https://vegasharmon.com/authors/paul-graham/ Recent content in Paul Graham on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/billionaires-who-couldn-t-stop-why-they-keep-working/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/billionaires-who-couldn-t-stop-why-they-keep-working/ One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/exploitation-myths-trap-the-poor-while-the-rich-know-better/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/exploitation-myths-trap-the-poor-while-the-rich-know-better/ The greatest danger of this nonsense may not even be that it sends policy astray, but that it misleads ambitious people. Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it’s really done? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/flip-the-polarity-from-why-not-to-how/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/flip-the-polarity-from-why-not-to-how/ The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sneaking-past-your-own-standards/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sneaking-past-your-own-standards/ Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/track-the-slope-not-the-point/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/track-the-slope-not-the-point/ It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seek-out-overlooked-work-you-can-explain/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seek-out-overlooked-work-you-can-explain/ Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a recipe: if you’re excited about some kind of work that’s not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that’s ok to do, but one to seek out. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/stay-upwind/ Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/stay-upwind/ What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you’re interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition. … One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn’t seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it doesn’t seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers.