I am a reasonably staunch beliver in the law of karma.
So when I went to the same site twice in two days I just had to take a deeper look.
I can’t quite work out how I got to Paul Graham’s site the first time; the onloy thing that I know is that I made a note to come back and take a closer look at his January 2004 essay, What You Can’t Say. Actually the very act of looking in my browser history has reminded me that I got to the site via a link to a post designed for college graduates entitled What You Wished You’d Known. Regardless of how I got there,both of these posts resonated with me because they dealt with ideas of integrity and knowledge of self – things that I have struggled with recently.
That was yeasterday.
Today, my interweb wanderings threw up another Paul Graham essay. This time the essay discusses the idea of the Power of the Marginal.
“That’s the paradox I want to explore: great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.”
“Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent—as if having a stupid idea made you stupid. There’s a huge weight of tradition advising us to play it safe. “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent,” says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).”
Now, there are some ideas worth exploring.
“Though the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think we’re just beginning to see its democratizing effects. Outsiders are still learning how to steal audiences. But more importantly, audiences are still learning how to be stolen—they’re still just beginning to realize how much deeper bloggers can dig than journalists, how much more interesting a democratic news site can be than a front page controlled by editors, and how much funnier a bunch of kids with webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.”
Now where have I heard that recently?
