Transcript
Introduction
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You see this pattern with start-up founders. You don't want to start a start-up to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there'll already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't, like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers’ floors. He's referencing Microsoft and Airbnb there.
Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture, which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
One difficulty here is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. It genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers. And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly.
Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself with independent-minded people, hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you too and to think of more. The independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded by conventional-minded people.
A place where the independent and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded. Otherwise, the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones. So as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck.
One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. The importance of founders knowing other founders is repeated a lot in Paul's essays. I'm going to read that one more time because I think it's important. One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees. You don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people. It's enough to have one or two who you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you are. They need you, too.
You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space by reading history. When I read history, I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is why I say, every entrepreneur needs a library. It's a tool for entrepreneurs. Back to his idea about how to make yourself more independent-minded, more generally, your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.
When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see his ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion. You notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt and then more and more and more until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. There are intellectual fashions, too. And you definitely don't want to participate in those because unfashionable ideas are -- oh my God, this is so good, Because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.
The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking. Novel ideas come from curiosity. Independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. The independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity who keep eating even after they're full.
And this is what I think the most important sentence in this entire essay is. "How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is not much, maybe you should change something. Curiosity is unlike most other appetites. Indulging it tends to increase rather than to satiate it. Questions lead to more questions. So perhaps, curiosity is the compass. Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be do what you love so much as do what you're curious about."
That's an excerpt from Paul Graham excellent essay, How to Think for Yourself. And so before I jump into his next excellent essay, which is How to Work Hard, if I sound funny, what I went through this week is going to be very familiar to anybody with school-aged children. My daughter brought home some kind of sickness. It was spread to my son, then spread to my wife. And then now I finally have gotten it. And so for the last few days, I've just been held up in bed reading and reading and reading any time I'm not asleep. So I have spent the last few weeks living inside the mind of Paul Graham and it has been an amazing experience. So not only have I finished reading all of his essays since I was sick in bed, I had the opportunity, I've already finished reading his book, which is a collection of essays too called Hackers & Painters, which will be the next episode of Founders.