I spent the last six months reading Paul Graham's essays. All of them. The old ones about startups, the newer ones about thinking, the weird ones about conformism and heresy and what happens when you let your mind wander.

I didn't expect them to change anything. I was just reading.

But they did change something. They changed what I think is possible.

You Can Just Do Things

The central lesson, the one that shows up in every essay whether he's writing about how to think for yourself or what makes a good founder, is this: you can just do things.

Not in the motivational poster sense. In the practical, operational sense.

You can write software that solves a real problem. You can start a company. You can build something people want. You don't need permission. You don't need credentials. You need curiosity, effort, and the willingness to be wrong until you're right.

This sounds obvious. It's not obvious when you're 22 and haven't started your career yet.

What I Learned About Building

Graham's essay on doing things that don't scale rewired how I think about building anything. You don't start with scale. You start with one person who has a problem. You solve it for them, manually if you have to. Then you solve it for the next person. Then the next.

Scale comes later. Craft comes first.

His piece on early work made me realize that the first version of anything is supposed to be bad. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is momentum. You build, you learn, you iterate. The learning is the point.

I didn't know this. I thought you were supposed to have it figured out before you started.

What I Learned About Thinking

How to Think for Yourself is the essay I've reread most. The core idea: independent thinking isn't about being contrarian. It's about being curious enough to follow ideas wherever they lead, even when they lead somewhere uncomfortable.

Most people don't think for themselves because thinking for yourself is hard. It requires reading widely, questioning assumptions, and being okay with uncertainty. It's easier to adopt the consensus view and move on.

But the consensus view is often wrong. Or at least incomplete.

Graham's essay on conformism breaks down the different types of conformists: aggressive conformists who punish dissent, passive conformists who just go along, and independent-minded people who can't help but question things. I realized I'd been a passive conformist most of my life. I didn't push back on bad ideas. I just nodded and moved on.

Reading that essay made me want to stop nodding.

What I Learned About Heresy

What You Can't Say is about identifying the ideas that are true but unacceptable to say out loud. Every era has them. The way to find them is to look for the things people get angry about, the topics where the response is disproportionate to the claim.

This essay taught me to pay attention to where the heat is. Not because controversy is good, but because heat often signals an idea worth examining.

The goal isn't to be provocative. The goal is to be honest. Sometimes honesty is provocative.

What I Learned About Effort

Graham writes a lot about working hard. Not in the hustle culture sense. In the deep work sense.

The people who build great things aren't necessarily smarter. They're more willing to put in sustained, focused effort over long periods of time. They read more. They think more. They revise more. They care more about getting it right than getting it done.

This was the lesson I needed most. I'd been optimizing for efficiency. Graham's essays made me realize I should be optimizing for depth.

What Changed

I didn't know it at the time, but these essays would shape the next phase of my life. They shaped the kind of work I wanted to do, the companies I wanted to work for, the content I consumed, the way I approached problems.

They taught me that software engineering isn't just about writing code. It's about solving problems. And solving problems requires thinking clearly, building iteratively, and caring deeply about craft.

They taught me that you don't need to wait for permission to start. You just start.

They taught me that the best way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. You can't optimize your way to insight. You have to think your way there.

Read More, Think More

If you haven't read Paul Graham's essays, start here. Pick one that sounds interesting. Read it slowly. Let it sit.

Then read another.

The insights compound. Six months from now, you'll think differently. Not because one essay changed your mind, but because twenty essays shifted your perspective one degree at a time.

That's how clarity works. That's how change works.

You read. You think. You build.

And eventually, you realize you can just do things.