Letter to Paul Graham
There's one line from Paul Graham's writing that made me want to record this episode:
“How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.”
Paul has spent decades writing about how to find work you love, and his answer to “why do so few people find it?” traces back to something most people skip right past in his biography: his years as a painter.
Before Paul was a programmer, before the essays, before Y Combinator funded Airbnb and Stripe and Dropbox, he was painting still lifes in a tiny bedroom in Florence, on leftover scraps of canvas, learning to see what was actually in front of him.
Listen to the episode:
🎙️ Letter to Paul Graham: Learning to See
That skill - overriding the brain’s shortcuts to see what’s actually there - shows up in everything he worked on afterward. He saw what Lisp revealed about program structure. He saw that software could run in a browser in 1995. He saw that young programmers needed small checks and freedom, when every VC on Sand Hill Road saw inexperience and risk.
In this letter:
- How painting still lifes in Florence taught Paul to see past abstractions
- The "garage sale test" - strip away prestige to find what's real
- Why interest is more unevenly distributed than ability
- The traps that steer you away from following your authentic curiosity
- "Always produce" as a heuristic that finds your life's work
- Why most great work starts as a project
- What it actually feels like to do work you love
Listen:
If you want to find out whether this letter reaches Paul, and what happens when it does, follow Craftsmith wherever you listen to podcasts.
Talk soon,
Bill
P.S. Paul is @paulg on X. If this resonated, send it his way.