This is Paul Graham.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it — even if they had to work at another job to make a living

The questions depend on inspiration, but the answers can be got by sheer persistence.

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.

There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers.

Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. In fact most aren't.

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.

Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.

Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that

something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be

able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard

enough

The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going

So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could

think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all

around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong

You need to be good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you're going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with.