Patrick McKenzie: Internet Famous

I think too many people are paralyzed with the ability to write or the desire to write by saying like 'It doesn't matter if I write if I don't have an audience to be able to ship those words to.' I think that even if you have literally zero people who read what you write today, it is still worth writing that thing today because you will produce an asset that you can use in the future.

You radically underestimate both how much you know that other people do not and the instrumental benefits of you publishing it.

If you spend nine months in the code cave building out version 1.0 of your software and then launch to nobody, that's nine months where you could have developed a newsletter with thousands of people subscribing to it and then, nine months after that, with relatively little additional work done on the newsletter, had people ready to buy your thing the first day.

Rethink the mindset of becoming a software person who writes and think more about becoming the expert and then writing the software that encodes your expertise in the software product ... Writing deeply about how you understand whatever your problem domain is will make your software product decisions better.

The amount of luck that you have in life is how much value you create times how many people you tell about it.

One of the ideas that I'm just ecstatically excited about is building an online audience writing online and then, through that, actually validating demand and meeting people who could be future coworkers, or future customers, or future investors for your company and, through that, actually launching small software businesses.

Writing is a useful skill, and like all skills, it decays over time if you don't use it.

Email is something that you can own and that is very difficult to take away from you in a way that your presence on social media platforms is not.

Self-promotion is kind of like self-cooking. If you don't do it and you don't pay somebody to do it... then you're going to go hungry.

The thing that exists in pockets in the United States and exists in more than pockets in Japan is a level of earnestness and optimism with respect to one's work.