Paul Graham

What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to your users.

You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your "vision", and you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision. In a cafe. By yourself. And build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users, because that's doing sales, which is a pain in the ass, and they might say no.

You will not ship fast enough because you're embarrassed to ship something unfinished, and you don't want to face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping. You will shrink from contact with the real world, contact with your users. That's the mistake you will make.

Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn’t matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn’t fully understand (e.g. Hegel).

The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common:

1. They had high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won’t respect the teachers who don’t call them on it.
2. They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It’s hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can’t think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.
3. They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren’t really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.

Something I explained to my 12 yo: When you're a little kid, your parents create your environment. Then there's a second stage where your peers do. Then for ambitious people there's a third stage where you create your own environment by choosing your own peers.

Taught 8 yo a rule of thumb for avoiding cults and cult-like things: Avoid groups that tell you not to talk to your family.

My mother on childraising: “All you have to do is love them and show them the world.”

Be skeptical of political opinions that don't survive having kids.

Little kids emulate big kids, but it works the other way too. Nothing makes a 6 yo try harder to do something than a 3 yo who can.

Having multiple kids makes it clear how much is nature vs nurture. How much momentum character has. At best you can steer it.

It's depressingly common to see parents staring at their phones while pushing their kids on the swings. Distraction addiction.