Summary (Human) - Part 2
Paul Graham 101 - Part 2
But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.
So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see Inequality and Risk). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesn’t sound as positive as “reducing economic inequality”. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.
The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms.
Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflix… 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didn’t, they had things we now regard as “essentials” while the poor didn’t. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.
Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.
“You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here.
I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.” (From Mind the Gap) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how it’s used
Graham’s proposition:
Allow those who create wealth to keep it.
When you’re allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.
Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Graham’s opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in How to Make Wealth and Mind the Gap).
Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false
“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.” (From Taste for Makers)
“And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say.
Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.” (From Orthodox Privilege)
Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.
Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.
Graham deep-dives into this idea in What You Can't Say, an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that I’d do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, here’s the main takeaway I was left with:
There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question.
Stay open-minded.
Paul Graham on Life
If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, you’d be smart to listen.
What You'll Wish You'd Known is sort of Paul Graham’s compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. It’s also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:
- It’s okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when you’re young. Optimize for optionality. If you’re unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line.
- Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesn’t really matter what it is. You’ll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life.
“If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.” (From The Power of the Marginal)
- How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. “One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.” At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory.
- “There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. That’s not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
[...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.”
Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.
Essays mentioned in this section:
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
Life is short
“Life is short” is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought.
But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.
For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.
Whether you agree with the premise that Life is Short, it’s easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we don’t like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, “bullshit”).
And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in Life is Short.
It’s surprisingly easy to waste your life if you’re not careful
Since life is short, it’s easy to let it slip away in a blur if you’re not careful.
One thing you get easily sucked into is “anti-tests”. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldn’t care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldn’t care about that.
Just because there’s a test doesn’t mean you should try to perform well in it.
Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of “bullshit” life is too short for.
Another thing that can corrode your life, if you’re not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but it’s harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In The Acceleration of Addictiveness, Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal.
“Technology tends to separate normal from natural.”
“You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.” For example, if your approach to consumerism doesn’t seem a bit weird, you probably own too much Stuff.
But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and “the bullshit” isn’t enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In How to Lose Time and Money, Graham writes:
“It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing.
Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking ‘wow, I'm spending a lot of money.’ Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.”
Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, it’s hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking “this is a waste of time” sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.
If you’re not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.
You have a lot of unconditioning to do
What’s a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like “if you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomach” is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like “be careful with strangers, they are dangerous”? Less so.
In Lies We Tell Kids, Graham shows that we’ve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that we’ve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if it’s something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.
As a rule, if you think it’s true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. It’s better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.
If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bull…). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something that’s part of our identity, so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly.
If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.
Another thing to uncondition comes from Cities and Ambition. When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if you’re into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But there’s an inverse consideration, too, and it’s an important one: the places you’ve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if it’s simply a product of where we have lived in so far.
This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because you’ve been conditioned a certain way, you’re set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, it’s easy to waste your life.
You have a lot of unconditioning to do.
So better get started.
Paul Graham’s 5 commandments for life
Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:
- Forgetting your dreams
- Ignoring family
- Suppressing emotions
- Neglecting friends
- Forgetting to be happy with what you have
In The Top of My Todo List, Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:
- Don’t ignore your dreams
- Don’t work too much
- Say what you think
- Cultivate friendships
- Be happy
Paul Graham’s Best Essays
Paul Graham’s favorites
My favorites
- What You Can't Say
- How to Think for Yourself
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
- How to Make Wealth
- [How to Lose Time and
Money](http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html)
Final words
This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Graham’s ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that weren’t included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.
Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.
If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so it’d be awesome if many people knew about this.
And if there’s something you’d like to add / edit, reach out: jaakko@jaakkoj.com / Twitter
Thanks for reading.