#277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3

What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily (my new daily podcast)[4:00] How To Make Wealth by Paul Graham [4:01] Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.<br /><br />[6:00] All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want.[7:00] It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much wealth as an average employee.[8:00] And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.[9:00] In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.  (Founders #208)[10:00] A very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.[10:00] Paul Graham’s Essays (Founders #275)[11:00] What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things.[12:00] Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.[12:00] Sam Walton epiosdes#150 Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble.#234 Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton.[13:00] Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.[14:00] So few businesses really pay attention to making customers happy.[15:00] What people will give you money for depends on them, not you.[16:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham[20:00] The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.[21:00] Relentelssness wins. A great product has to be better than it has to be.[21:00] Relentlessness Wins: Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible.[22:00] All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.[2