Paul Graham Quotes
About Paul Graham
A computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor. His work includes the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpage Hacker News.
Quote
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question.
Insight
Strong work starts from wanting to understand something deeply, not from forcing yourself to work hard.
Actionable Takeaways
- Write one question you genuinely can't stop wondering about.
- Replace aimless browsing with researching your question.
Insight
Without writing, thinking becomes vague—writing is not just expression but a tool for clarity.
Actionable Takeaways
- Start a daily writing habit – Spend 10 minutes each day writing about a problem, idea, or belief to clarify your thinking.
- Use writing to make decisions – Before making a tough choice, write out the pros, cons, and assumptions to expose hidden logic gaps.
- Revisit what you wrote – Review your past writings weekly to spot patterns, refine ideas, and challenge your own evolving logic.
Insight
In the very early stages of your startup, you should focus on doing tasks and activities that are highly manual, time-consuming, and personalized to get your first users and make them extremely happy.
Actionable Takeaways
- Actively Recruit Your First Users Manually.
- Deliver an "Insanely Great" Experience to Early Adopters.
- Embrace Unscalable Manual Efforts to Learn and Iterate.