Active voice. Minimum word count. That’s it, unless you’re Paul Graham.

Spoiler: You are not Paul Graham.

When I had my first real programming gig in the early 90s, I worked 14+ hours a day and ate fast food exclusively (often in very large quantities). My weight ballooned to nearly 400 pounds.

Then I got sick…

I couldn’t eat anything with fat. Just the thought of it made me physically ill. I ended up dropping half my body weight in 18 months.

What I learned is that it is possible to break your body in many ways.

Seems like someone needs to read more Frans de Waal “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”

https://wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-How-S...

Archived Link: https://archive.is/m89pK

“Without work there is no life…”

That’s not something you’re going to hear from someone in their 20s or 30s, even a few decades ago. This is an attitude that you develop as you get older and become more experienced. It also helps if you’ve already checked a lot of boxes along the way (family, success, and so on).

Sure, Chang was the right person at the right place at the right time, but TSMC could only be built by someone in their 50s. Someone who understood from experience that the work is more important than the accolades because they lived it.

Incredible story end to end.

Well, I suppose opening an essay with a compound gerund is close enough to the prose equivalent of premature optimization to suggest they may be onto something. However, aside from both processes optionally using keyboards for efficiency, code and prose really couldn’t be more different.