Some of my favorite quotes from Paul Graham’s essays: • My father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. •You should not worry about prestige. This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow. •You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. • Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. •If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. •You have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and that's why I've never done another startup. •If a startup succeeds, you get millions of dollars, and you don't get that kind of money just by asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain. • Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up. • If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. • If you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror. •The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. • If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there. • After a while determination starts to look like talent. • One of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. • Startups take off because the founders make them take off. Listen to the episode I made on what I learned from reading all of Paul Graham’s essays: https://t.co/qnr8gqqGcL