Paul Graham is founder of Y Combinator. Together with Tim Urban, Seth Godin and Derek Sivers these are true artists of the blog format.

“Second order thinking” is a big part of Paul’s approach. Second order thinking is looking for non-obvious rules that improve decision making, efficiency and quality of life. Check out the Python Paradox for an example 😉

Paul’s Essays that have most Impacted My Approach to Life

1. How to do what you love?
2. Good procrastination and bad procrastination
3. The lies we tell our kids, and the lies that our parents told us… and how important it is once in your life to review this set of accepted lies before they mess up your life
4. Beating the averages
5. Money is not Wealth, and How to Create New Wealth (not take money from others…)
6. Relentlessly resourceful
7. How to Disagree (a ranking order of methods of refuting the other person’s argument)

Google Based Ranking of Paul Graham Essays

This is an interesting big of research – Colin Wright produced a ranked list of Paul Graham’s essays based on google pagerank.

23.02 Beating the Averages 19.84 Lisp for Web-Based Applications 5.56 What You Can’t Say 3.81 Revenge of the Nerds 3.72 The Roots of Lisp 3.66 The Age of the Essay 3.29 What Made Lisp Different 3.26 Why Nerds are Unpopular 2.81 Taste for Makers 2.77 Great Hackers 2.33 The Other Road Ahead 2.12 How to Make Wealth 1.91 Succinctness is Power 1.74 A Unified Theory of VC Suckage 1.73 The Word “Hacker” 1.67 How to Start a Startup 1.43 Hiring is Obsolete 1.39 Why Startups Condense in America 1.39 Programming Bottom-Up 1.35 Inequality and Risk 1.35 How to Be Silicon Valley 1.21 After the Ladder 1.04 How to Do What You Love 1.00 Good and Bad Procrastination 0.90 After Credentials 0.88 The Equity Equation 0.88 How Not to Die 0.84 What You’ll Wish You’d Known 0.83 A Plan for Spam 0.80 How to Be an Angel Investor 0.76 Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy 0.74 The High-Res Society 0.67 The Python Paradox 0.65 Ideas for Startups

0.64 Better Bayesian Filtering 0.64 Filters that Fight Back 0.61 Relentlessly Resourceful 0.61 The Future of Web Startups 0.61 The Hundred-Year Language 0.60 Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas 0.59 The Submarine 0.59 The Power of the Marginal 0.59 How to Fund a Startup 0.56 Why TV Lost 0.56 High Resolution Fundraising  0.56 Being Popular 0.56 Stuff 0.56 Trolls 0.49 Why There Aren’t More Googles 0.49 The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups 0.48 The Top Idea in Your Mind  0.48 Hackers and Painters 0.47 What the Bubble Got Right 0.46 Five Questions about Language Design 0.46 The Venture Capital Squeeze 0.45 Cities and Ambition 0.44 Startups in 13 Sentences 0.44 A Fundraising Survival Guide 0.44 The Hacker’s Guide to Investors 0.43 Design and Research 0.43 Two Kinds of Judgement 0.40 An Alternative Theory of Unions 0.38 Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. 0.38 Why to Move to a Startup Hub 0.35 Founder Control 0.35 Why to Not Not Start a Startup 0.34 What Business Can Learn from Open Source

Who are your favourite Bloggers? What are some specific blog posts that have really impacted your views on the world?

Would love to hear in the comments below…