Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

The guys that guys envy, girls like.

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest.

To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they’re affected by how you react to them. When you’re driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling.

An example of a job with both measurement and leverage would be lead actor in a movie. Your performance can be measured in the gross of the movie. And you have leverage in the sense that your performance can make or break it. CEOs also have both measurement and leverage. They’re measured, in that the performance of the company is their performance.

if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.

Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything.

Chapter 7. Mind the Gap When

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.