Paul Graham

Your parents miss you and wish you'd call. Later you'll miss them and wish you could.

Something I wish I'd done while my mother was still alive: I wish I'd written an essay, just for myself, about what she was like as a person. I knew her pretty well, but I'd know her better if I'd had to observe her and ask her questions in order to describe her in writing.

One way to tell what your kids have an aptitude for is what kinds of advice they listen to eagerly. This probably works for adults too, but not as well, because adults have learned to be diligent about things that bore them.

Explained liberal and conservative to my 10 yo and 7 yo on the way to school. I ended up describing them as forms of bias that each produced distinctive patterns of error when they hit the truth.

Parenting trick: When one of our kids does something really good (usually but not always at school) we give them the “royal treatment.” For the next couple days, all the rules are slightly bent. Stay up late? Candy with breakfast? Ok, since they're getting the royal treatment.

When my kids tell me things I didn't know, I always make a big deal about it in order to encourage them to learn more such things.

One thing you learn after having kids is what's the biggest favor you can do for anyone with kids: something that helps their kids.

I was trying to explain to my 7 yo how powerful it is to be able to read, because you can now learn anything from books instead of waiting for teachers to teach you. When I described a shelf of books as an army of robot teachers, he started to get it.

Trick that delights 7 year olds (n=1): Show how you can draw a pyramid with any shape base by drawing a polygon, drawing a dot above it, and drawing a line from each corner of the polygon to the dot.

Most of making things is figuring out why they don't work.