If you’ll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.

When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide of some great fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked ‘Why don’t artists paint like that now?’ The room...

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is...

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary...

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They’re going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and...

People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different,...

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not...

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at...