Cognition

The most important active step you can take to cultivate your curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few adults are equally…

One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are…

In the startup world, the name for this principle is "do things that don't scale." If you pay a ridiculous amount of attention to your tiny initial…

But this is hard for us to empathize with because we're not the recipients; we're the returns. [ 2 ] Knowledge did of course have a practical…

Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it because they liked it. But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket collector.…

Newton's case, at least, suggests that the risk/reward rule holds here. He's famous for one particular obsession of his that turned out to be…

It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be…

Notes [1] There are other types of collecting that illustrate this point better than bus tickets, but they're also more popular. It seemed just as…

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes"…

If you don't need to go too deeply into a problem, you can solve it without writing. If you're thinking about how two pieces of machinery should…

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words…

If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more qualifications.…

But this only seems possible with ideas you can express in a formal language. [ 1 ] Arguably what such people are doing is putting ideas into words…

What I'm saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them. Putting…

Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one. Notes [ 1 ] Machinery and circuits are formal languages. [ 2 ] I…

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can…

And yet no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea best…

But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better. I don't think this was because my writing was…

But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications. An essay is a cleaned up…

If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs. So it's not quite right to…

Notes [ 1 ] The closest thing to an exception is when you have to go back and insert a new point into the middle of something you've written. This…

You wouldn't have a boss, or even need to get research funding. I had always liked looking at paintings. Could I make them? I had no idea. I'd…

Much to my surprise, the time I spent working on this stuff was not wasted after all. After we started Y Combinator, I would often encounter startups…

There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money. I just mean that those startups don't do as well. [ 3 ] The most powerful…

Notes [ 1 ] I'm going to use "persistent" for the good kind of stubborn and "obstinate" for the bad kind, but I can't claim I'm simply following…

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 it.…

I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was…

There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in…

Expertise The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup is not to…

Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort.…

So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version…

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best…

There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had…

School That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn…

Filters There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter. Most…

I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many…

I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to…

It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to…

Perhaps most convincingly, it would be demoralizing for us to be up to our chins in failure all the time. But I know the real reason we're so…

Tell them that valuation is not the most important thing to you and that you haven't thought much about it, that you are looking for investors you…

When you refuse to meet an investor because you're not in fundraising mode, or slow down your interactions with an investor who moves too slow, or…

1. Pick good cofounders. Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is.…

The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As…

There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is…

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they…

It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is…

Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most…

Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been…

Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what…

Once you understand how these mechanisms work, and that startups were suppressed for most of the 20th century, you don't have to resort to some vague…

But there's no contradiction here; the startups that raise the most are the ones doing it by choice, in order to grow faster, not the ones doing it…

As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same. The…

YC doesn't have time to do this, but if the YC partners can convince themselves that the founders both (a) know what they're talking about and (b)…

But you should know who your competitors are, and tell the YC partners candidly what your relative strengths and weaknesses are. Because the YC…

Steve presumably wouldn't have kept having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of another company doing this. So is it a good…

And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that. [ 2 ] If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that…

The reason many hope you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investors this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to…

I'm going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom…

It's like the old saying, "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." And of course, that's the way the chiropractor goes about…

So let's briefly review what kind of models and techniques constitute this basic knowledge that everybody has to have before they proceed to being…