This is Paul Graham.

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 most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like

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

If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away.

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

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.

To do something well you have to like it.