Paul Graham - Essays

In the computer world we get not new mediums but new platforms: the minicomputer, the microprocessor, the web-based application. At first they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work. And yet someone always decides to try anyway, and it turns out you can do more than anyone expected. So in the future when you hear people say of a new platform: yeah, it's popular and cheap, but not ready yet for real work, jump on it.

As well as being more comfortable working on established lines, insiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them. The professor who made his reputation by discovering some new idea is not likely to be the one to discover its replacement. This is particularly true with companies, who have not only skill and pride anchoring them to the status quo, but money as well. The Achilles heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize themselves. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see a path whose immediate effect is to cut an existing source of revenue.

So if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian projects. Instead of working on things the eminent have made prestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.

The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified. For example, after Wozniak designed the Apple II he offered it first to his employer, HP. They passed. One of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II to use a TV as a monitor, and HP felt they couldn't produce anything so declasse.

Wozniak used a TV as a monitor for the simple reason that he couldn't afford a monitor. Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things that are cheap and lightweight. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster.

The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large scale. Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums. One reason they work on big things is that they can: like our hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience. A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to ignore; a few might even snicker at it. You can't snicker at a giant museum, no matter how much you dislike it. And finally, there are all those people the eminent have working for them; they have to choose projects that can keep them all busy.

Outsiders are free of all this. They can work on small things, and there's something very pleasing about small things. Small things can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them. But there's a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. All kids know it. Small things have more personality.

Plus making them is more fun. You can do what you want; you don't have to satisfy committees. And perhaps most important, small things can be done fast. The prospect of seeing the finished project hangs in the air like the smell of dinner cooking. If you work fast, maybe you could have it done tonight.

Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. ("Next time, I won't...") The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve.

Plain materials have a charm like small scale. And in addition there's the challenge of making do with less. Every designer's ears perk up at the mention of that game, because it's a game you can't lose. Like the JV playing the varsity, if you even tie, you win. So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the designers' pleasure at their own ingenuity more than compensates.

So if you're an outsider, take advantage of your ability to make small and inexpensive things. Cultivate the pleasure and simplicity of that kind of work; one day you'll miss it.

When you're old and eminent, what will you miss about being young and obscure? What people seem to miss most is the lack of responsibilities.

Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence. In principle you could avoid it, just as in principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few do. I sometimes suspect that responsibility is a trap and that the most virtuous route would be to shirk it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.

When you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course. You're short of money, for example. But that constrains you in different ways. How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastination are those that seem like work, the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a park bench.

A lot of the pain of being an outsider is being aware of one's own procrastination. But this is actually a good thing. You're at least close enough to work that the smell of it makes you hungry.

As an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done. A huge step, admittedly, and one that most people never seem to make, but only one step. If you can summon up the energy to get started, you can work on projects with an intensity (in both senses) that few insiders can match. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. It's never so pure as it was when they were young.

Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow. That's what they miss.

A lot of outsiders make the mistake of doing the opposite; they admire the eminent so much that they copy even their flaws. Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things. When I was in college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors. But this wasn't what made them eminent-- it was more a flaw their eminence had allowed them to sink into. Imitating it was like pretending to have gout in order to seem rich.

Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually disadvantages. Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but will make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware of it.

What are the genuine advantages of being an insider? The greatest is an audience. It often seems to outsiders that the great advantage of insiders is money-- that they have the resources to do what they want. But so do people who inherit money, and that doesn't seem to help, not as much as an audience. It's good for morale to know people want to see what you're making; it draws work out of you.

If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid. Outsiders don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow themselves actual audiences. This is great news for the marginal, who retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite.

Though the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think we're just beginning to see its democratizing effects. Outsiders are still learning how to steal audiences. But more importantly, audiences are still learning how to be stolen-- they're still just beginning to realize how much deeper bloggers can dig than journalists, how much more interesting a democratic news site can be than a front page controlled by editors, and how much funnier a bunch of kids with webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.