What to Do — Paul Graham (paulgraham.com, March 2025)
Author: paul-graham
Published: paulgraham.com/do.html (March 2025)
Format: Short essay (~1,000 words)
Raw source: raw/What to Do.md
Core Thesis
Three principles for what one should do:
- Help people
- Take care of the world
- Make good new things
The first two are obvious and traditional. The third is the novel and central claim: making good new things is the best proof that one has thought well, and is therefore the highest human activity.
Making Good New Things
Graham’s preferred phrasing over “have good new ideas” because:
- It includes art, music, and other creation that embodies more than just ideas
- It biases toward creation rather than criticism
- Criticism seems sophisticated; making seems awkward — especially early — but making is rarer and more valuable
Why newness is essential: Copying isn’t impressive in the way originals are. Not in science (plagiarism), not in art (copies aren’t great art), not in anything. Making the same thing over and over — however well — is just copying yourself.
Two kinds of “should”:
- Helping people and taking care of the world are duties
- Making good new things is about living to your full potential
This is a post-traditional ethics. Traditional answers to “what should one do?” (Cicero, Confucius) were actually answers to “how should one be?” — because the audience (landowning/political class) didn’t have a choice about what to do. Their work was foreordained. The question of what to do is genuinely modern, available to us now that more people can devote their lives to chosen work.
The Archimedes Model
Graham argues that makers — Newton, Archimedes — were always admired but not held up as models in antiquity. Now they should be. The audience that can emulate them has expanded enormously.
“He turned out to be a model after all, along with a collection of other people that his contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right angles to the social hierarchy.”
Key Nuance: Goodness
Making new things is not sufficient — they should be good (or at minimum, not net harmful). But the shortcut: if you make something amazing, you’ll often be helping people even if you didn’t intend to. Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not practical effect — and yet the practical effect of his work has been enormous. So: if you think you can make something amazing, do it.
Connections to Wiki
- first-principles-thinking: Graham’s three principles are themselves first-principles thinking about ethics — stripping away the accumulated “how to be” advice and asking what actually matters about what one does.
- high-agency: “Make good new things” is the positive action-orientation of high agency. High-agency people don’t just process and react — they make. The Wilbur Wright story is a perfect example.
- founder-mode: Making good new things is why founders matter. Manager mode optimizes maintenance; founder mode enables creation of new things.
- stoicism: Interesting tension. Stoicism emphasizes accepting what you can’t control; Graham emphasizes actively making new things. Both agree on focusing on what you can actually do — they differ in emphasis (acceptance vs. creation). But the Stoics also had the concept of kathêkon (appropriate action), and making something excellent could be a perfect expression of virtue.
- specific-knowledge: Naval’s insight and Graham’s are parallel: the thing most worth doing is the thing uniquely yours — your specific knowledge finding expression in making something new.
- creativity-cliff-illusion: That breakthroughs come from sustained effort (not sudden inspiration) supports Graham’s point that “making seems awkward at first” — the early steps are most valuable precisely because they’re rare.
- cogito: Light echo: Descartes’ proof of his own existence (“I think, therefore I am”) established thinking as the indubitable foundation. Graham suggests thinking well, proven by making good new things, is the apex of what humans can do.
Pages Created/Updated from This Source
New entity page:
- paul-graham — entity page (also created from source—founder-mode)