Quotes

A collection of my favorite one-liner quotes.

"If you're thinking without writing, you're only thinking that you're thinking," - Leslie Lamport

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

"When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to." - Paul Graham

"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas." - Linus Pauling

"Earthquakes do not kill people; collapsing buildings do." - Ilan Kelman

"Nature uses only the largest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." - Richard Feynman

"Everyone faces the future with their eyes firmly on the past. And they don't see what's going to happen next." - John Robinson Pierce

“A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes.” - Vinod Khosla

Insights

A collection of my favorite long-form insights.

Peter Thiel on Starting a Business

"Most people think that competition is a synonym to business. But I argue that it is actually an antonym. Profits are just competed away in these competitions. If you want to start a business, you should start one that has a high pricing ability in a specific field (which is a monopoly). "

Paul Graham on Great Work

(from his essays How To Do Great Work and Superlinear Returns)

"There's a surprising amount of technique to doing great work. It's not just a matter of trying hard. I'm going to take a shot giving a recipe in one paragraph.

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they're full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you're lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing occasionally you're probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

And there is of course one other thing you need: to be lucky. Luck is always a factor, but it's even more of a factor when you're working on your own rather than as part of an organization. And though there are some valid aphorisms about luck being where preparedness meets opportunity and so on, there's also a component of true chance that you can't do anything about. The solution is to take multiple shots. Which is another reason to start taking risks early."

Salman Khan on Education

(from his book: Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing). New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024.)

"In conventional learning — still the norm in most schools — teachers educate students at a fixed pace and give them a quiz or test every few weeks. Even if students get 80 percent on a test, the class typically moves in lockstep to the next topic, usually without first addressing the 20 percent gap that was identified on the last exam. This process continues for years, with the students accumulating gaps along the way, and then we act surprised when they have trouble with algebra or calculus. No matter how innately bright or hardworking someone is, how can they have a chance of mastering algebra if they have major gaps in, say, decimals, fractions, or exponents? In mastery learning, students have time to identify and address those gaps. Having the space to develop a strong foundation allows the student to learn faster later too. In fairness to the traditional school system, without support, it is difficult to pull this off with one teacher and thirty students, each with different gaps and learning paces."