The Wisdom Of Paul Graham’s Latest Essay

If you’re not aware yet, Paul Graham is an utter genius when it comes to a wide range of subjects. Many of his essays are absolute must-reads. If you haven’t been to check them out, I suggest you do so soon.

Anyway, his last piece, titled What Business Can Learn From Open Source is an absolute masterpiece. I’m not going to mirror the thing here, but I want to highlight a few of the comments/ideas that I found most interesting.

First and foremost among the main ideas he talks about is the concept that people who do something because they love it will usually do it far better than someone who’s simply paid to do it. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s worth repeating. I’ve seen it in my own professional life time after time; those who don’t have a true passion for their work are often mediocre at it (or worse).

That’s why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money.

About traditional vs. evolving media sources:

The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it’s only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.

About the inefficiency of modern workplaces:

The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient. The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it’s not just the way offices look that’s bleak. The way people act is just as bad.

About how real work requires time to do nothing but think:

The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I’m writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I’m sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase– this is where ideas come from– and yet I’d feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

Comparing economic models to business models:

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails. Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

On the forces inhibiting business:

The list of what you can’t ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience I assume it’s infinite. Within the office you now have to walk on eggshells lest anyone say or do something that makes the company prey to a lawsuit. And God help you if you fire anyone.

On the true nature of a startup:

Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs. But business administration is not what you’re doing in a startup. What you’re doing is business creation. And the first phase of that is mostly product creation– that is, hacking. That’s the hard part. It’s a lot harder to create something people love than to take something people love and figure out how to make money from it.

Head over and read the whole thing now — it’s here: http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/o pensource.html