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You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life…

Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most people can get to saying to one's boss, I want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten…

Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans…

And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees. You…

Startups make wealth, which means they make things people want, and if there's a limit on the number of things people want, we are nowhere near it. I…

But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time…

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another;…

When we were working on our own startup , back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about…

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups…

And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to…

After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. When I interviewed Mark…

The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something…

And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something. It's easy to see how little launches matter. Think…

He wrote "If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than…

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to…

Whereas if you want to start a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something fairly novel. A startup has to make something it can…

It's not that you don't think about the future, just that you think about it no more than necessary. In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a…

If a successful startup could make a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were only 1%, the expected value of starting one…

On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that…

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have…

These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid…

Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. Do…

There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not…

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'…

It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds,…

Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the ancillary benefit…

It will also be important to choose work that suits your circumstances. For example, if there's a kind of work that inherently requires a huge…

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…

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood:…

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…

The other solution is to let yourself be interested in lots of different things. You don't decrease your upside if you switch between equally genuine…

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"…

Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead. It's not just having to commit your ideas to…

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.…

Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned further, taps his head…

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…

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…

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…

Jessica Livingston's brain , that's what her x-ray vision is seeking out in founders. Earnestness! Who'd have guessed? Reporters literally can't…

In preindustrial times it was never far from robbery, and some areas of business still retain that character, except using lawyers instead of…

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…

Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find…

You don't have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your heels. It even works, up to a point. The fact that obstinacy works for…

When we love a problem that other people don't, it's often because we've unconsciously noticed that it's more important than they realize. Which…

Considering what it's made of, it's not surprising that the right kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that it gets so…

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.…

Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural…

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…

The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty…

You shouldn't give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much…

But if you know what you want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in. [ 5 ] The lower time limits for intense work suggest a…

A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on.…

The hard part is making this converge with the work you do as an adult. And our customs make it harder. We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as…

The other sense of a project being one's own — working on it by oneself — has a much softer edge. It shades gradually into collaboration. And…

A company that needs software to do something can't use the software already written to do it at another company, and thus has to write their own,…