Live in the Future

The recipe PG keeps returning to comes from a line about Pier Oliner's observation, compressed to: live in the future, then build what's missing. People at the leading edge of a fast-changing field don't strain to see the future. They're standing in it, and gaps in it look like obvious annoyances.

Zuckerberg built Facebook partly because he lived online in a way most people in 2004 didn't yet. To him, connecting people through software wasn't a vision. It was Tuesday.

You become the kind of person ideas happen to by working at some leading edge, usually of a technology, either as a builder or a power user. Then ideas stop being something you hunt and start being something you trip over.