My Love, Hate, Love Again Affair with Paul Graham Love I discovered you in May 2003. I think I found out about you in an Infoworld article about spam filters. You had developed a successful Bayesian spam filter and there was a link to your website. Snowed in during a work trip at my hotel in Edmonton, Alberta, I tracked down A Plan For Spam and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it was when I read A Taste For Makers that I had an epiphany. Although "taste is subjective and a matter of personal preference" had been drummed into me from an early age, I still had some vague notions about the absoluteness of good design. Alone in my room I rolled on the carpet and screamed “I love you, Paul Graham.” I spent the rest of the night reading all of your other essays and was quite sleep deprived when I got to the client's site the next morning. Over the next three years I must have read A Taste For Makers at least twenty times. Even while vacationing in the Maasai Mara with my cousin I used the cyber-café in the middle of the jungle to check email and re-read A Taste For Makers just one more time.  I constantly checked PaulGraham.com for updates (before the RSS feed) and at times when I discovered a new essay I savored it like a precious little dessert, promising myself I would read it only after accomplishing my day’s work. “What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through?” [1]. For me, it was a PG essay. I procrastinated endlessly by re-reading your essays and through you I discovered what would become an even bigger time sink—Reddit. I spent more time on Reddit than on anything else outside of my job between late 2005 and late 2006. I avoided the guilt by convincing myself it was good procrastination, the kind you condoned, if not encouraged. My friends got sick of me telling them about Paul Graham and only one of them managed to become half as enthusiastic as I was about you. I must also have become an annoyance on various discussion groups I was a member of when I forwarded several of your essays with the subject “Interesting Article”. When I broke up with my girlfriend of almost a year (the one I thought I’d marry) I quoted from you. I pleaded my case and explained that I needed time to pursue my dream—found a successful start-up, sell it for a tidy sum, then spend my days writing essays and pontificating about every subject under the sun, just like you :) From your various writings I developed a disdain for MBA and marketing type people and even decided not to attend business school, instead choosing to become a serious hacker. Until then I had been more of an IT guy who wrote quick and dirty programs or the occasional Perl script. As I grappled with the business school decision and argued with my dad about it, I felt bad because your writings had more influence on me than my own father.  When he visited me and asked me about my life's plan he was disappointed that I had decided not to follow in his footsteps and get advanced degrees. African fathers don't mess around and I just didn't have the nerve to tell him, you know what dad, PG says all you need is a copy of K&R and a Linux box, not an MBA. I imagined what it must have been like when your own father told you “Where there is muck there is brass” repeating the old Yorkshire adage. You introduced me to Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People in one of your essays and I bought an original unrevised version with yellowing pages per your recommendation. For a short while tried to live my life by its advice. [2] How To Do What You Love was another great essay and the subject of one of my better Toastmasters speeches, for which I won a Best Speaker award. Hate And then it happened. Sometime in 2006 you started to exhibit the Kiyosaki phenomenon, named after Robert Kiyosaki who wrote one great book (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) then tried to milk its success for all it was worth by cranking out titles like there was no tomorrow! The initial book was a compelling read because it was based on insights developed over a life time. In the later books there wasn’t much new to say and they were of questionable value. Like Kiyosaki, you hadn’t yet gained enough new experiences to inform more essays at the rate you were cranking them out and unsurprisingly the later essays were bad. By this time you had developed quite a fan base--PaulGraham.com got 3.6 million page views in 2004 over 10.6 million page views in 2005—and a something of a cult following among early Reddit users. [3]. How else could you explain nonsensical posts like ‘Paul Graham Eating Breakfast’ getting to the very top of Reddit? It seemed like after the high of great feedback on the initial essays had worn off, you needed another fix, which you sought by pumping out more essays. An essay like Microsoft Is Dead was clearly and desperately reaction seeking. “we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world.” Surely PG, did you think a 60 billion dollar company felt hurt because you “didn’t invite them” to your demo days? (Full disclosure: I am a former Microsoft employee and enjoyed my time there for the most part). You tried to clarify what you said in MicrosoftIs Dead Cliff Notes but the damage had been done. Your stature as a guru was rapidly declining. How Art Can Be Good had the dubious distinction of being both long and content free given what you had said earlier in A Taste For Makers. Why did you even bother writing this essay? As you have observed in the past “Hackers are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people”. In my own development journey I’ve tried to become more of a ‘people’ person. While I initially liked the fact that you made hacking cool, by now your nerdy language and metaphors had become tiresome. No big deal I figured, I’ll just re-cast you “as a background process” and as I continue to develop it just might happen that “a small lead [will] grow into the yes half of a binary choice.” Heck, I might even join a startup and “be roughly 1/n^2 founder, where n is your [my] employee number.” And if am lucky enough to get into Startup School “as t approaches infinity something [will] become demo day.” :) Perhaps it is true that the real reason we dislike others is because we see in them qualities we hate about ourselves. Admittedly I am a nobody compared to you but a part of me was a tad jealous of your success. Now you even have Stephen Wolfram and Peter Norvig reviewing your essays? Wow! In the later essays you belabored your Viaweb story ad nauseum. Common PG, that was 1995. What have you done lately? For christ’s sake tell us something new, I thought to myself! As if things weren’t bad enough you had the effrontery to write that essay. I think it deserves to be simply called 'that essay' from now on! It was about hackers in a Silicon Valley café looking as lifeless as caged animals because they weren’t working on startups! At this point I figured you had completely lost it. Your stature as a guru was toast! Kaput! In all fairness the essay had some good points but a preposterous claim: That you could look at some random person in a café, deduce that s/he is a hacker and then notice how lifeless s/he looks. And bingo! It had to be because s/he isn’t working on a startup. Why weren’t your essay reviewers catching this, I wondered. When Reddit was sold to Conde Nast you launched Startup News, later re-christened Hacker News. You said it was built to test Arc but I felt you just wanted to reclaim the attention you were used to in the early days of Reddit. Sadly the new breed of Reddit users (posters and up-voters of numerous Bush bashing articles and silly images) had no clue who PG was and weren’t paying him his due respect! Eventually I stopped reading your essays because there was nothing new to learn but more importantly because I didn’t want my hero to die. Deep down I wanted to pretend that you were still PG of old, the one whose eloquent writing had profoundly influenced me. Love Again Over the past year I’ve come to appreciate Hacker News a lot more. I don’t spend as much time on it as I used to on Reddit [4] but it is one of the few sites I can count on to deliver great content for the subjects I’m interested in. You’ve re-iterated a number of times that one of your goals for HN was to avoid what happened to Reddit. To your credit you’ve managed to accomplish it and for this I say, thanks PG. Without Hacker news I would never have discovered Denny Miu whom I have since corresponded with. I find myself re-reading his essay What I Learned From My Dad Who Taught Me How To Ride from time to time and his two quotations below are among my all time favorites: “If the mountain is without tigers, even monkey can be king.” Without Hacker News I would not have found David Adewumi who wrote the compelling essay Why Black Nerds Are Unpopular. [5]. And without Hacker News there wouldn’t be the culture of startups that has created a new class of founders. Many of the successful ones might otherwise have led lives of anonymity cranking out code for big, bad, large corporations. Through Startup School they’ve met and mingled with famous founders and realized that they are just ordinary guys. [6] What one man can do, clearly, so can another. I hope to eventually join this elite group. Your more recent essays about venture capitalists and their motivations, qualities of successful startup founders and the like have been quite insightful. After reading one of your essays, I tried to treat money making as an unpleasant errand to be quickly dispensed with so I could pursue my true life passions. Unfortunately I quickly realized this path was not for me when I became miserable and depressed. Sacrificing your relationships and health in the here and now in order to enjoy life at some elusive future date is simply not worth it. I have now stepped back and rephrased the question as: How can I pursue my life’s passions and somehow make money? Is it even possible if you are not a professional golfer, musician or fisherman? One school of thought says we must learn to love what we do, the other says just do what you love and things will work out somehow. You have addressed this at length in How To Do What You Love and maybe you are right. I’m still trying to figure this out but Napoleon Hill may have been onto something when he noted that you cannot be successful without being happy. When I have suffered from self doubt thinking maybe I’m “not bright enough to do something technically difficult” I have found consolation in these words of yours: “If you are worried that you are not bright enough, then you probably are bright enough.” [7] You’ve often said that smarts are highly overrated and that the most important factors for success are focus and determination. I believe I have these in abundance. Every now and then when things don't seem to be going well I admonish myself to be relentlessly resourceful. As for your essay about hackers and caged animals, I’m glad it has since been revised to exclude the preposterous claim. It now reads more like PG of old. They say old is new, new is old. Maybe you’ve come around full circle. You may have done no startups since Viaweb but by your own genial admission you’ve tried to do it a few times and quit because you don’t want random schleps taking up 3 to 4 years of your life. [8]. My own short experience working for someone else’s start up has borne out your claim that working on startups is so darn hard that if you are already independently wealthy it may not be worth doing. I decided to write this in PG format. After all, wasn’t it you who said Copy What You Like? :) You’ve deeply influenced me in many ways and love you, hate you or love you again, you are on my list of Heroes! Notes [1] From a PG essay that I'm too lazy to look up at the moment. This ain't a term paper and we are not in college! [2] I have since learned that How To Win Friends And Influence People is not the best way to be truly effective with people. I will write a post on this at a later date. [3] These figures are from footnotes that appeared on PaulGraham.com in January 2005 and January 2006 respectively. [4] I simply don't read as much anymore. I spent 2002 to 2006 amassing knowledge then realized that my knowledge had gotten too far ahead of my being and I risked self destruction. I discovered this when my friend Frank Zane introduced me to In Search Of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky. See some excerpts here. [5] I can't find this essay anywhere at the moment. It looks like David's site (www.DavidAdewumi.com) has been hijacked. [6] From a PG essay. [7] From a PG essay that I will leave as an assignment for you to find :) [8] From another PG essay. |
