20 times a year." And he said, "Not a typo." So it's very unusual, 20 times a year. And they're only nine employees. This is so rare that I didn't know what to do. We ended up talking about problems they might have in the future. I advise them. And then you see this steam over and over again. He wants you to have control of your own destiny. And he talked about what he would do. He's like, you know, keep the company as small as possible, not in revenues, but in employees. That way you actually have more of like a maker's schedule than a manager's schedule, which is probably what most founders want to do anyways. So he says, "I advise them never to raise another round. So to get equity, you're going to have to be hired there. So learn how to program." So back to the essay. The fact is one of the things that makes why this fact, excuse me, is one of the things that makes why see work. I didn't know it when we started YC. It was a surprise to me how often the same problems recur in different forms. And I love that he says this, "But knowing nearly all the problems startups can encounter doesn't mean that advising them can be automated or reduced to a formula. Each startup is unique." In this essay, I think just should be mandatory reading for founders. I don't know why anybody wouldn't want to read it. I mean, this entire next page, I essentially highlighted the whole thing. And the reason I say that is because he's just giving us the blueprint. So I just like, "Listen, not only do startups encounter the same problems open over again, but founders make the same mistakes over and over again." So again, I would assume every single person making this mistake smarter than me, what's the likelihood that I would not do the exact same thing? So my goal is, can I be one of these very, very rare people that actually learn from the experience of other people? It's extremely hard to do. Another surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk about some problem, and we will discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation. For example, in this case, it's all too common. Founders will come in to talk about the difficulties they're having raising money, and after digging into the situation, it turns out the reason is that the company is doing badly and investors can tell. Our founders will come in worried that they still haven't cracked the problem of user acquisition, and the reason turns out to be that their product isn't good enough. There have been times when I've asked, "Would you use this yourself if you hadn't built it?" But founders on thinking about it said, "No." Well, there's a reason you're having trouble getting users. So this is where we have a massive advantage. You and I have a massive advantage because you get to experience this because I have this giant database of all these different highlights and notes from hundreds of biographies. When I get to this section, he's just like, "This is beautiful," what he said. "Would you use this if you hadn't built it?" and the founders, after thinking about it, say, "No." Well, there's a reason you're having trouble getting users, and I just reread this highlight two days ago, and it's Steve Jobs talking about where he comes up with his product ideas. He's like, "It's not about pop culture. It's not about you fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want." And once you do that, the second part, he says, "I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of people are going to want it to." Same idea. The Jobs talk about he's in his own career is what Paul's advising the founders that he's talking to do the same thing. You've made a giant mistake. Often founders know what their problems are, but not their relative importance. They'll come in to talk about three problems they're worrying about. One is of moderate importance. One doesn't matter at all, and one will kill the company. If it isn't addressed immediately, it's like watching one of those horror movies where the heroine is deeply upset that her boyfriend cheated on her and only mildly curious about the door that's mysteriously a jar. You want to say never mind about your boyfriend. Think about the door. The YC partners can warn them where the murderers are. Not that founders listen. That was another big surprise. This is why I say it. I just think founders should be reading this essay. So think about how much work. From Paul's perspective, that's obviously a big surprise. You have to go through all these hoops. You have to spend a lot of time and effort to get accepted in the YC. It's now very prestigious. I'm sure they turn away a good percentage of the people that apply. You've had to do a bunch of things to even get to this point to where you're actually talking. The partners at this organization that you apply to that you think is going to greatly improve the odds of your company's success. Why the hell would you not listen to their advice? When I think of this, if I'm put in their shoes, I would probably make the same mistake of their making. How do I avoid it? I think just being aware and constantly reminding yourself that, "Oh, it's common mistake. Pause, step outside yourself. What's the chance, David, you're not doing the same thing?" It's very, very likely that you're doing the exact same thing. So it says, "Not that founders listen." This was another big surprise. How often founders don't listen to us. A couple weeks ago, I talked to a partner who had been working for YC for a couple of batches and was starting to see the pattern. They come back a year later, she said, and say, "We wish we listened to you." And then this is just fantastic. It took me a long kind of figure out why founders don't listen. At first, I thought it was mere stubbornness. That's part of the reason, but another and probably more important reason is that so much about startups is counterintuitive. This is, I think I talked about this in the last podcast that they don't Charlie Munger. I've done a bunch of them, but it's episode 221. I found this is a book called "Damn Right." In that book, Charlie Munger says, "If he was ever teaching like a finance course or course on business, he would," he was like, "The curriculum would just be the histories of 100 companies that did something right or did something wrong." And it's a way to pierce like this counterintuitive nature of business building, right? So it says another and probably more important reason is that so much about startups is counterintuitive. And when you tell someone something counterintuitive, what it sounds to them is wrong. So the reason founders don't listen to us is that they don't believe us. At least not to experience teaches them otherwise. The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what it's like except those who have done it. And that is why you will know this feeling that I'm about to say. If you do this, that's why when you read the autobiographies of entrepreneurs in the past, yes, they're full of good ideas, but you're going to find that experience comforting. And this one to be good for Paul and his company because he says, "If it weren't counterintuitive, founders wouldn't need our advice about how to do it." And so then he gives us some advice. Focus is doubly important for early stage startups because not only do they have 100 different problems, but they don't have anyone to work on them except the founders. Figure out which problems matter most and then cook up ideas for solving them. Try those ideas and measure how well they worked. If you correct course at a high enough frequency, you can be simultaneously decisive at a micro scale and tentative at a macro scale. This is going to be very similar to this idea you and I have talked about a bunch about Jeff Bezos. He has this idea about two-way doors. Like most of the decisions you're making in business are reversible. So make the decision. He's like, if it's something, if it's a decision, you cannot reverse what she calls a one-way door. And you better analyze that six-way to Sunday. But 99% of the decisions you're going to make are reversible. So he's like, "I think it's from the book Amazon Unbound." Probably founders 180 if I remember correctly. Where he's like, "Listen, sometimes you have to aim aim aim aim and then shoot." He's talking to Amazon executives about launching a new business line in Amazon. He's like, "Sometimes you have to aim aim aim aim and then shoot." He's like, "This is not one of those times. I want you to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot." And then aim. This is very similar to what he's saying. If you course correct at a high enough frequency, you can be simultaneously decisive at a micro scale and tentative at a macro scale. The result is a somewhat winding path, but executed very rapidly. Like the path that we're running back takes down field. That's one of my favorite metaphors. He uses a few times in his essays. You know where you're going. You're going down field, but you're very flexible in how you're going to get there. And including some cases, you have to go backwards, right? And so then he goes to the value that Y-commoner to give the founders in this specific example. That's where a lot of Y-C's value lies. And helping founders get an extra increment of focus that lets them move faster. Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. Y-C improves focus. I double-underline that sentence. Focus enables speed. One of the favorite things I ever heard was Seth Bannon told me about the founder of Cover Alexis Rivas that he was intolerant of slowness. I thought about that when I was reading the biography of Alexander the Great for episode 232. And I realized, oh, the combination of that Alexander combined in excessive tolerance of fatigue with an intolerance of slowness. Focus enables speed. Then he goes back to some more valuable ideas for founders. It can still be valuable for an experienced founder to do Y-C just as it could still be valuable for an experienced athlete to have a coach. The other big thing Y-C gives founders is colleagues. And this may be even more important than the advice of partners. If you look at history, great work clusters around certain places and institutions. I've noticed the same thing in the book side of it. However good you are, good colleagues make you better. Indeed, very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else because they're so starved for them in everyday life. And Paul knew this for a long time. I see this when he's like in his 30s writing essays. Maybe before he started Y-C, we were very aware of this historical phenomenon and deliberately designed Y-C to be one. By this point it's not bragging to say that it's the biggest cluster of great startup founders. And then he also proves that he takes his own advice. I often tell founders to make something they themselves want and Y-C is certainly that. was designed to be exactly what we wanted when we were starting a startup. And I don't think he's writing it for the following reason, but I said, this is more and buff at level content marketing. By this point, I'm like, how do I get in? I think by this point, the point that Paul's writing the SSA, you know, the momentum behind why he's kind of unstoppable. But it just goes to the quality of his writing and the clarity of his thinking that even if he's not trying to give you a marketing pitch, he's thought about this a lot, and then therefore he can explain why it's valuable to you and that idea immediately gets inside your mind. So he says something magical happens when they do cluster. The energy in the room and a YC dinner is like nothing else I've experienced. When you have a whole room full, it's another thing entirely. YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one another. That, again, I see this over and over again, why on earth? Most of the times when an entrepreneur writes an autobiography, they do it when they're, you know, they're very close to the end of the life and they know they're close to the end of their life. And in many cases, I'm thinking of Ingvar Camprod, Thunder Rikia as one example, but in many cases they do so. They're reluctant to do so and they usually only do so because they're like, hey, the lessons I learn can benefit future generations of entrepreneurs. I feel that Paul's dead right about this. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup founders, how generous they can be in helping one another. Same thing. I've seen this exact same thing, just how generous people are with their own ideas. It's remarkable and I try to do the exact same thing. How generous they can be in helping one another. The result is something far more intense than say a university. Between the partners, the alumni, their batch mates, founders are surrounded by people who want to help them and can. And that is where I'll leave it for today. I got a bunch of essays I'll cover in the future in a bonus episode and then as soon as I can, my voice is back, I will record the part, Paul Graham Part III, which would be the final ball gram for a while, which would be on his book, Hackers and Painters. That is 276 podcasts down 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.