"Hackers & Painters" Excerpts [2]

1. Being a heretic pays off, not just in science, but in any competitive field where you can see things others can't or won't see, giving you a huge advantage.

2. Train yourself to think the unthinkable, and the benefits you get will exceed the ideas themselves. It's like stretching before a track meet to open up your limbs. You want to stretch your body to the limit, far beyond what running requires, so that when the race comes, you can run faster. Similarly, if you can think "far" outside the box and come up with shocking ideas that blow people's minds, you'll have no trouble thinking "a little" outside the box. You know, people call the latter "innovation."

3. Think anything you want in your mind, but don't necessarily say it out loud. I encourage myself to silently think the most lawless thoughts. Your mind is an underground organization; never tell anyone everything that happens there. The first rule of "Fight Club" is: you do not talk about Fight Club.

4. The concept of "your computer" is slowly becoming a thing of the past, replaced by "your data." You should be able to access your data from any computer. Or more accurately, access your data from any terminal device, which doesn't have to be a computer. Terminal devices shouldn't store data; they should be like telephones. In fact, terminal devices might end up becoming telephones, or conversely, telephones becoming terminal devices.

5. There is a subtype of compound bug: two bugs compensate for each other, like "two negatives make a positive," and the software runs normally. This kind of bug might be the hardest to find. When you fix one bug, the other is exposed. At this point, you might feel your correction was wrong because it was the last place you changed.

6. Start by making a simple product, first ensuring you would use it yourself. Then, quickly make version 1.0 and continuously improve it, listening closely to user feedback throughout the process. The user is always right, but different users have different requirements. Low-end users want simplified operations and clarity, while high-end users want you to add new features.

7. The biggest benefit of software is making everything simple. The way to do this is to set correct defaults, not to limit user choices.

8. If you want to create wealth, you should look at business plans that focus on things you are interested in with particular skepticism. For things you are interested in, you will feel they are valuable, but they are precisely the least likely to overlap with what others find valuable.

9. Wealth created doesn't have to be realized through selling. At least until recently, scientists have been truly donating the wealth they created to society. The discovery of penicillin made us all richer because our chances of dying from bacterial infections became smaller.

10. Wealth means what people need, so delivering goods to customers is also what people need. Many companies that don't produce physical goods are creating wealth in this way. In almost all cases, the purpose of a company's existence is to satisfy some need of people.

11. A college graduate always thinks "I need a job," and others tell him the same, as if becoming a member of an organization is such an important thing. A more direct expression should be "you should do something people need." What really matters is making things people need, not joining a company.