This is Paul Graham.

Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience.

Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose

particularly well.

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.

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.

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."

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.

Going

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

wholeheartedly, or not at all.

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

People who've done great things tend

to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only

exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude

biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how

the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems

like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the m... See more

You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world