Mean People Fail – Paul Graham

Paul Graham:

One is that being mean makes you stupid. That’s why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don’t win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case

He’s mostly talking about failure in the context of startups but it applies to just about everything.