Paul Graham

You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

1. When you write something intended to be read by an important person, go through it and cut every unnecessary word. 2. The reader of anything you publish is an important person.

Churn is the worst reason to have slow growth. Churn means you're not just unknown, or that there's a big threshold to sign up. It means people are actually trying the product and deciding they don't like it.

Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger, there is almost certainly no leverage.

The rich love quiet because they're trying to work.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.