There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.
It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn’t center on you.
The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.
People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.
Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.
People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.
The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.
So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.