Sculpting a company, like sculpting out of clay, or creating a perfectly balanced 4 or 6 or 8 or 12 cylinder enging can be a "work of art". Creating a a system,

Sculpting a company, like sculpting out of clay, or creating a perfectly balanced 4 or 6 or 8 or 12 cylinder enging can be a "work of art". Creating a a system, and then watching it run, and tuning and adjusting and tinkering and improving (given that it is built on the most unreliable or unspecifiable of parts: humans), could be a joy in itself. The sheer joy of creation and maintenance. Or, with the mental model of the organization as a developing child, an unruly yet talented child full of promise - raising it up to reach it's peak potential, like an athlete's father, like Tiger Wood's father, might do. That sounds like a legitimate life work, and a hobby, and an interest, to me. EDIT: The care-and-feeding of some of my long-running simulations, be they agent-based computational economics, or alife, give me a lot of joy, even after 20 years of watching them and nurturing them and tuning their parameters. (The results are can be quite surprising! I don't understand people who golf or fish, or that retire to do whatever retired people do, but starting companies or herding populations of computer programs is something I could imagine doing until I die.)