18 December 2006

Quote of the day: A few choice words of Paul Graham

From Paul Graham's essay "Ideas for startups":
What happens when your mind wanders? It may be like doodling. Most people have characteristic ways of doodling. This habit is unconscious, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. I started to make the kind of gestures I'd make if I were drawing from life. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly.
From Paul Graham's essay "What Business Can Learn From Open Source":
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture [2] ...
[2] It derives from the late Latin trepalium, a torture device so called because it consisted of three stakes. I don't know how the stakes were used. "Travel" has the same root.
From Paul Graham's essay "How to start a startup":
People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.

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