tl;dr:Paul compares persistence and obstinance. “When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don't give up is completely different.”
tl;dr:Key takeaways include: (1) Recognizing the right kind of crazy: Good ideas that are innovative and groundbreaking often seem crazy or bad to most people. (2) Breaking rules: Being independent-minded, whether aggressively or passively, allows for rule-breaking. (3) Choosing the right problems: People tend to be more conservative when selecting problems to solve, favoring fashionable problems. And more.
tl;dr:Popular languages are equally good at "gluing together calls to library functions." To expand your concept of programming, find a "weird" language. They are weird for a reason e.g. Lisp macros, and ask "what can you say in this language that would be inconvenient to say in a popular language?" You'll probably be "learning how to think things you couldn't previously think."
tl;dr:"Working hard is a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result."
tl;dr:"Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed, but not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." Paul advises us to listen and pro-actively encourage these ideas.
tl;dr:"The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy."
tl;dr:"We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects." Optimism and imagination become urgent.
tl;dr:The recipe for a good essay is importance + novelty + correctness + strength. Essays speak truths which isn't always received well, as they can often disagree with personal beliefs.
tl;dr:"Schools train us to win by hacking bad tests" so we can get good grades, but not learn. Good grades reward us in obvious ways. This mindset filters into the startup world, founders want to hack the system. This is correcting itself and that makes Paul optimistic.
tl;dr:Collectors of old bus tickets "have an obsessive interest" in the their field. It's not rationale, nor driven by market forces. Paul argues that this passion is the sprout of what we consider "genius", and here he philosophizes how to leverage it into your career.