Annotations (18)
“I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right. Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Only publish what survives brutal self-editing
“Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible. Notice these are all a matter of degree. The four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
Four components multiply to create usefulness score
“The formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is also a recipe for making people mad. When you tell people something they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the reason people don't know something is because they don't want to know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. If you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken beliefs are a good place to find them.”— Paul Graham
Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Cherished falsehoods create unexplored idea zones
“My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully. When I proofread an essay, there are usually passages that stick out in an annoying way. The annoyance starts out unconscious, but after the tenth reading or so I'm saying 'Ugh, that part' each time I hit it. They become like briars that catch your sleeve as you walk past.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Operations & Execution
DUR_ENDURING
Fast divergent draft, then brutal convergent edit
“The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These two counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in a car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something you're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all. Whereas points that seem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Qualification calibrates certainty to evidence
“The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication. Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks for about 15 years. I never published any of them and never expected to. I wrote them as a way of figuring things out. But when the web came along I'd had a lot of practice.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
15 years private practice before publishing
“The trick for getting importance: to make something you yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader. If you write about topics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem important to a significant number of readers as well. Importance has two factors. It's the number of people something matters to, times how much it matters to them.”— Paul Graham
Business & Entrepreneurship · Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Your needs predict audience needs
“Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false. Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues. Useful writing is bold, but true.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management
DUR_ENDURING
Strength maximized without crossing into falsehood
“The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a significant number of readers. If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don't publish it.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
Expertise enables recognizing true novelty
“If you've stated an idea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyone has to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it is false. Much of the time they're not even doing it deliberately. One of the most surprising things you'll discover, if you start writing essays, is that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what you've actually written. Instead they make up something you said and disagree with that.”— Paul Graham
Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
Precision creates vulnerability to misrepresentation
“You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of it. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble. If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident that most other people wouldn't know it either.”— Paul Graham
Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning
DUR_ENDURING
Confidence permits admission of ignorance
“In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered bad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results, you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay writing, publication bias is the way to go.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Science requires full reporting; essays demand filtering
“The way to get better at writing essays is to practice. Which constraint do you relax initially? The first component of importance: the number of people who care about what you write. If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and you're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write about.”— Paul Graham
Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Relax audience size first, maintain other quality
“Although the essay is an old form, it hasn't been assiduously cultivated. In the print era, publication was expensive, and there wasn't enough demand for essays to publish that many. There was not really a direct path to becoming an essayist. Now, thanks to the internet, there's a path. Anyone can publish essays online. The exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, but that there's a lot left to discover. There's a certain kind of idea that's best discovered by writing essays.”— Paul Graham
History & Geopolitics · Creativity & Innovation · Technology & Engineering
DUR_CONTEXTUAL
Distribution bottleneck removed reveals unexplored ideas
“This is where essayists have an advantage over journalists. You don't have a deadline. You can work for as long on an essay as you need to get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the face of an enemy with unlimited resources. You're like a parent saying to a child 'we can sit here all night till you eat your vegetables.' Except you're the child too.”— Paul Graham
Strategy & Decision Making · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Unlimited time defeats error through attrition
“Steve Wozniak did the same thing. In high school he designed computers on paper for fun. He couldn't build them because he couldn't afford the components. But when Intel launched 4K DRAMs in 1975, he was ready.”
Technology & Engineering · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Constraint forced mental simulation, creating readiness
“The countermove is to ask someone who does this to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that they believe is false, and explain why. I say 'for what it's worth' because they never do. So although it might seem that this could get a broken discussion back on track, the truth is that it was never on track in the first place.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Demand specific quotes to filter bad faith
“Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to avoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range. It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of having them.”— Paul Graham
Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Qualification generates ideas, not just protects
Frameworks (2)
Four-Component Usefulness Formula
Multiplicative model for evaluating communication quality
Useful writing maximizes four independent dimensions (novelty, importance, correctness, strength) which multiply together to create total value. Each component ranges from low to high, and weakness in any dimension destroys total usefulness because of the multiplicative relationship. The framework provides both evaluation criteria and generation guidance.
Components
- Novelty
- Importance
- Correctness
- Strength
Prerequisites
- Willingness to delete own work
- Time without deadlines
- Deep knowledge in at least one domain
Success Indicators
- Reader feedback about learning something new
- Ability to state claims with appropriate qualification
- Reduced rate of corrections after publication
Failure Modes
- Inflating importance of trivial topics
- Publishing before achieving certainty
- Sacrificing strength to avoid controversy
Loose-Then-Tight Creative Process
Two-phase approach balancing exploration and refinement
Creative work proceeds in two distinct phases: a fast, divergent drafting phase where all ideas are tried without filtering, followed by a slow, convergent editing phase where everything is refined to the point of certainty. The phases require different mental modes and should not be mixed. The editing phase continues until all passages that 'catch' (cause annoyance or uncertainty) are eliminated.
Components
- Loose Phase: Divergent Generation
- Tight Phase: Convergent Refinement
Prerequisites
- Time without deadlines
- Willingness to abandon work
- Ability to separate generation and judgment modes
Success Indicators
- Clean reading of final draft with no catches
- Substantially different final version from first draft
- Higher quality output than previous methods
Failure Modes
- Mixing phases: editing during generation
- Stopping editing phase too early
- Not generating enough raw material in loose phase
Mental Models (6)
Precision-Correctness Tradeoff
Decision MakingPrecision and correctness are opposing forces.
In Practice: Graham articulates this as core principle of useful writing
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Publication Filtering (Morris Technique)
Decision MakingIn creative work without deadlines, quality can be ensured by brutal self-filtering.
In Practice: Graham describes learning this from Robert Morris
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Exploration-Exploitation Phases
Decision MakingCreative work proceeds in distinct phases: exploration and exploitation.
In Practice: Graham describes his loose-then-tight writing process
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Unlimited Time as Competitive Advantage
TimeWhen you have no deadline, you can wait out errors through repeated iteration. M
In Practice: Graham describes essayists' advantage over journalists
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Confidence-Humility Paradox
PsychologyConfidence in your expertise permits humility about specific ignorance.
In Practice: Graham explains how confidence enables acknowledging novelty
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Cherished Falsehoods Create Idea Dead Zones
PsychologyPopular but mistaken beliefs create unexplored territories of ideas that contradict them.
In Practice: Graham explains why useful writing makes people mad
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Connective Tissue (2)
Manual transmission: accelerator and clutch counterbalancing
The relationship between thinking well and qualification in writing mirrors the accelerator-clutch dynamic in a manual transmission car. The accelerator (unqualified assertion) provides power and forward motion, but must be modulated by the clutch (qualification) to match the terrain and conditions. Push too hard on the accelerator without proper clutch control and you stall; over-clutch and you lose momentum. Skilled drivers (writers) learn to adjust both controls in concert, creating smooth power delivery (appropriately calibrated claims). The parallel illuminates how two seemingly opposed forces must be coordinated rather than treated as a simple tradeoff.
Graham uses this analogy to explain how strength and qualification work together in writing
Cryptography and number theory: dormant fields exploding when conditions change
Number theory sat as pure mathematics for centuries, cultivated by a small number of specialists with no practical applications. When public-key cryptography emerged in the 1970s, number theory suddenly became essential to digital security, and the field exploded with new practitioners and discoveries. Graham draws the parallel to essays: the form existed for centuries but was constrained by publication economics. The internet removed the distribution bottleneck, just as digital communication created demand for cryptography. When distribution constraints lift, fields can experience explosive growth as latent demand meets newly-accessible supply. The parallel suggests that many intellectual domains may be artificially constrained by distribution mechanisms rather than inherent value or interest.
Graham uses this to explain why the internet explosion in essays suggests many ideas remain undiscovered
Key Figures (2)
Robert Morris
2 mentionsComputer scientist, colleague, friend
Morris is described as Graham's friend who has 'a horror of saying anything dumb.' His approach to communication (not speaking unless certain the statement is worth hearing) becomes the basis for Graham's 'Morris Technique' in writing.
- His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right.
Steve Wozniak
1 mentionsApple co-founder, computer engineer
Glossary (3)
vaporous
VOCABULARYVague, insubstantial, lacking concrete meaning or clarity
“That's a common flaw in academic writing, for example.”
unequivocally
VOCABULARYIn a way that leaves no doubt; clearly and unambiguously
“Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.”
assiduously
VOCABULARYWith great care, attention, and persistent effort
“The essay hasn't been assiduously cultivated.”
Key People (2)
Robert Morris
Computer scientist, professor at MIT, known for extreme caution in making statements
Steve Wozniak
(1950–)Co-founder of Apple Computer
Concepts (1)
Publication bias
CL_SCIENCEIn science, tendency to publish only positive results, creating distorted literature; Graham inverts this for essays where filtering is desired
Synthesis
Synthesis
Migrated from Scholia