Writing, Briefly An Article by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it; start writing when you think of the first sentence; write about stuff you like; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it. v0.crapThe situation talks back writing
Writing and Speaking An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. writingspeechcommunicationpractice
Write Simply An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. Several Short Sentences About Writing writing
The Age of the Essay An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com EssayerExpressing ideas helps to form themFlow interesting (The Meander) Follow the brushThe Anxiety of Sequence writing
Early work An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do. The right way to deal with new ideasFocus on the rate of change creativityskillideas
What doesn't seem like work? An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you? workinterestlife
The Top Idea in Your Mind An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. ideas
Cities and Ambition An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Boston says you should be smarterFlorence and MilanA city speaks to you mostly by accidentCity messages citiesambition
Taste for Makers An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff? You feel this when you start to design thingsGood design is simpleGood design is timelessGood design is often slightly funnyGood design is hard, but looks easy+3 More Beauty in flight beautytastedesign
Good and bad procrastination An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The absent-minded professorYou can't look a big problem too directly in the eye
The still life effect A Fragment by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late. ideasart
How to do what you love An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com To do something well you have to like itWow, that's pretty coolPrestige is just fossilized inspirationAlways produce worklife
Hackers and Painters An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com A great painting has to be better than it has to be
Note-Taking for Pencilophobes An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by Piotr Naskrecki MantisAn extension of my brainRecordingsThe era of paper
Mantis One of the first relational databases for biologists was Biota. Unfortunately, in its early stages of implementation, Biota did not yet have all the elements that my work on taxonomy, systematics, and behavior of katydids required. I decided to develop my own solution, and Mantis was born. There is a fairly long list of data points, but having a database designed specifically to record them simplifies the record-keeping process tremendously.
An extension of my brain Mantis has become an extension of my brain, and extra memory storage space that never forgets anything and thus, I am convinced, is a reason for major memory lapses on my part. Why should I make an effort to remember the author of that paper on the courtship behavior of Cyphoderris when I can quickly look it up?
Recordings Of course, I do not carry my laptop with me when out in the first at night, and if anything requires me to make a note I either record it as a voice message on the sound recorder (which I always carry with me), or make a note in a small, waterproof notebook.
The era of paper Instant availability and portability of data make research in the field infinitely easier for scientists, but what is lost is the feeling of slow accumulation of knowledge and the physical evidence of one’s scientific prestige—the extensive shelves of important-looking volumes and journals. There is no denying it, the era of paper is fading fast, and I can easily imagine a time when students will be perplexed by the strange, primitive implement known as the pencil. As far as I am concerned, this time cannot come soon enough.