Summarized PG’s Article

How to do What you Love :: (http://paulgraham.com/love.html)
The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else– even something mindless. But you don’t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think– because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don’t have to force yourself to do it– finding work you love does usually require discipline.

There’s another sense of “not everyone can do work they love” that’s all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it’s hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

the organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t.

the two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.

The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he’ll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it’s slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.

The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the “day job,” where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.

Don’t decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it’s wrong.

When you’re young, you’re given the impression that you’ll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you’re deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don’t teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

MicroEconomics

 A review of Joe’s article named “Strategy Letter V”

Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.
IBM’s goal was to commoditize the add-in market,
Microsoft’s goal was to commoditize the PC market

Commoditize your complements.

Some awesome examples

Headline: IBM Spends Millions to Develop Open Source Software.
Myth: They’re doing this because Lou Gerstner read the GNU Manifesto and decided he doesn’t actually like capitalism.
Reality: They’re doing this because IBM is becoming an IT consulting company. IT consulting is a complement of enterprise software. Thus IBM needs to commoditize enterprise software, and the best way to do this is by supporting open source. Lo and behold, their consulting division is winning big with this strategy.

Headline: Netscape Open Sources Their Web Browser.
Myth: They’re doing this to get free source code contributions from people in cybercafes in New Zealand.
Reality: They’re doing this to commoditize the web browser.

This has been Netscape’s strategy from day one. Have a look at the very first Netscape press release: the browser is “freeware.” Netscape gave away the browser so they could make money on servers. Browsers and servers are classic complements. The cheaper the browsers, the more servers you sell. This was never as true as it was in October 1994. (Netscape was actually surprised when MCI came in the door and dumped so much money in their laps that they realized they could make money off of the browser, too. This wasn’t required by the business plan.)

Headline: Transmeta Hires Linus, Pays Him To Hack on Linux.
Myth: They just did it to get publicity. Would you have heard of Transmeta otherwise?
Reality: Transmeta is a CPU company. The natural complement of a CPU is an operating system.

 I wonder will they ever find a complement to the Search dimension ??

PG - What you’ll wish you’d known ::~~~~~

People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can’t help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject’s life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right. >> This is so TRUE When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you’re wondering what you’re doing now that you’ll regret most later, that’s probably it. >> Look I always thought so …. One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee. Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it’s the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They’re all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they’re not interested in. I’m not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I’m often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don’t run for several days, I feel ill. It’s the same with people who do great things. They know they’ll feel bad if they don’t work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Review on more than one article of Paul Graham…

I think this review includes…How to start a startup and Undergraduates….

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.                 
If you work your way down the Forbes _400_ making an x next to the name of
each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business
school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number _22_, Phil Knight, the CEO of
Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top _50_. What you notice in the Forbes
_400_ are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the
technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you
want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business,
the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.                                                                                                                                                 
When nerds are unbearable it’s usually because they’re trying too hard to
seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act
smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability
to say things like “I don’t know,” “Maybe you’re right,” and “I don’t understand
x well enough.”

Below mentioned is in context to applying for as a Research Assistant under a Prof…

Don’t be put off if they say no. Rejection is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. Just move on to the next. (This applies to dating too.)   
“Serious” applications like databases are often trivial and dull technically (if you ever suffer from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about databases) while “frivolous” applications like games are often very sophisticated. I’m sure there are game companies out there working on products with more intellectual content than the research at the bottom nine tenths of university CS departments.                             Thomas Huxley said “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Most universities aim at this ideal.

Chill Article … Needs to be Answered by Open Source Admirers

“Open source software is like handing you a doctor’s bag and the architectural
plans for a hospital and saying, ‘Hey dude, if you have a heart attack, here
are all the tools you need–and it’s free,’” McVoy says. “I’d rather pay
someone to take care of me.”

Complete Article :: By the time Ranta reads this Forbes will remove the link

Since 1993, Larry McVoy has been one of the closest allies to Linus Torvalds,
creator of the open source Linux operating system.

Yet after all these years, McVoy has come to believe that the open source
business model, which is all the rage these days among computer makers like
Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) and IBM (nyse: IBM - news -
people ), cannot generate enough money to support the development of truly
innovative software programs.

“Open source as a business model, in isolation, is pretty much unsustainable,”
says McVoy, founder and chief executive of BitMover, a San Francisco-based
company that makes a software-development tool for Linux called BitKeeper.

McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet. Though his
product, BitKeeper, is not an open source program, from 2002 until 2005, McVoy
let open source programmers use it for free. But as of July, McVoy will stop
the give-away, saying it has been costing him nearly $500,000 per year to
support Torvalds and his programmers.

Open source advocates have pushed McVoy to “open source” his product–that is,
to publish the program’s source code, or basic instructions, and let the world
use it for free. But McVoy says it is simply not possible for an innovative
software company to sustain itself using an open source business model.

“We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six
months,” McVoy says. “The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound
company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If
everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product
for you and supporting you?”

The term “open source” refers to software that is distributed with its source
code so that anyone can read or copy that code. Most commercial programs, like
those made by Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), keep their source
code secret.

Open source products typically are distributed free, since it’s pretty much
impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy.

So how do you make money with open source code? Some companies, like Red Hat
(nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), distribute Linux for free and then make money
selling service contracts to users.

“One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you
are giving customers crap–because if you give them software that works, what
is the point of service?” McVoy says. “The other problem is that the services
model doesn’t generate enough revenue to support the creation of the next
generation of innovative products. Red Hat has been around for a long
time–for a decade now. Yet try to name one significant thing–one innovative
product–that has come out of Red Hat.”

To be sure, a few open source companies are successfully generating revenue
and even (possibly) profits. But none of them generates enough money to do
anything really innovative, says McVoy, 43, an industry veteran who has
developed operating system software at Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news -
people ), Silicon Graphics (nyse: SGI - news - people ) and Google (nasdaq:
GOOG - news - people ).

“The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer
stuff. That’s easy. It’s way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to
create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation
goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it’s true.”

Torvalds disagrees with McVoy about the sustainability of open source.

“Open source actually builds on a base that works even without any commercial
interest [which] is almost always secondary,” he says. “The so-called ‘big
boys’ come along only after the project has proven itself to be better than
what those same big boys tried to do on their own. So don’t fall into the trap
of thinking that open source is dependent on the commercial interests. That’s
nice gravy, but it is gravy.”

But McVoy says open source advocates fail to recognize that building new
software requires lots of trial and error, which means investing lots of
money. Software companies won’t make those investments unless they can earn a
return by selling programs rather than giving them away.

“It costs a huge amount of money to develop a single innovative software
product. You have to have a business model that will let you recoup those
costs. These arguments are exceedingly unpopular. Everyone wants everything to
be free. They say, ‘You’re an evil corporate guy, and you don’t get it.’ But
I’m not evil. I’m well-known in the open source community. But none of them
can show me how to build a software-development house and fund it off open
source revenue. My claim is it can’t be done.”

And though open source software may be “free,” sometimes you get what you pay
for, McVoy says. “Open source software is like handing you a doctor’s bag and
the architectural plans for a hospital and saying, ‘Hey dude, if you have a
heart attack, here are all the tools you need–and it’s free,’” McVoy says.
“I’d rather pay someone to take care of me.”

McVoy argues that the open source phenomenon may appear to be sustainable but
actually is being propped up by hardware makers who view open source code as a
loss leader–something that will entice customers to buy their boxes.

“Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development,
maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies
themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough
money floating around? Where is innovation going to come from? Is the
government going to fund it? This stuff is expensive.”

Even the popular Linux operating system would suffer if hardware makers
stopped their sugar-daddy support for its development–putting their own
programmers to work on Linux, and sending payments to the Open Source
Development Labs, the non-profit organization that employs Torvalds and some
of his key lieutenants.

“If hardware companies stopped funding development, I think it would
dramatically damage the pace at which Linux is being developed. It would be
pretty darn close to a nuclear bomb going off,” McVoy says.

McVoy says he believes the software industry will reach some kind of balance
between open source and traditional software companies. Open source companies
will make commodity knockoffs and eke out tiny profits, while traditional
“closed source” companies will develop innovative products and earn fatter
profits.

Heretical as this may seem, McVoy wants to be on the side that innovates and
makes money.