This is Paul Graham.

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved.... See more

There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't.

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline.

Going

into business is like a hang-glider launch: you'd better do it

wholeheartedly, or not at all.

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

So the biggest cause of bad ideas is the still life effect: you

come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and then at each point

(a day, a week, a month) feel you've put so much time into it that

this must be the idea.

One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality

VCs are

like car salesmen or bureaucrats: the nature of their work

turns them into jerks.