Paul Graham, one of the most enigmatic geniuses in Silicon Valley. He is a hacker, a painter, an investor, and the "wind-maker" behind entrepreneurs.
He founded Y Combinator, the world's earliest startup incubator, and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit. He has written a series of articles that have changed the way countless entrepreneurs think, such as "Hackers and Painters", "How to Create Wealth" and "Startups = Growth".
His approach to life is quite unlike that of those multi-talented "time management experts". Instead, it is completely contrary to common sense - he almost always refuses all unnecessary invitations and stubbornly devotes most of his time to just a few specific tasks.
Others regard "opportunities" as pies, but he treats "opportunities" as traps.
He said, "If you truly want to achieve something in a particular area, you must make it the center of your life. Other matters do not wait for you to handle them; instead, they wait for you not to handle them."
This is not an evasion; rather, it is a profound self-choice. A strategy commonly employed by intelligent people, namely "default rejection + concentrated penetration".
01、 "Default Denial": Those who consistently reject countless opportunities actually gain more time.
In a speech, Paul Graham said: What really throws you off track is not failure, but distraction.
Once, in his work diary at Y Combinator, he recorded a trivial matter - declining an "extremely important industry conference". Why?
Because he was going to write an article that day. It's not because this summit is not "meaningful" enough, but he knows that for him at this moment, it is a low-intensity consumption. Even if he goes, it won't advance him much. Instead, it will disrupt the rhythm and blur the focus.
In his worldview, there is a very simple but powerful criterion for judgment: "Not everything is worth optimizing. Learn to distinguish: what is 'capable of being improved', and what is 'must be accomplished'."
Seemingly ordinary, yet it almost completely overturns the logic of most people's efforts.
Many people believe that success is: grasping everything, making progress in every aspect, and enhancing marginal efficiency.
But the reality is: true experts usually only focus on a very few key tasks, and then use time and patience to forcefully penetrate them.
So he tacitly refused almost all meetings, social events, interviews, and even refrained from making investments on his own.
His life didn't improve through having "more choices", but rather became better through having "fewer choices" faster.
This is not aloofness, but rather a sense of scarcity.
02、"Focused Breakthrough": The Secret of Deep Work, is to make the brain "sink deep"
In "How to Work Efficiently", Paul wrote a passage comparing "maker's schedule" (the schedule of the creator) and "manager's schedule" (the schedule of the manager):
- Managers can divide a day into 30-minute intervals or 1-hour blocks and switch between them.
- However, creators cannot do things during fragmented time. Any distraction will ruin the entire train of thought.
And he himself is an extreme "creator type". His daily schedule is almost a blank space that is completely cleared. It's not because of leisure, but to reserve a complete and deep space for thinking, writing, and coding.
He said, "If something is worth doing, it is worth eliminating all distractions and immersing yourself in it." This, then, is his second core strategy: concentrated penetration.
He seldom tries to "balance" his life. Instead, he focuses on one thing at a time and gives it his all.
When writing code, he doesn't check messages; when writing articles, he doesn't reply to emails; when spending time with family, he doesn't talk about starting a business.
It may seem inefficient, but it is very profound. We are often told to "operate in multiple directions", to balance life, career, relationships, and growth simultaneously...
However, those who pursue "all-round development" often fail to excel in any of these areas. And Paul Graham tells us: A truly worthwhile life is not about distributed efforts, but rather about in-depth exploration.
03、The counter-intuitive wisdom is that intelligent people don't "do more", but "refuse to do".
Why are we always anxious, constantly wasting energy, and doing a lot of things but achieving no results?
Because we mistakenly believed that: The more diverse one's life is, the less likely one will miss out on anything.
But the truth is: Life is not a fully packed backpack, but a funnel.
The resources you can focus on - time, energy, willpower, concentration - are always limited.
The more you grasp one aspect, the less depth you will have, and you will merely skim the surface, never reaching the "moderate level".
Therefore, truly intelligent people are not judged by "how much they have accomplished", but by "how much they have eliminated".
The most important decision in Paul Graham's life was not "what to accept", but "what to give up":
- He gave up painting and turned his artistic inclination towards writing;
- he abandoned following the trends and turned his blog into a classic piece;
- he quit being the CEO of a large company and turned Y Combinator into a "seed community".
His secret can be summed up in just six words: "No, but really no."
04、Three things, that is a life.
Try tthree things like
- It could be: Writing + Work + Spending time with family.
- it could be: Products + Exercise + Self-growth.
The key point is not which option you choose, but rather after you make a choice, you eliminate 99% of the others.
This is not a variant of "choice anxiety", but rather a kind of "active default".
Moreover, once you have determined your main "line" of life, you will have an extremely strong sense of control. It's not that life pushes you along; rather, you tell life: I will exert my efforts only on this path.
Paul Graham's philosophy of life is actually quite simple:
Use your most energetic moments on the people and things that are most worthy of your attention.
"Less but better is more powerful than more but chaotic." A wise person is one who dares to say "no", and then uses the remaining energy to make a powerful strike.
