
Some Heroes (2008) - keiferski
http://www.paulgraham.com/heroes.html
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keiferski
I was recently re-reading this essay and found the last blurb about Isaac
Newton to be particularly insightful.

 _Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he 's the one I reproach
myself with. He worked on big things, at least for part of his life. It's so
easy to get distracted working on small stuff. The questions you're answering
are pleasantly familiar. You get immediate rewards—in fact, you get bigger
rewards in your time if you work on matters of passing importance. But I'm
uncomfortably aware that this is the route to well-deserved obscurity._

 _To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people didn 't
even realize were questions. There have probably been other people who did
this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of
thought. I can just begin to understand what it must have felt like for him._

 _You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigm
shift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out
there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of
laziness and stupidity. If we work like Newton._

