Paul Graham delivered a brilliant key note at the first day of RailsConf, with jokes and insights coming so fast in succession that it felt like a new chapter in his trademark book; Hackers and Painters. It is impossible to do Graham’s speech justice in a blog, as the softies realized, but I got pretty decent notes, so I’ll give a try anyway.

Graham titled his keynote “Power of the marginal”, and his theme for talk was just this: The advantage of being an outsider, and the amount of great ideas that stems from outsiders. “Using Ruby on Rails is a marginalizing yourself – welcome to my world!” Graham said, hinting his preference for Lisp as a programming language. He pointed out that there, due to the definition, will have to be more outsiders than insiders, and that this is part of the reason that most of the good ideas comes out the marginal. But that’s not entire reason – there are actually several disadvantages to being an insider:

  • You will often select the wrong people from your pool of other insiders
  • You need to seem serious
  • You want to avoid risks
  • The task becomes a duty, rather than being pleasurable

You can pass a test either by being good at it or by being good at hacking it, and you can tell how interesting a scientific field is by the overlap between its practitioners and the people who teaches it, where you have, on one end, mathematics, where all the great scientist are also the best teachers, and on the other end you have computer science, where the people who can’t do, teach. Grahams point with this was that you shouldn’t learn things from people who are bad at those things. He also points out that it’s hugely valuable to be able to look like a fool, to make mistakes – something insiders can’t afford to do, because they want to stay insiders – but something outsiders can without a worry – they are already outsiders. Bottom line is that stupid ideas don’t make you stupid – it takes many stupid ideas to come up with a great idea.

Another advantage of being an outsider is you have lots of time. Successful people often answer, to the question on what’s wrong with their life, that they don’t have enough time. Everybody wants a piece of them, and that way they loose a lot of the freedom they had as outsiders. (This point actually made me feel bad for pulling DHH into a photo with me earlier that day, since that’s a perfect example of an outsider taking a bite of an insider.) So being an outsider, you should take advantage your freedom, and be flexible instead of being ruled by plans.

Repeating some his well known views, Graham stated that every programming language should be written together with a large application using it, like C with UNIX, so the language doesn’t turn into a big, unusable science project. Another point was that outsiders are compelled to make things that are cheap, because they have very limited resources. An example of this was Steve Wozniak, who created Apple with Steve Jobs, used a TV as a monitor for the computer, since he couldn’t afford a real computer monitor. The insiders can’t make it as cheap or as small as the outsiders, they have to work on big projects, which will, by their sheer size, impress people. Small things are magical, Graham says, because they can be done fast and seem perfect, and working on small things is a good way to learn.

The biggest disadvantage of being an outsider is that you don’t, as opposed to the insiders, have a big audience. It’s good for moral and motivation to an expectant audience, and luckily, the internet has made it much easier to get such an audience for the outsiders. This way, outsiders can retain most of the advantages of being and outsider, while still having an audience.

Graham ended his talk by underlining the power of marginal: Just try hacking something together. Spend less time worrying and more time building stuff, Graham said, and how does this leave someone like me (that’s me, Casper Fabricius, not Graham being quoted), who are actually spending more time studying and making plans for future than executing and try building stuff? With a feeling of wasting my time and not being willing to take a risk – but I’ll have to take my chances. Graham suggest that you can check if you are on the right track by noticing if people call you unqualified and tells you that you are doing inappropriate stuff. As long as the worst thing the insiders can say about what you are doing is to point out that you are an outsider, you are on the right track.

UPDATE: You can now read Paul Grahams key note transformed into an essay at his website.

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