Watch Paul Graham make mistakes

Paul Graham describes himself as an essayist, programmer and investor. I know his name as one of the founders of Y Combinator (which is something that everyone that's ever thought about one day maybe doing a startup should know about). One of the startups they've funded is Stypi that provides a platform for collaborative writing (that includes writing code, with syntax highlighting) where you can playback the history of the document you're working on.

Paul describes how he used a version of Stypi with a slight modification that colored all the text that ultimately got deleted in yellow to write a blog post:

"What struck me most is the way writing seems for me to be a stick-slip phenomenon. Initially I fumble about and keep rewriting the same sentence over and over. Then I get rolling and write a sentence or two that make it almost intact into the final version, and then I get stuck again. Watching these parts is like watching a mouse find its way through a maze."

The end result is a rare opportunity to experience someone else than you writing and editing a text. I find it very reassuring to see that it's not an easy process even to someone calling themselves an essayist. Go have a "read": Startups in 13 Sentences.