Tag Archives: motivation

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 2

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some more highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love

2. Always Produce.
a. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

Put any high performing, engaged team in a room and explore what motivates them and chances are you’ll get back a bunch of words like ‘achievement’, ‘competence’ and ‘contribution’. These values all have roots in the drive to build something, deliver a service, produce a feeling. What I really like about Paul’s ‘always produce’ rule is it’s ability to be both chicken and egg: you can bring up energy and engagement by just doing and you can also reinforce energy and engagement by seeing the results of the doing.

If you’re stuck in a rut, turning in circles, just start taking steps, make things different – produce!