Paul Graham - Essays

The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here. Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won't be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that's ok, because the main value that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.

The word "try" is an especially valuable component. I disagree here with Yoda, who said there is no try. There is try. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. You're driven by curiosity instead of duty. Which means the wind of procrastination will be in your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you do as a way of avoiding other work. And when you do it, you'll be in a better mood. The more the work depends on imagination, the more that matters, because most people have more ideas when they're happy.

If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.

Raymond Chandler's advice to thriller writers was "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." He followed that advice. Judging from his books, he was often in doubt. But though the result is occasionally cheesy, it's never boring. In life, as in books, action is underrated.

Fortunately the number of things you can just hack together keeps increasing. People fifty years ago would be astonished that one could just hack together a movie, for example. Now you can even hack together distribution. Just make stuff and put it online.

If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.

This is why I spend most of my time writing essays lately. The writing of essays used to be limited to those who could get them published. In principle you could have written them and just shown them to your friends; in practice that didn't work. An essayist needs the resistance of an audience, just as an engraver needs the resistance of the plate.

Up till a few years ago, writing essays was the ultimate insider's game. Domain experts were allowed to publish essays about their field, but the pool allowed to write on general topics was about eight people who went to the right parties in New York. Now the reconquista has overrun this territory, and, not surprisingly, found it sparsely cultivated. There are so many essays yet unwritten. They tend to be the naughtier ones; the insiders have pretty much exhausted the motherhood and apple pie topics.

This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.

If you make something and people complain that it doesn't work , that's a problem. But if the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other respect you've succeeded. Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.

But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing inappropriate. I've been hearing this word all my life and I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing beacon. "Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it."

So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that, you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted.

The facts about Apple's early history are from an interview with Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's forthcoming Founders at Work , Apress, 2006.

As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality. Now the misunderstood artist is not a chain-smoking drunk who pours his soul into big, messy canvases that philistines see and say "that's not art" because it isn't a picture of anything. The philistines have now been trained that anything hung on a wall is art. Now the misunderstood artist is a coffee-drinking vegan cartoonist whose work they see and say "that's not art" because it looks like stuff they've seen in the Sunday paper.

In fact this would do fairly well as a definition of politics: what determines rank in the absence of objective tests.

In high school you're led to believe your whole future depends on where you go to college, but it turns out to only buy you a couple years. By your mid-twenties the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you've done than where you went to school.

Managers are presumably wondering, how can I make this miracle happen? How can I make the people working for me do more with less? Unfortunately the constraint probably has to be self-imposed. If you're expected to do more with less, then you're being starved, not eating virtuously.

Without the prospect of publication, the closest most people come to writing essays is to write in a journal. I find I never get as deeply into subjects as I do in proper essays. As the name implies, you don't go back and rewrite journal entries over and over for two weeks.

Thanksto Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Olin Shivers, and Chris Small for reading drafts of this, and to Chris Small and Chad Fowler for inviting me to speak.

I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.

What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and think about that.

For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen.

There are other things I might bring if I thought of it, like music, or tea, but I can live without them. I'm not so addicted to caffeine that I wouldn't risk the house not having any tea, just for a weekend.