What You'll Wish You'd Known (2005) | Hacker News Reader

What You'll Wish You'd Known (2005)

paulgraham.com

54 pointstokenadult28 comments

In my first year of graduate school, I was wondering "HOW can I do something creative?" It seemed an impossible problem. How do you come up with something which would startle you with its newness if somebody else showed it to you as something they came up with?

The solution I hit upon which moved me forward was this: research problems are homework problems. You could give me a homework problem I had never solved before, and I would work diligently on it. I was not deterred by the fact that I had never answered this homework problem before because I knew SOMEBODY had answered this homework problem before.

A Research Problem was just a Homework Problem asked for the first time. BEFORE the first person to do it had ever done it. With this attitude, I was able to work on a problem with the artificial belief that OF COURSE it could be done, and so I should stick to it until I had done it. The belief was artificial because, in the case of a research problem, it had NOT been done before.

Once I got used to working on research problems it was totally better than homework. No longer was I interested in homework, but only in these incredible investigations that hadn't been done before.

I should add that I wouldn't have even vaguely understood the questions if I wasn't on a daily basis exposed to great research.

The solution I hit upon which moved me forward was this: research problems are homework problems.

There is a famous story about this, which you can read in the book Mathematical People. George Dantzig came late to class one day and saw two problems on the blackboard. He worked them, not knowing that his professor had posted them as examples of unsolved research problems, NOT homework. That impressed his professor and helped launch his career.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Dant...

Chevy Chase spoke at our HS graduation, and as best I can recall, he told us that adults are jerks, it's fun to smoke pot (he said it euphemistically but we all knew what he meant), and not to take things too seriously. I think he was pretty stoned at the time.

My favorite line in a speech with lots of favorite lines:

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

A nice application of this rule: try to explain a social or economic event/trend.

Theory 1: event occurs as a result of emergent phenomenon.

Theory 2: powerful people that I dislike caused it.

How is this an application of that rule?

Both theories are excuses for being lazy.

It seems to be more of an application of rule "if I say something that's appealing to the majority of people on YC I'll get upvoted."

I imagine that explaining the emergent phenomenon is less lazy than blaming someone, though simply labeling it as such may not be.

Yet when it comes to coding, you generally want to follow exactly the opposite advice - "lazy" programmers tend to be the best, because they figure out how to get the most work done in the fewest lines of code/hours of work.

The difference in context is crucial, of course: the laziness pg is talking about is the decision that you shouldn't even try something because you don't have the "stuff" (genius) that you'd need to do it. When coding (and in a lot of other areas, too), you've already decided that you're going to do the job, and it's just a question of how to bang it out most efficiently.

Sorry if it's rude to ask, but why were you vetoed?

There's a lot of heretical (good) advice in there, so I wonder if that was the reason.

I think because I wasn't from an organization that could serve as a guarantee of good behavior. E.g. if I came from IBM and told the students to try heroin, I'd be fired, but as a random individual there was no limit to how irresponsible I could be. (This was before YC.)

It wasn't because of the content of the talk. The authorities didn't see that. The only thing I've written that was turned down because it was too controversial was:

http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html

What would you say the limit on how irresponsible you can be is now that you are part of YC?

The fact that it was turned down speaks volumes.

This has been posted here before. I wonder how dupe-detection failed! I couldn't find the earlier submission in SearchYC.com but I am sure it was posted before.

My wild guess, based on other examples, is that duplicate submission detection lapses after a certain interval, so that there can be fresh discussion of interesting topics. But I haven't checked the source code to see if that is indeed how it works.

There is enough churn in membership here on HN that if the software lets a submission post as a new thread, I'm willing to treat it as a new thread. I try always to post canonical URLs when I submit links myself, the better to activate the duplicate detector if necessary. /metadiscussion

Not complaining... just surprised :-)

Had to go into the database for this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58424

The background story seems interesting. Why was this speech not given?

In any case, I'm pretty sure that at 18, I wouldn't have "gotten" it.

I'm pretty sure that at 18, I wouldn't have "gotten" it.

I'm encouraging my sixteen-year-old to read it often enough to wrap his mind around it.

Yeah, I do wonder about that. It seems to me that wanting to do significant work is either inborn or a sort of acquired taste.

But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if you don't expect kids to do significant work, you won't give them opportunities to do so. So maybe we should try it the other way for a while.

Hi I'm 18. I read this article like two months ago. It struck me as important but I moved on. I was thinking about the phrase that stuck with me "Do something hard" and came back and have reread it 3-4 times over the last month.

I also recently watched a Disney movie called "Meet the Robinsons". It has a great moral and at the end there is an amazing quote:

"Around Here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." -Walt Disney

I was so struck by this quote that I printed it out and it now hangs above my desk. I don't think I've fully internalized these two quotes, this one idea. I'm working at it and its greatly affected already how I do work at work. How I view where my life is going and how I view the activity that I'm currently working on (speaking of which I need to stop reading HN and get back to work).

Even if this article doesn't fully sink in I think it can start the cogs running in the minds of our youth. I strongly encourage all of us to push high schoolers to read this article. There is a chance it could make a difference.

I read from him somewhere recently (but I can't find it!) that basically, since he wasn't from a company or anything, he wasn't accountable. There was no one to fire him if he told them all to drop out.

I read it at 18...

Reading it now. :P

At 18, you're a grown man. At 15, you're pretty close. You probably shouldn't short-change yourself by saying you wouldn't have "gotten" it just because our college-bound society tells you that you're a baby if you're under 25.

I'm a bit confused on who the audience is. Students going into high school or students going into college? After reading I'm noting to myself not to waste any time in college.

Maybe the audience is more clear to readers who grew up in the United States. The speech would be given to a group of students about to graduate from high school (that is, just completing secondary schooling) and would assume that many of the audience would be going on to college for higher education.

Any possibility of hyper linking the footnotes on all of the old essays? I'd rather click a link than search [1], [2] etc :P

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