“But I am an honest artist. What I write is intended to reach the customer — and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or at least divert the tedium of his hours. I never hide from him in a private language, nor am I seeking praise from other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him — or I don’t want anything.”
“That’s life, pal. Deal.”
“Once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture — you’ve found your priority.”
“Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn’t been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.”
Paul Graham, emphasis mine
“Don’t tell me you had a wonderful meeting with me. Tell me what you’re going to do on Monday that’s different.”
Peter Drucker
A good reminder that it’s not about your thing, it’s about what your thing is for.
“You take that underlying view that work is somehow supposed to create something more meaningful and you marry that with the entrepreneurial-delusional state and you get this really interesting stew of people who want to change the world ultimately because they want to make it a better place… because they want to create more meaning.”
“The rest of the time, it’s about shipping, motivating, leading, connecting, envisioning and engaging. So that’s what we worked on.”
“All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
“I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn’t the life they were designed for.”
“You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I’m telling you that the key is to have a mind that’s prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth.”