Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
The place to fight design wars is in new markets,
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
How to Do Great Work
Paul Graham, the founder of a startup incubator and mentor to thousands of young people, sees this attention as a trap. In his view, prestige is “a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.”12
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
Paul Graham • How to Do What You Love
In some ways it's easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.
How to Do Great Work
When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore.
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
This is an important point. A lot of the most successful people, not just in startups but in many fields, do what they do because there's something they want to exist, or some mystery they want solved, and no one else is working on it.
So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software.