«One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start.»
«Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooled by impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that. But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, and plagued with asterisks. [2] If you use revenue as the test, Silicon Valley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's. And because it works, it will spread.»
«Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it»
«It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it as a way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then even if the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it. If the problem is sharply enough defined, failure itself is knowledge: if the theorem you're trying to prove turns out to be false, or you use a structural member of a certain size and it fails under stress, you've learned something, even if it isn't what you wanted to learn.»
«Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early work too harshly is to realize that our attitudes toward it are themselves early work. Holding everything to the same standard is a crude version 1. We're already evolving better customs, and we can already see signs of how big the payoff will be.»
https://paulgraham.com/early.html#f8n