A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in.

For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever processed payments online knew how painful it was. Yet when they started startups, they built recipe sites and local event aggregators instead. Schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments — which became Stripe.

Scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks because there's less demand for them among founders — everyone else has been frightened off by the challenges involved.

The most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would say that if they'd known the obstacles they'd face, they might never have started. That's one reason the most successful startups so often have young founders.

Younger founders have an advantage because they make two mistakes that cancel out: they don't know how much they can grow, but they also don't know how much they'll need to. Older founders only make the first mistake.

To see ideas hidden by obvious schleps, take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking 'what problem should I solve?' ask 'what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?'

Most hackers wish they could start a startup by just writing clever software, putting it on a server, and watching money roll in — without talking to users or negotiating with companies. Paul Graham hasn't seen it work.