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

The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each... See more

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

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.

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

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

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

particularly well.

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.