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Maybe the world also needs people who are not so achievement-driven, who act as a kind of lubricant in the machine of society by making the environment around themselves lighter and more pleasant. And people who are that way should learn to value themselves and not feel guilty for not being as driven as some.

A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.



And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com bubble to another .com company. That wasn't so hard at the time. He wrote a good book on Lisp, and used his riches to invest and get richer. None of this seems particularly extraordinary. Does he somehow imagine Dropbox or Viaweb have transformed human experience? He writes a good essay, but he seems overly impressed by his own success.


He has had many successes. He essentially was the first to solve the commercial email spam problem:

http://paulgraham.com/spam.html

If you remember email before and after those techniques were implemented into mail clients of the time, it was night and day.


It does, and you’re right. Not everyone has to work hard, and those people are important too.

But: those people aren’t the folks for whom this essay is written.




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