What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham
How to make wealth there are a lot of ways to get rich, and this essay is about only one of them.
This essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it.
The advantage of creating wealth as a way to get rich is that it's more straightforward.
You just have to do something that people want.
Money is not wealth.
This paragraph is key to understanding this entire essay.
Wealth is the stuff we want.
Food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on.
You can have wealth without having money.
If you had a magic machine that could, on command, make you a car or cook you dinner or do anything else that you wanted, you wouldn't need money.
Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica where there's nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.
Wealth is what you want, not money.
But if wealth is the most important thing, why does everyone talk about making money?
It is a kind of shorthand.
Money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable.
But they are not the same thing.
The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen.
Their handmade objects become store bought ones.
But with the rise of industrialization, there are fewer and fewer craftsmen.
One of the biggest remaining groups is is computer programmers.