Paul Graham's Essays Part II

0:00 all the way back in 2019 I received a message that changed the direction of this podcast forever it was from Tristan who is one of the co-founders of rewise he said hey I love the podcast and he told me about the readwise product I responded thanks Tristan love the idea behind readwise I will definitely check it out I had no idea that I would become a super user of his product and so over the years I've added my highlights and

0:23 notes for over 300 books I have over 20,000 highlights and notes for the books that I read for the podcast and because I search every single thing I've ever done I use readwise every day I never close the browser tab the tab on readwise is always open because as I'm reading as I'm thinking as I'm researching I'm constantly going in and rereading all my notes and highlights and you might already know this because every other podcast I go on I talk about

0:49 readwise I tweet about it I post about it constantly I've been saying for years it is the best app that I pay for and because I go around shouting about how great it is from the mountain tops I get a bunch of messages nearly every day people have asked me hey is there a possibility that I can actually get access to your readwise and it's happened so much for so long and I thought it was like a superpower mind so

1:09 I was like no no no no and then I started thinking like well why why does everybody want this like why do they keep asking for this and I thought about it's like well if you think about this is like has anybody else in the world read this many biographies of History gra entrepreneurs obsessively taken notes on it obsessively highlighted it and I was like oh they want access because it's the world's most valuable notebook for Founders and I I think

1:30 people understood that instinctively in fact there's a line in poor Charlie's omac that said that there's answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book and I think that's the case from my notebook as well so a few months ago I went to the founders of rewise Tristan and Daniel and I asked hey is there a way we can build a product together that actually mirrors what I see I want to wait for people that want

1:48 to subscribe to my notes and highlights to see exactly what I see they can search by book they can search by keyword they can get access to the highlights feed which is essentially what I call Smart Twitter feed it is a feed of short little little highlights and notes from all different books on one page and I also wanted people to see all the highlights that I've actually favored it so so far I favored it 839 highlights and so that's exactly

2:10 what we built together you can find it at Founders notes.com I will also leave the link Down Below in the show notes and because this is brand new it's actually half the price of what it's eventually going to be there's not even a landing page you just go to Founders notes.com sign up and subscribe and then you get immediate access and it's important to note that I made this for Founders already running successful companies I think that's who's going to

2:31 get the most value out of it those are also usually the most committed people there is no monthly option you can only subscribe for a year it is only made for the already committed and these kind of Founders and I include myself in there they just want the the best way to reference the thoughts and ideas of History's Greatest Founders and then they'll figure out how to apply what they're learning directly to their company so if this is you I encourage

2:53 you to test it out for a year you'll have access to the world's most valuable notebook for Founders and I think the value you'll receive because the value I've gotten out of it has been incredible and I think that'll be the same case for you if you wind up subscribing make sure you keep it once you're in make sure you just keep it in your browser this is how I use it the tab is always open on my computer I'm

3:10 referencing it dozens of times a day it is a product I can get behind fully because I use it every day you're literally seeing what I see so if this sounds interesting to you and you want to get access go to Founders notes.com there are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers your ideas have to be both correct and novel you see this pattern with startup Founders you don't want to start a

3:33 startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea or there will already be other companies doing it you have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea but that you know isn't like writing software for tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on Strangers floors he's referencing Microsoft and Airbnb there do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking

3:58 differently from everyone else independent mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture which means if you pick the wrong type of work you're going to be unhappy if you're naturally independent minded you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager and if you're naturally conventional minded you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research one difficulty here is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the Spectrum from

4:26 conventional to independent-minded Conventional minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional minded it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything it's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers and the independent-minded meanwhile are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones at least till they State them publicly can you make yourself more independent-minded I think

4:56 so it matters a lot who you surround yourself with if you surround yourself with independent-minded people hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to and to think of more the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional minded people a place where the independent and conventional minded are thrown together is in successful startups the founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful but conventional minded people greatly outnumber

5:26 independent-minded ones so as the company grows the original Spirit of independent mindedness is inevitably diluted this causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck one of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees the importance of Founders knowing other Founders is repeated a lot in Paul's essays I'm going to read that one more time because

5:54 I think it's important one of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees you don't have to spend all your time with independent minor people it's enough to have one or two who you can talk to regularly and once you find them they're usually as eager to talk as you are they need you too you can expand the source of influences in time as well as Space by

6:19 reading history when I read history I do it not just to learn what happened but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past how did things look to them this is why I say every entrepreneur needs a library it's a tool for entrepreneurs back to his idea about how to make yourself more independent-minded more generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined and things don't always enter your head in the form of

6:44 statements some of the most powerful influences are implicit how do you even notice these by standing back and watching how other people get their ideas when you stand back at a sufficient distance you can see these ideas spreading through groups of people like waves the most obvious are in fashion you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt and then more and more and more until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt

7:09 there are intellectual Fashions too and you definitely don't want to participate in those because unfashionable ideas are dispropor oh my God this is so good because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting the best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking novel ideas come from Curiosity independent mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly

7:39 everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious and everyone I know who's conventional minded isn't the independent minded are the glutton of curiosity who keep eating even after they're full and this is what I think the most important sentence in this entire essay is how much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity if the answer is not much maybe you should change something curiosity is unlike most other appetites indulging it tends to increase rather

8:11 than to satiate it questions lead to more questions so perhaps curiosity is the compass perhaps if your goal is to discover novel ideas your motto should not be do what you love so much as do what you're curious about that is an excerpt from Paul Graham's excellent essay how to think for yourself and so before I jump into his next excellent essay which is how to work hard if I sound funny what I went through this

8:42 week is going to be very familiar to anybody with schoolage children my daughter brought home some kind of sickness was spread to my son then spread to my wife and then now I finally have gotten it and so for the last few days I've just been holed up in bed reading and reading and reading anytime I'm not asleep so I have spent the last few weeks living inside the M mind of Paul Graham and it has been an amazing

9:04 experience so not only have I finished reading all his essays since I was sick in bed I had the opportunity I've already finished reading his book which is a collection of essays too called hackers and Painters which will be the next episode of Founders I also have a collection of essays that I read and highlighted and made notes on that I won't get to today I'll probably do it in maybe like a few weeks maybe a few

9:22 months I'll just do like bonus episodes on Paul gr Paul Grahams essays you know maybe every few months because I do think they're extremely valuable for Founders so let's jump into so my apologies if I sound a little funny let's jump into how to work hard and so Paul writes it might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard anyone who's been to school knows what it entails even if they chose not to do

9:42 it and yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school the answer is definitely yes one thing I know is that this is so this is so good I I'm just going to repeat myself over and over again because I'm a huge fan of his writing one thing I know is that if you want to do great things you'll have to work very hard I wasn't sure of that as a kid was there

10:04 perhaps I thought about this way you might have as well when I was younger I like everybody told me it's like don't work hard work don't work harder work smarter and then what you realize is when you start studying people that reach the top of their profession and if you want to be excellent in what you do and and really do great work that you do both they all do both they work hard and smart and so Paul's kind of going back

10:24 to his inner monologue that he was having as a kid he's like was there perhaps some way to evade hard work through she sheer Brilliance now I know the answer to that question there isn't in fact Paul has this great quote where he's respond on on Twitter he's responding back to Patrick Carson the founder of stripe saying hey you know stripe was really hard to build it took a lot of intensity and we had to work

10:43 really hard and he said something like hey you know maybe better Founders are able to do build something great without working hard but we we couldn't figure out a way to do that and Paul's response was that's an empty set if Patrick and John Collison had to work both smart and hard you're going to have have to too and so I feel that's where he's that's very much his perspective in this essay the reason famous adults seem to

11:04 do things effortlessly was years of practice they made it look easy because they were practicing in private mean you talk about this all the time there are three ingredients in great work natural ability practice and effort this is really special to me because I feel in the last like six months maybe 12 months I feel like you and I been talking about practice just over and over and over again I've become obsessed with the idea you can do pretty well with just two but

11:26 to do the best work you need all three bu gates for example was among the smartest people in business in his era but he was also among the hardest working I never took a day off in my 20s he said not one it was similar with Lionel Messi when his youth coaches talk about him what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win PG wooden housee or wood house would probably get my vote for the best

11:52 English writer of the 20th century no one has ever made it look easier but no one ever worked harder at 74 he wrote with each new book of mine I have the feeling that this time I've picked a lemon in the garden of literature a good thing really I suppose it keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence 10 times or in many cases 20 times that line reminded me of something Rick Rubin said back on

12:21 episode two 245 of Founders and he says less is more but you have to do more to get less and there's many examples when Rick is working with some of the best musicians that have ever lived and they'll redo like a section of the guitar 30 times if they want 10 great songs they might have to write a 100 just to be able to reduce it down to 10 so this idea keeps showing one's toes makes one rewrite every sentence 10

12:44 times or in many cases 20 times that is somebody that's at top of their profession and had Decades of experience at the time he's 74 when he wrote that it sounds a bit extreme you think and yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme not one day off in 10 years these two had about as much natural ability as anyone could have and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work so remember let go back to the

13:03 title of the essay how to work hard they had as much natural abilities anyone could have and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work you need both if great talent and great Drive are both rare then people with both are rare squared and so you can't really change how much natural talent you have in practice doing great work in so far as you can reduces to working very hard what I've learned since I was

13:25 a kid is how to work towards goals that are this is really the description of the Founder's Journey right he's like you have to work towards goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed you'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things when I'm not working hard so this is he's describing his like what happens in his own mind when he feels he's not working hard enough I wrote this is a

13:47 gift and the curse I highly suspect I mean I feel like this a lot I'm highly suspect you do as well when I'm not working hard alarm Bells go off I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not and it feels awful the reason it's a gift and the curse cuz you have this fire in the belly this internal drive but you can't really turn it off and in some cases my

14:08 own inner monologue I've told you before sounds a lot like David goggin's book you can't hurt me and I also don't think that's healthy either I think you have to moderate it because you can be extremely I guess there's no other word you can just be extremely mean to yourself like most little kids I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new As I Grew Older this morphed into a feeling of disgust see this exact I know exactly

14:29 he's talking about As I Grew Older this morphed into a feeling of disgust disgust when I wasn't achieving anything the the one precisely datable Landmark I have is when I sto watching TV at age 13 he's going to talk about he stopped watching he got serious about his work at 13 he's going to talk about p something Patrick cson told him founder stripe I'm going to leave a link in the show notes I think you should read it

14:50 you can just Google if you want it's called aliens Jedi and Cults it is a way to think about people that build incredible usually incredible companies or even incredible movements Paul is an alien if you read that quick post you can read it I think like 5 minutes you understand what I mean by that Patrick Carlson is also an alien so it says the one precisely datable Landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV at age 13 when I

15:12 asked Patrick cson when he started to find idleness distasteful and that's another theme this is in the book that I'll talk about next week too he talks a lot about like idleness is not you're seeking it it's not going to make you happy he finds it well distasteful is I guess the word he was there he started to find idolist tasteful he said this is Patrick speaking now I think around age 13 or 14 I have a clear memory from around then

15:35 of sitting in the sitting room staring outside and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday back to Paul strangely enough the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school which made work or what they called work seem boring and po pointless I talked about this really referenced I feel his best essay on this on last week's podcast if you obviously this is part two you don't really have to listen to them in order if you don't want to

16:00 but I would listen to them I listen to all three of them you can pick the order probably makes sense to go in order but anyways that that essay is how to do what you love talks a lot about this the problem is we're teaching we're confusing kids that they automatically associate with work with something oh I have to do I'm not supposed to like it and let me just get it over with and that way I can then go and do the play

16:20 part of my day or do what I want to do and Paul makes the point well you're never going to be great at what you do if you have that attitude like you have to be called to do it like it's almost like a like it pulls you down this path where you want to do it but as I learned the shape of real work I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if

16:38 they'd been made for one another and so that's what he's going to refer from here on in as a real work work that you actually want to do once you know the shape of real work you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it you can't solve this problem by simply working every waking hour because in many kinds of work there's a point Beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline this is very

16:58 fascinating he talks about the different limits that he's experienced his own life I've done several different kinds of work and the limits were different for each my limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about 5 hours a day whereas when I was running a startup I could work all the time so same thing for me it's impossible like when I hear Warren Buffet say he can read 500 or 600 Pages a day there's no

17:17 way I could read 500 or 600 Pages a day you know for me it's you know 3 to four hours at the very most of a book a day so it's kind of very similar to what he's finding when he's programming he says hey my limit for programming is about 5 hours a day whereas when I was running a startup I could work all the time and then I like this point the only way to find your

17:33 limit for working is by Crossing it honesty is critical here in both directions you have to notice when you're being lazy but also when you're working too hard finding the limit of working hard is a constant ongoing process and not something you do just once then he gets into your motivation for wanting to to work this hard to begin with what keeps me going depends on the type of work when I was working at via web that was his startup that he

17:54 sold to Yahoo I was driven by the fear of failure so I want to pause right there this is something that was fantastic Jimmy iven there's a there's a great documentary on HBO called the defiant ones and Jimmy IV's had a very interesting career record producer founder winds up selling the company he co-owned with Dr Dre to Apple for billions and billions of dollars but there's at the very beginning of this Dre this Dr Dre song called All in the

18:19 day's work there's there's a clip of Jimmy iven talking about how he utilized fear as a tool and this is what he said fears are powerful thing I mean it's got a lot of Firepower if you could figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind rather than to stand in front of you that's very powerful I always felt I had to work harder than the next guy just to do as well as the

18:41 next guy and to do better than the next guy I just had to kill it and you know to a certain extent that's still with me in how I work you know I just go in and so the idea that fear is a powerful force if you can actually use it as a tool instead of hindrance something that Jimmy I repeats over and over again again in a lot of different contexts when I was working on via web I was

19:01 driven by fear of failure I barely procrastinated all then because there was always something that needed doing and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing Beast by doing it then why wait whereas what drives me now writing essays is the flaws in them so he is writing I should tell you because a lot of the essays I covered last week were a lot older I I do have some that are maybe over 10 years old in

19:21 in the selection today but the one I started with came from 20 is written in 2020 and this one is from 2021 so let's go back to this whereas what drives me now writing essays is the flaws in them between essays I fuss for a few days like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down but once I get started at one I don't have to push myself to work because there's always some error or Omission that is

19:45 already pushing me and then this next part is just absolutely Excellence I think that that is very common with high Achievers or people that want to be high Achievers is this weird thing where you're almost more afraid of losing than you are like the the the pain of of losing is almost greater than the the thrill of winning this part is excellent many problems have a hardcore at the center surrounded by easier stuff at the edges working hard means aiming towards

20:09 the center to the extent that you can so again many problems hardcore at the center surrounded by easier stuff at the edges of course I think you know where he's going with this most people are just going to nibble on the easy part right but do you only you make the the big jumps and the big progress by aiming towards the center working hard means aiming towards the center to the extent that you can some days you may not be

20:26 able to some days you only be able to work on the easier peripheral stuff but you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling that is an absolutely excellent couple PS later I just keep repeating in the margins excellent the consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken both in general and within specific Fields the consensus about which problems are the most important is often mistaken both in general and within specific Fields if

20:49 you disagree with it and you're right that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new if you discover some ambitious type of work that's a bar that's it's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people which we talked about Echoes of this last week and there's a v rakon also talks about this a lot that's episode 191 and I think I went back and read my notes from the the omac

21:12 Nal and there's a lot of overlap between naval's perspective and Paul I actually think reading these books maybe I'll reread it very soon I actually think Paul GS essays and Nal and Nal thoughts go there's a lot of overlap and they go hand in hand I guess what I'm saying because this Echoes a lot what what noal says he like you have to find work that feels like play and one way to do that is there's something that you do

21:34 that seems seems easier quote unquote to you but other people can't believe you can do it so it says if you discover some type of ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people either because of the ability you happen to have or because in of some way of some new way you found to approach it or simply because you're more excited about it by all means work on that some of the

21:52 best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard this may be my favorite sentence in the entire I I can't like scream or jump up and down like I normally do but this is just I love this a deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can so imagine if you could find a deep like just you feel compelled you have to do this a deep

22:17 interest in a topic and then you combine that with worldclass discipline a deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can some people figure out what to do with children and just do it like moart that's a crazy life story episode 240 is the Mozart documentary I got to go back or mozar biography I'm GNA have to read more books on him because that's just I think he starts doing it what three years old if I

22:41 remember correctly some people figure out what to do as children just do it like mozar but others like Newton turn restlessly from one kind of work to another and so obviously I think Paul makes the point in this essay and if he doesn't I'm sure he would agree with it way more common for you to have a path like Newton than it is for people to have a path like Mozart along with measuring both how hard you're working

23:00 and how well you're doing you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another if you're working hard but not getting good enough results you should switch it sounds simple expressed that way but in practice it's very difficult and unfortunately no one can tell you other than yourself this only works if you can trust your own judgment right but how much time and and what should you do if work that was going well stops

23:22 going well how much time do you give yourself then and what I like about Paul is he's not saying hey I have the answers he's got approximations but again this the reason that goes back to one of the the best things and what I've been talking about in conversation since since that podcast came out is just his his thought it's like how many people truly get to do like how many first of all how many fine how many people fine

23:43 work they truly love and then work themselves in a way in a position to actually do work they love and he's like it's hundreds of thousands out of billions this is so difficult the best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting that may sound like a dangerously subjective measure but it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get you're the one working on the stuff who's this kind of ran over

24:03 his point here right who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting so one line I say over and over again that I try to use as as a guide not only for myself but also who to spend time with is the most interesting people are the most interested so this idea is like what's who who knows better than you what's better predicted of its importance than

24:26 whether it's interesting and then this is just absolutely fantastic just what an ending to this essay working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11 it's a complicated dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point you have to understand the shape of real work See Clearly what you're what kind you're best suited for aim as close to the true core as you can accurately judge at each moment both what you're

24:51 capable of and how you're doing and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result this network is too complicated to trick amen but if you're consistently honest and clear cited it will automatically assume an optimal shape and you'll be productive in a way few people are okay so I want to skip to the next essay as with everything I will link all these essays down below they're all free to to read online even if

25:23 you don't read the ones I covered I would just go to prgrams prg.com all the time and just pick essay random like they're all listed there just what sounds like what headline or title sounds most interesting to you and then I do think the the benefit is like rereading them you know intermittently they definitely change I've read that I've read some of them you know who knows how many times and every time I learned something different because I've

25:44 changed as a person since then so this is how to lose time and money is written in 2010 and it says when we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before how not to lose it I knew it was possible to go from Rich to poor just as it was possible to go from poor to rich but while I'd spent a lot of the

26:01 past several years studying the past from poor to rich I knew practically nothing about the paths from Rich to poor now in order to avoid them I had to learn where they were so again how to lose time and money is the name of the essay so I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost I've read a bunch about this too it's it's fascinating if you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor I'd have said by spending

26:26 all their money but in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure but through bad Investments this is also in line with the research I've done I was shocked by it I think I've told you in the in the past one of my oldest friends his dad played in the NFL but this is like years before they made a ton of money when he retired he started a nonprofit and that nonprofit was was the fact that you know

26:50 90 something per of them wind up claiming bankruptcy and I think now they've expanded way past you know just this one form and and to other sports and everything this has been going on for quite a while decades but I'll never forget and this is probably I don't know 10 or 15 years ago when I learned this but they said the same thing it's like they don't go you you're thinking they're going poor CU they're buying

27:08 Ferraris it's like no they gave their idiot cousin $250,000 to start a restaurant that tanked it's all these Investments it's like here I'll give you 50,000 for this and it just goes up and smoke so let's go back to that in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure but through bad Investments it's hard to spend a fortune without noticing whereas if you start trading derivatives you can lose a million dollars or as much as you

27:29 want in the blink of an eye and he makes the point why this is so difficult because in most people's minds if you're spending you know a bunch of money there's like alarms that go off it's like well I spent way too much money on luxuries or stuff I don't actually need where if you you say now that money that money leaves your bank account right and it's going to leave your bank account for like a very fancy car or a nice

27:47 purse or something like that hopefully if you have some kind of you know level of intelligence like hey I should probably not do that in relation to the wealth I have but the pro what what the point Paul makes here is that when you re frame the money leaving your bank account as an investment it bypasses these alarms even if a lot of these Investments are going to go to zero investing bypasses these alarms you're not spending the money you're just

28:06 moving it from one asset to another and this part made me laugh he says which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say quote it's an investment and so this part I absolutely love a few days ago I realized something surprising the situation with time is much the same as with money the most dangerous way to lose time is to not spend it having fun but to spend it doing fake work if I woke up one morning and sat down on a

28:29 sofa and watched TV all day I'd feel like something was terribly wrong just thinking about it makes me winse and so he ties us together but if you do fake work kind of bypasses that alarm just like a fake investment right and yet I've definitely had days when I might as when I might as well have sat in front of the TV all day days at the end of which if I asked myself what I got done

28:48 that day the answer would have been basically nothing but the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done because I'm doing stuff that seems superficially like real work dealing with email for example you do it sitting at a desk it's not fun so it must be work with time as with money avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you the world has gotten more complicated the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms

29:18 about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types and the worst thing is they're not even fun okay so now want to jump to an essay that I've read a bunch of times it's called schlep blindness and has written in January 2012 there are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our nosis one reason we do not see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness a schlep it means a tedious and unpleasant task this is

29:49 going to remind you of something you and I have talked about a bunch that business is problems and that companies are just effective problem solving machines I learned from experience that schle are not merely inevitable but pretty much what business consists of a company is defined by the SCH it will undertake remember tedious unpleasant tasks and schleps should be dealt with the same way you deal with a cold swimming pool just jump in which is not

30:13 to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great what a fantastic line it's not that you should seek out unpleasant work but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great the most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps that is SLP

30:41 schlep blindness and then he gives the greatest illustration of this idea and why it's so powerful and what he means by describing that strip built their entire business on this idea really think about this is like it's a problem that is so hard that most people won't even consider it the most striking example I know of schlut blindness is stripe or rather stripe's idea for over a decade every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful

31:07 the experience was thousands of people must have known about this problem and yet when they started startups they decided to build a recipe site or an aggregator for local events why why work on problems few care about few care much about and no one will pay for when you could fix one of the most important components of of the world's infrastructure because schle blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments he gives us

31:36 a fantastic metaphor to to describe the value in in these really hard problems problems so hard that we're kind of ignoring their existence that scariness makes abitious ideas doubly valuable they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among Founders if you pick an ambitious idea you'll have less competition because everyone else would have been frightened off by the challenges involved this is also true of starting a startup generally and then this next paragraph

32:02 I'm just going to read to you what I jotted down in the margin when I got to the section I've read several examples in these biographies that say exactly this how do you overcome schlap blindness frankly the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance most successful Founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome they might never have started it and then he ends giving you and I excellent

32:29 advice the trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture instead of asking what problem should I solve ask what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me and then I absolutely love this next essay it's essentially Paul giving us a summary of what he's learned by building y accomodator it's called what I've learned from users is written in September 2022 and so he says what have I learned from YC's users which are the startups

32:58 that they funded and this just jumps out to me as well I've shared this with you before after reading hundreds of biographies of Founders I noticed a very similar idea as what Paul says here the first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems no two have exactly the same problems but it's surprising how much the problems remain the same regardless of what they're making once you've advised a 100 startups all doing different things you

33:20 rarely encounter problems you haven't seen before and this happened to him recently he tweeted out out in August of 2022 he says today I talked to a startup doing so well that they had no current problems that needed solving they're profitable growing Revenue 20 times a year and he said not a typo so it's very unusual 20 times a year and they're only nine employees this is so rare that I didn't know what to do we ended up

33:46 talking about problems they might have in the future I advise them and then you see this theme over and over again he wants you to have control of your own destiny and he talked about what he would what he would do he's like you know I'd keep them company as small as possible not in revenues but in employees that way you actually have more of like a maker schedule than a manager schedule which is probably what

34:04 most Founders want to do anyways so he says I advise them never to raise another round so to get Equity you're going to have to be hired there so learn how to program so back to the essay the fact is one of the things that makes y that this fact excuse me is one of the things that makes YC work but I didn't know it when we started YC it was a surprise to me how often the same

34:25 problems recur in different forms and I love that he says this but knowing nearly all the problems startups can encounter doesn't mean that advising them can be automated or reduced to a formula each startup is unique and this ESS say I think just should be mandatory reading for Founders I don't know why anybody wouldn't want to read it I mean this ENT this entire next page I essentially highlighted the whole thing and the reason I say that is because

34:48 he's just giving us the blueprint he's like listen found not only do startups encounter the same problems over and over again but Founders make the same mistakes over and over again so so again I would assume every single person making this mistake smarter than me how what's the likelihood that I would not do the exact same thing so my goal is like can I be one of these very rare people that actually learn from the experience of other people it's

35:08 extremely hard to do another surprise is how bad Founders can be at realizing what their problems are founders will sometimes come in to talk about about some problem and we will discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation for example in this case is all too common Founders will come in to talk about the difficulties they having raising money and after digging into this situation it turns out the reason is that the company is doing

35:29 badly and investors can tell our Founders will come in worri that they still haven't cracked the problem of user acquisition and the reason turns out to be that their product isn't good enough there have been times when I've asked would you use this yourself if you hadn't built it and the founders on thinking about it said no well there's the reason you're having trouble getting users and so this is where we have a massive Advantage you and I have a

35:54 massive Advantage because we have I mean you get to experience this because I have this giant database of all these different highlights and notes from you know hundreds of biographies and some this so when I get to this section he's just like this is beautiful what he said would you use this if you hadn't built it and the founders after thinking about it say no well there's a reason you're having trouble getting users and I just reread this highlight

36:19 two days ago and it's Steve Jobs talking about where he comes up with his product ideas he's like it's not about pop culture it's not about you fooling people and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't we figure out what we want and once you do that the second part he says I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to Think Through whether a lot of people are going to want it to same idea did jobs talked

36:44 about he Us in his own career is what Paul is advising the founders that he's talking to to do the same thing you've made a giant mistake often Founders know what their problems are but not their relative importance they'll come in to talk about three problems they're worrying about one is of moderate importance one doesn't matter at all and one will kill the company if it isn't addressed immediately it's like watching one of those horror movies where the

37:06 heroin the the heroin is deeply upset that her boyfriend cheated on her and only mind mildly curious about the door that's mysteriously a jar you want to say never mind about your boyfriend think about the door YC the the YC Partners can warn them where the murderers are not that Founders listen that was another big surprise see this is why say like we should I just think Founders should be reading this essay not that Founders listen that was

37:32 another big surprise so think about how much work I mean from from Paul's perspective he's like that's a that's obviously a big surprise like you have to go through all these hoops you have to spend a lot of time and effort to get accepted into YC it's now very prestigious I'm sure they they turn away you know a good percentage of the people that apply you've had to do a bunch of things to even get to this point to

37:50 where you're actually talking to the partners at this organization that you appli to that you think is going to greatly improve prove the odds of your Company Success right why the hell would you not listen to their advice and so when I think of this it's like if I'm put in their shoes I would probably make the same mistake that they're making so how do I avoid it and I think just being aware and constantly reminding yourself

38:11 that oh this a common mistake pause step outside yourself what's the chance David you're not doing the same thing it's very very likely that you're doing the exact same thing so it says not that Founders listen this was another big surprise how often Founders don't listen to us a couple weeks ago I talked to a partner who had been working for YC for a couple batches and was starting to see this the pattern they come back a year

38:29 later she said and say we wish we listen to you and then this is just fantastic it took me a long time to figure out why Founders don't listen at first I thought it was mere stubbornness that's part of the reason but another and probably more important reason is that so much about startups is counterintuitive this is there's a I I think I talked about this in the last podcast I did on Charlie wer I've done a

38:51 bunch of them but it's episode 221 Founders it's a book called damn right and in that book Charlie Monger says if he was ever teaching like a finance course or a course on business he would he was like the curriculum would just be the histories of a hundred companies that did something right or did something wrong and it's a way to pierce like this the counterintuitive nature of business building right so it says another another and probably more

39:16 important reason is that so much about startups counterintuitive and when you tell someone something counterintuitive what it sounds to them is wrong so the reason Founders don't listen to us is that they don't believe us at least not till experience teaches them otherwise the reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences no one knows what it's like except those who have done it and that is why you will know this feeling that

39:42 I'm about to say if you do this that's why when you read the autobiographies of entrepreneurs from the past yes they're full of good ideas but you're going to find that experience comforting no one knows what it's like except those who have done it and this wind up being good for Paul and his company because he says if it weren't counterintuitive Founders wouldn't need our advice about how to do it and so then he gives us some advice

40:05 focus is doubly important for early stage startups because not only do they have a hundred different problems but they don't have anyone to work on them except the founders figure out which problems matter most and then cook up ideas for solving them try those ideas and measure how well they worked if you correct course if you if you correct course at a high enough frequency you can be simultaneously decisive at a micro scale in tentative at a macro

40:29 scale this is going to be very similar to this idea you and I have talked about a bunch about Jeff Bezos he has this idea about two-way do like most of the decisions you're making in business are reversible so make the decision he's like if it's something if it's a decision you cannot reverse which he calls a one-way door then you better analyze that six we of Sunday but the 99% of the the decisions you're going to

40:47 make are reversible and so he has that great quote I think it's from the book Amazon Unbound probably Founders 180 if I remember correctly where he's like listen I sometimes you have to aim aim aim aim and then shoot he's talking to Amazon Executives about launching a new business line in Amazon he's like sometimes you have to aim aim a aim and then shoot like this is not one of those times I want you to shoot shoot shoot

41:06 shoot shoot and then aim this is very similar to what he's saying if you course correct at a high enough frequency you can be Sim simultaneously decisive at a micro scale and tentative at a m macro scale the result is is a somewhat winding path but executed very rapidly like the path of a running back takes down field that's one of my favorite metaphors he uses a few times in in his essays you know where you're going You're Going Down field but

41:27 you're very flexible in how you're going to get there and including some cases you have to go backwards right and so then he goes to the value that y commentator gives to Founders in in in this specific example that's where a lot of YC's value lies in helping Founders get an an extra increment of focus that lets them move faster speed defines startups Focus enables speed YC improves Focus I double underlined that sentence speed defines startup

41:56 Focus enables speed one of the favorite things I've ever heard was Seth Bannon told me about the founder of cover Alexis Rivas that he was intolerant of slowness I thought about that when I was reading the biography of Alexander the Great for episode 232 and I realized oh the combination that Alexander combined an excessive tolerance of fatigue with an intolerance of slowness speed defin startups Focus enable speed then he goes back to some more valuable ideas for

42:22 Founders it can still be valuable for an experienced founder to do YC just as it could still be valuable for an experienced athlete to have a coach the other big thing YC gives Founders is colleagues and this may be even more important than the advice of Partners if you look at history great work clusters around certain places and institutions that I've noticed the same thing in the books that I read however good you are good colleagues make you better indeed

42:49 very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else because they're so starved for them in everyday life and Paul knew this for a long time you I see this when he's like in his 30s writing essays way before he started YC we were very aware of this historical phenomenon and deliberately designed YC to be one by this point it's not bragging to say that it's the biggest cluster of great startup Founders and then he also proves that he

43:17 takes his own advice I often tell Founders to make something they themselves want and YC is certainly that it was designed to be exactly what we wanted when we were starting a startup and I don't think he's writing it for the following reason but I said this is waren Buffet level content marketing by this point I'm like how do I get in I think by this point the point that Paul's writing this essay you know the

43:37 momentum behind YC is kind of Unstoppable but it just goes to the quality of his writing and the clarity of his thinking that even if he's not trying to give you a marketing pitch he's thought about this a lot and then therefore he can explain why it's valuable to you and that idea immediately gets inside your mind so he says something magical happens when they do cluster the energy in the room at a YC dinner is like nothing else I've

43:57 experienced when you have a whole room full it's another thing entirely YC Founders aren't just inspired by one another they also help one another that again I see this over and over again why on Earth most of the times when an entrepreneur writes and autobiography they do it when they're you know they're very close to the end of their life and they know they're close to the end of their life and in many cases I'm thinking of inar camrod founder of Ikea

44:21 is one example but in many cases they do so they're reluctant to do so and they usually only do so because they're like hey the lessons I learned can benefit future generations of entrepreneurs I I feel that Paul's dead right about this YC Founders aren't just inspired by one another they also help one another that's the happiest thing I've learned about startup Founders how generous they can be in helping one another same thing I've seen this exact same thing just how

44:42 generous people are with their own ideas it's remarkable and I try to do the exact same thing how generous they can be in helping one another the result is something far more intense than say a university between the partners the alumni their batchmates Founders are surrounded by people who want to help them and can and that is where I'll leave it for today I got a bunch of essays I'll cover in the future in a bonus episode and then as soon as I can

45:07 and my voice is back I will record the part Paul gram part three which will be the final Paul gram for a while which will be on his book hackers and Painters that is 276 podcast down 1,000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon okay so real quick in case that you want to get access to my version of readwise which is called Founders notes.com you go to Founders notes.com to sign up that's founders with an S just like the podcast so

45:34 Founders notes.com so when you sign up and you get access I'm going to tell you how what what are the features that I use the most and so at the very top is the main feature the one I use but every day and it says search highlights and there's a search bar and very simply I just search by whatever keyword I'm thinking about so it could be about hiring about marketing about Obsession could be about a specific specific

45:56 entrepreneur like Rockefeller whatever I happen to be thinking about or whatever problem I need to solve at the at the time so like the greatest example and I actually made like a 30 minute like short AMA about this it was asked like how do History's Greatest Founders think about hiring and so if you type hiring in that box you'll see what what did Jeff Bezos say about it what did Thomas Edison say about it what did the people

46:15 that founded Paypal say about it what did Este Lauder say about it and on and on and on and so I think that's pretty self-explanatory again this is a product for people already running successful companies I think I don't have to elaborate you know what the value of that would be so the highlights feed is the searching excuse me searching the highlights is what I use the most now the thing I use the second most is

46:34 called the Highlights feed and the highlights feed I'm loading it right now essentially it's just like these little almost like sized highlights from all different books and so it is completely randomized and it's almost like you have History's Greatest entrepreneurs speaking to and then just read through them and see what thoughts respond so like the first thing that came up was actually it's actually a highlight from one of Warren Buffett shareholder letters he's talking about diversification relation to risk the

46:57 next highlight is a quote from Ed KML the founder of Pixar talking about he didn't even realize at the beginning of his company how poor the communication was and that there was things going on in his company that that his the people his employees were not telling him and his thoughts on how to fix that then there's a quote from a book that I read like six years ago and it's actually the the biography of alib Baba and he's

47:15 talking about the importance of listening and that poor listeners actually have second rate negotiation skills and so that is the second most used feature for me personally this might be different for you third feature books did you have a list of all the books that are in there I think right now says I have 307 books in here I still have a bunch I need to put in and then that that's very simple like I just

47:32 went through the reason I reposted the Mike Bloomberg episode for example is because I've been rereading the highlights and so I went back if I don't have time to reread the book which I will in the future but I just read through I think I have like 44 highlights of Bloomberg's autobiography here and you read through them and there's just so many ideas and this is happening like 15 minutes it's absolutely incredible so that's self-explanatory you can search my book

47:53 The Last feature that I use the most is the favorites feature you know I have 20,000 highlights it's there's a ton of information in here and so what I'll do is as I go back through the highlights and I've done this forever and that's why this number will always go up I have 839 favorites now but you know if you're listening to this months from now it's it's going to be higher and whether it's through searching whether it's through

48:14 rereading the the highlights on a specific book or through the highlights feed which is the random just showing me like the random highlights that I've done if there's something like damn that's a good one I really want to remember remember that and so I I highlight it right me I favored it and then now that goes into the favorites feed so then I have an even more like specialized feed of ideas and highlights from different books all on one page so

48:38 again need to re reiterate I think if you are like me and there's a good chance that you're if you're listening to this you're like me if you're like me you're already running a successful company I think it's a it's a no-brainer I would at least test it out for a year there's a chance that you don't like it I not going to share that opinion with you because like I said before I listen to it or should not listen to it I use

48:57 it every day and I think what I what this is going to be good for and what I hope to do is like man like for a Founder to just have a browser this this notebook sitting in a browser that they can tap into anytime I think that's going to be very valuable and I can say that because it's been very valuable for me so hopefully that makes sense if you want to test it out it is Founders

49:19 notes.com again Founders notes.com and I also leave a link down in the show notes if you want to grab the link from from the podcast the show notes on your podcast player founders notes.com