An essay by Paul Graham; chock-full of good stuff:

people work a lot harder on stuff they like

people working for love often surpass those working for money

…the average quality of writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they’re losing.

The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it’s only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.

The average office is a miserable place to get work done

if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don’t try to fool us just by being here a lot.

So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.