Paul Graham: My Idols

Original author: Paul Graham
  • Transfer
I have in stock several topics that you can write and write about. One of them is “idols”.

Of course, this is not a list of the most respected people in the world. I think that such a list is unlikely to be compiled by anyone, even with a great desire.

For example, Einstein, he is not on my list, but certainly he deserves a place among the most respected people. Once I asked my friend who was studying physics if Einstein was really such a genius, and she answered in the affirmative. So why then is he not on the list? This is because here are those people who influenced me, and not those who could influence if I realized the full value of their work.

I needed to think about someone and understand whether this person is my hero. Thoughts were varied. For example, Montaigne, the creator of an essay, dropped out of my list. Why? Then I asked myself what is required to call a person a hero? It turns out that you just need to imagine what this person would do in my place in a particular situation. Agree, this is not an admiration at all.

After I made the list, I saw a common thread in it. Everyone on the list had two characteristics: they overly cared for their works, but nonetheless were extremely honest. By honesty, I do not understand the performance of all that the viewer wants. They were all fundamentally provocateurs for this reason, although they hide this to varying degrees.

Jack lambert


image


I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 70s. If you were not there at that time, it’s hard for you to imagine how the city belonged to the Steelers. All local news was bad, the metallurgical industry was dying. But the Steelers remained the best team in American football, and in some ways this reflected the character of our city. They did not perform miracles, but simply did their work.

Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lin Swan. But they were on the attack, and you always pay more attention to such players. It seems to me, as a 12-year-old expert in American football, that Jack Lambert was the best of them. He was completely ruthless, which is why he was so good. He didn’t just want to play well, he wanted a great game. When a player from another team owned the ball in his half of the field, he perceived it as a personal insult.

A suburb of Pittsburgh in the 1970s was a rather boring place. The school was boring. All adults were bored with their jobs in large companies. Everything that we saw in the media was the same and was produced somewhere in other places. The exception was Jack Lambert. I have never seen anyone like him.

Kenneth Clark


image


Kenneth Clark is undoubtedly one of the best nonfiction writers. Most of those who write about the history of art know absolutely nothing about this, and a lot of little things prove this. But Clark was as excellent in his work as one could imagine.

What makes it so special? The quality of the idea. At first, the style of expression may seem mundane, but it is a hoax. Reading "Nudity" is comparable only to riding a Ferrari: as soon as you get settled, you are pressed to the seat at high speed. While you get used to it, they will throw you around when the car turns. This person produces ideas so quickly that there is no way to grab them. You will read the chapter with wide open eyes and a smile on your face.

Thanks to the documentary series Civilization, Kenneth was popular in his day. And if you want to get acquainted with the history of art - "Civilization" is what I recommend. This work is much better than those that students are forced to buy, studying the history of art.

Larry Mikhalko


Each in childhood had his own mentor in certain issues. Larry Mikhalko was my mentor. Looking back, I saw a certain line between the third and fourth grades. After I met Mr. Mikhalko, everything became different.

Why is that? Firstly, he was curious. Yes, of course, many of my teachers were quite educated, but not curious. Larry did not fit into the image of a school teacher, and I suspect that he knew about it. Perhaps it was difficult for him, but for us, the students, it was a pleasure. His lessons were a journey to another world. That is why I enjoyed going to school every day.

Another thing that distinguished him from the rest was his love for us. Children never lie. Other teachers were indifferent to the students, and Mr. Mikhalko strove to become our friend. On one of the last days of 4th grade, he put us a disc of James Taylor, where he played "You have a friend." Just call me and wherever I am, I will fly. He died when he was 59 years old from lung cancer. The only time I cried was his funeral.

Leonardo


image


Recently, I realized what I did not understand in childhood: all the best that we manage to do is we do for ourselves, and not for others. You see the paintings in museums and believe that they were painted exclusively for you. Most of these works are intended to show the world, and not to satisfy people. These discoveries are sometimes more enjoyable than those things created to satisfy.

Leonardo was multifaceted. One of his most respected qualities: he did so many great things. Today, people only know him as a great artist and inventor of an aircraft. From this it can be assumed that Leonardo was a dreamer who threw all the concepts of launch vehicles aside. In fact, he made a large number of technical discoveries. So, we can say that he was not only a great artist, but also a great engineer.

For me, however, his paintings play a major role. In them, he tried to explore the world, and not show the beautiful. And yet, Leonardo’s paintings are on a par with paintings by a world-class artist. No one since then before him or after him was so good at the moment when no one was looking at him (No one else, before or since, was that good when no one was looking).

Robert Morris


image


Robert Morris has always been characterized by his rightness in everything. It seems that you need to be all-knowing for this, but in fact it is surprisingly easy. Do not say anything if you are not so sure. If you're not all-knowing, just don't say too much.

More precisely, the trick is to pay attention to what you want to say. Using this trick, Robert, as far as I know, was mistaken only once when he was a student. When Mac came out, he said that small desktop computers would never be suitable for real hacking.

In this case, this is not called a trick. If he realized that this was a trick, he would definitely make a reservation at the moment of excitement. Robert has that quality in his blood. He is also incredibly honest. He is not just always right, but he still knows that he is right.

You probably thought how good it would never be to make a mistake, and everyone did it. It is too difficult to pay as much attention to errors in ideas as to the idea as a whole. But in practice, no one does this. I know how hard it is. After meeting with Robert, I tried to use this principle in software, he seems to have used it in hardware.

P.G. Woodhouse


image


Finally, people realized the importance of the person of the writer Woodhouse. If you want to be accepted today as a writer, you need to be educated. If your creation has gained public recognition and it is funny, then you expose yourself to suspicion. This is what makes Wodehouse's works so exciting - he wrote what he wanted and understood that for this his contemporaries would regard him with contempt.

Evelyn Vogue recognized him as the best, but in those days people called it a knightly and at the same time wrong gesture. At that time, any accidental autobiographical novel of a recent college graduate could count on a more respectful attitude from a literary institution

Woodhouse may have started with simple atoms, but how he combined them into molecules was almost flawless. His rhythm in particular. It makes me self-consciously write about it. I can only think of two other writers who came close to him in style: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. These three used English as if it belonged to them.

But Woodhouse had nothing. He was not shy. Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford were worried about what other people thought of them: he wanted to appear aristocratic; she was afraid she was not smart enough. But Woodhouse didn't give a damn what they thought of him. He wrote exactly what he wanted.

Alexander Calder


image


Calder was on this list because he makes me happy. Can his work compete with the work of Leonardo? Probably not. Like it can’t possibly compete with anything related to the 20th century. But Calder has all the good things in Modernism, and he does it with his usual ease.



What is good in Modernism is its novelty, freshness. 19th century art began to choke.
Popular paintings at that time were mostly the artistic equivalent of mansions - large, artsy and fake. Modernism meant that you had to start all over again, to create things with the same serious motives as children do. The artists who took advantage of this best of all were those who retained their childhood confidence like Klee and Calder.

Kli was impressive because he could work in many different styles. But of the two of them, I love Calder more, because his work seems more joyful. Ultimately, the point of art is to attract the viewer. It is difficult to predict what exactly he will like; often what seems interesting at first will bore you in a month. Calder's sculptures are never bored. They just sit there quietly, radiating optimism like a battery that never runs out. As far as I can tell from books and photographs, the happiness in Calder’s work is a reflection of his own happiness.

Jane Austen


image


Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to this list. It seems to me that she is the best writer of all time. I wonder how things are. When I read most of the novels, I pay as much attention to the author’s choices as to the story itself. But in her novels I cannot see the mechanism in the work. Although I wonder how she does what she does, I cannot understand this because she writes so well that her stories do not seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of what really happened. When I was younger, I read a lot of novels. Most of them I can no longer read, because they lack information. Novels seem so meager compared to history and biography. But reading Austin is like reading non-fiction. She writes so well that you don’t even notice her.

John McCarthy


image


John McCarthy invented Lisp, a field (or at least a term) of artificial intelligence, and was one of the first members of the best departments of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford. No one will argue that he is one of the great, but for me it is special because of Lisp.

It is difficult for us now to understand what kind of conceptual leap occurred at that time. Paradoxically, one of the reasons why it is so hard to evaluate its achievement is that it was so successful. Almost every programming language invented over the past 20 years includes ideas from Lisp, and every year the average statistical programming language becomes more and more similar to Lisp.

In 1958, these ideas were not at all obvious. In 1958, programming was thought of in two keys. Some people thought of him as mathematics and proved everything related to the Turing machine. Others took the programming language as a way to do something, and developed languages ​​that were too heavily influenced by the technology of the time. Only McCarthy overcame the divergence of views. He developed a language that was math. But he developed a not quite correct word, or rather discovered.

Spitfire


image


When I wrote this list, I caught myself thinking about people like Douglas Bader and Reginald Joseph Mitchell and Jeffrey Quille, and I realized that although they all did a lot of things in their life, there was one factor, among others, that related them: Spitfire.
This should be a list of heroes. How can a car be in it? Because this car was not just a machine. She was the prism of heroes. Extraordinary devotion came into her, and extraordinary courage came out of her.

It is customary to call the Second World War the struggle between good and evil, but between the construction of fights, it was. Spitfire's original retaliation, ME 109, a tough practical airplane. It was a killer car. Spitfire was the embodiment of optimism. And not only in these beautiful lines: he was the pinnacle of what, in principle, could be made. But we were right when we decided that above this. Beauty alone has an edge in the air.

Steve Jobs


image


People who lived at the time Kennedy was killed usually remember exactly where they were when they heard about it. I remember exactly where I was when a friend asked me if I heard that Steve Jobs had cancer. It’s like the earth has gone from under my feet. After a couple of seconds, she told me that it was a rare operable form of cancer and that he would be fine. But those seconds seemed to last forever.

I was not sure whether to include Jobs on the list. Most people at Apple seem to be scared of it, which is a bad sign. But he is admirable. There is no word that could describe who Steve Jobs is. He did not create Apple products himself. Historically, the closest analogy to what he was doing was patronage of art during the great Renaissance. As the CEO of the company, this makes him unique. Most managers pass on their preferences to subordinates. The development paradox is that, to a greater or lesser extent, the choice is determined randomly. But Steve Jobs had his own taste - so good taste that he showed the whole world that taste means much more than they think.

Isaac Newton


image


Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he is the one for whom I reproach myself. He worked on significant things, at least part of his life. It’s so easy to get distracted when you work on trifles. The questions you answer are familiar to everyone. You get instant rewards - in essence, you get more rewards in due time if you work on issues of paramount importance. But it’s unpleasant for me to realize that this is the path to deserved obscurity. To do really great things, you need to look for questions that people did not even consider questions. Probably at that time there were other people who were doing this, like Newton, but Newton is my model of this way of thinking. I'm just starting to understand how it must have felt for him. You have only one life. Why not do something grand? The phrase "paradigm shift" is now hackneyed, but Kuhn understood something. And behind this lies a larger, now separated from us wall of laziness and stupidity, which will soon seem very thin to us. If we work like Newton.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading the drafts of this article.

Partially the translation was done by translatedby.com/you/some-heroes/into-ru/trans/?page=2






Also popular now: