57 ms·

A Project of One’s Own

• gizmo 5y ago
  > Indeed, it may be one of the advantages of capitalism that it encourages such rewriting. A company that needs software to do something can't use the software already written to do it at another company, and thus has to write their own, which often turns out better. I think this is a great insight, and perhaps this is the reason why open source libraries aren't a panacea. By building your own stuff from scratch you get something that makes sense for --your project--. When you glue libraries together you get something that works, but the parts never quite fit and product quality suffers. And the sheer enjoyment of building something entirely from scratch combined with having a lean and mean thing that works exactly the way as intended is absolutely worth it. The next time you're comparing libraries and none of them suit your application perfectly, maybe ask yourself if you should just re-invent the wheel, and thereby make it "a project of one's own".
  • BiggsHoson 5y ago
    I once worked for a small software company that produced custom-written ERP systems for small to mid-sized manufacturers. It was a real thrill to be presented a problem and write code that solves it nicely, removing hindrances to productive work by the end users. I loved being able to visit in person, see the issue first-hand, work with them to devise a solution, and then later watch how much easier their job had become because of it. I miss that kind of job satisfaction. Indeed, it satisfied a deep, personal need to create. I was just fortunate that I could make a living doing so.
• maverickJ 5y ago
  Great write up Paul. An interesting add in my opinion is that one can also do great work when working on a project not of your own origination but of an area where one's interests lie or where visions intersect. >"You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive." While the above does ring true to some extent, one can also approach all tasks with a sense of being awake and alive; This is something some eastern religions preach about. I do admit that this will be hard to implement in practice though. i One person who was able to test out their own ideas while working for others is Nikola Tesla. He might be used a case study by others with grand visions who want to do great work. Although, it can be argued that Tesla had to at some point seek independence. "In 1883, Nikola Tesla was sent by his employer - The Continental Edison Company- to fix the problem that had occurred in the powerhouse and electric lights installation at the railroad station in Strassburg. This presented him with the opportunity to test out his theory of a two phase alternating current motor encompassing his rotary magnetic field discovery [at that time, everyone who had tried to make an alternating current motor used a single circuit]. He set to work and tested his theory in the power plant. He was successful in starting up the power generator with this new system. This meant that Tesla now had a novel electrical system that utilised alternating current." The above was taken from https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you-show-your-work https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...
  • gregwebs 5y ago
    You could look at Tesla different ways. Tesla claimed Edison withheld a promised bonus and then Tesla left to directly work on his own projects for the rest of his life.
• cousin_it 5y ago
  I think the tricky part is keeping that sense of "awake and alive" as you get to the forefront of a problem, which might involve a different set of tasks than those that originally attracted you. For example, playing chess is fun for me at the tactical level, but learning openings isn't fun, so maybe I'll never get good. PG might have the same problem: making programming languages is fun, but studying the current state of programming language design is less fun, so the results (Arc, Bel) don't go very far.
• ximm 5y ago
  I kept waiting for the virgina woolf reference, but it never came…
  • olly_r 5y ago
    Why has this been downvoted? Does no one else think it's strange that the title of the post is a direct reference to Woolf but she's not mentioned at all?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • shmageggy 5y ago
    One (of the many) things that irks me about most of the writing from SV-bigwig-types: they almost never cite anything.
    • barry-cotter 5y ago
      Citing things is an academic tic, not one generally followed in other forms of writing. Terminator didn’t point out that the idea of machine intelligences taking over was first thought of by the Czech guy who coined the word “robot”. Nor does Terry Pratchett cite Conan the Barbarian as inspiration for Cohen the Barbarian.
      • shmageggy 5y ago
        Your analogies are ridiculous to the point of being non-seqiturs. Citing things is not a "tic", it's a discipline that serious non-fiction writers employ when they want to lend support to their claims, show the provenance of their ideas, and generally situate their work in the wider world of ideas. Many SV articles, including PG's, are often full of claims that would benefit from citation for all of the above reasons.
• apples_oranges 5y ago
  No https:// https://?
  • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    Are you concerned someone is MITMing Paul Graham's blog and inserting bad advice?
    • sodality2 5y ago
      https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs-https/ https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs...
      • fhakx 5y ago
        Mostly nonsense, written in Twitter style. The argument for HTTP-only is to preserve the free web and not being dependent on yet another middleman.
        • Karsteski 5y ago
          Can you elaborate more on this? This is the first time I've read such a thing. Is it that HTTPS relies on certification, and therefore introduces one more actor that can effectively remove content that they deem "inappropriate", whatever inappropriate may be?
    • jmkni 5y ago
      Hey guys, Paul Graham wrote an article about me!
• shoto_io 5y ago
  I have come to realize something profoundly fundamental for myself in the last weeks - after seeing this famous marketing video by Steve Jobs and reading a biography of Nike's founder: My passion for my own project/business is highest whenever my passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience. In that case, I also believe your chances of success have improved. Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight was a passionate athlete. He loved sports. However, he was never so good that he could do it for a living. Part of the reason he founded a shoe company back then was to stay in the athlete's business without being an athlete himself. Watch any Nike advertisement and you will not see many words on products, but it's always about how great athletes are.
  • munificent 5y ago
    > My passion for my own project/business is highest whenever my passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience. This is a critical insight. Taking this out of the business domain and into psychology/philosophy, I think the key question is "What does working on the project mean for me?" Here's an interesting thought experiment: Take the hobby project you are working on now and imagine that when it was all done, you planned to just delete all the code without another soul ever seeing it. Would you still work on it? Sometimes the answer is "yes". In those cases, I think the meaning of project is usually either: 1. A way to relax and unwind. Essentially a videogame. It just feels good to use one's skills in a low stakes way. 2. Where the output is to develop your own skills with the expectation that you will use those skills later in ways that touch other people. Essentially piano practice. If the answer is "no", then you have hit the realization that for many projects, the meaning is intrinsically tied to making something that benefits other humans. This is probably obvious for most but is easily overlooked by us awkward introvert types. Knowing why you are doing something is key to being able to do it well.
    • shoto_io 5y ago
      Yes, absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights. I like the test/thought experiment. You know, there is also the other camp, and I have been part of it myself. Those who say that you shouldn’t find a passion to follow, and why that’s a foolish and romantic thing to do. But I have switched sides (again). Why solve problems for people you don’t care about even if that makes you rich? It’s nothing I’d like to do with the limited amount of time I have on this planet.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free." I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing. But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as Bluetooth (I'm pretty good with devices -I've been working on them all my life. I started as an EE, and actually played with Heathkits when I was a kid). I'm now working on a very ambitious social media app. It's probably months down the road, but it will happen. I always ship. I've been doing it all my adult life. This project is the kind and scope that is usually done by a team of 10-20 engineers (I also wrote the backend from scratch, three years ago), but I've been doing it alone. I just started working with another guy that will be adding a dashboard to the server. If you look at the projects in my portfolio, you will see heavy-duty, industrial-strength code; not sloppy "hobby" code. The code Quality is out of this world, they all have a lot more testing code than implementation code, and the documentation is over-the-top complete. I learned, long ago, to make my "hobbies" "ship" projects. That way, everything I do is useful. And that is what makes me happy. I like to finish stuff; and having people use my stuff is the best way to validate its completeness. That said; despite the completeness of my work, it isn't particularly popular, which is just fine by me. I tend to "eat my own dog food," and use a lot of my libraries in my own work. The less that people other than myself depend on my work, the more freedom I have to form it to my own needs. I take Stewardship of my work seriously.
  • jacksonkmarley 5y ago
    So do you make a living from your current company, or are you living off past income/superannuation etc.?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Basically, the latter, but I'd like to get back to making money. It just hasn't been an option. I'm not kidding. The door was slammed on me, quite hard (I think part of it was because I live in New York. New York's ageism problem is much worse than Silicon Valley's). I'm very fortunate, in being able to work on my own. I can't imagine what it must be like for the folks that don't have that option.
• matt_s 5y ago
  > It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams. The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing anything remotely school like. If there is mention of a "project" it is perceived as interfering with their time away from school which is usually involving sports, friends, video games, and media consumption (netflix, youtube, etc.) I want my kids to explore opportunities to find something that sparks their interest enough where they are excited about spending time on it, pursuing it on their own. I think this will help them identify areas of interest for college and their future. Any ideas on how to do this without it seeming like its "school" work?
  • tmotwu 5y ago
    People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like activities provides them. Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right and mold them into the standard high achieving student. Of course, not unwarranted concerns: how do we fairly evaluate a student's external achievements without picking favorites. There is no objective measure to solve that problem. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-university-of-california.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-universi... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require-sat-act-for-admissions-next-year-11592272825 https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require... [3] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement-about-sat-subject-tests/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement...
    • matt_s 5y ago
      I was asking how to get kids to explore things where they might find something that sparks them to desire to spend time on "A Project of One's Own". Competition in school or school-like activities is a fabricated incentive that doesn't have anything to do with kids doing what Paul is talking about with "A Project of One's Own". Chasing a GPA leads to a feedback loop akin to "keeping up with the Joneses" and basically the "plodding along" path in life.
• deleted 5y ago
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• austincheney 5y ago
  If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. That was the most important part of the essay for me. I don’t see this reflected in hiring though. Most of my real challenging programming is on personal projects but interviewers just want to know about the boring junior CRUD work that I do at the job. When I go on military deployments I continue programming and solving problems and building things but none of that seems to come up. As a web developer I prefer to keep my personal projects personal. On my current personal project I published over 950 commits before asking for feedback. Sometimes people will discover something of mine and use it, which is great, but it’s still a personal project. The reason for that level of introversion is that I don’t trust other web developers. It mostly isn’t about ownership. I find that my peers tend to fear data structures and present an extreme fear of original code. Call it Invented Here[1] or whatever you want but it is certainly there and it’s an irrationality I don’t want to deal with when I am writing an application. As an example of the hostility, yes that is the best choice of word, mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns. As an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419965 I wish the attitudes in the above example were rare, but they aren’t. So, I remain an introverted developer working on personal projects. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
  • beaconstudios 5y ago
    I think that's just a HN bubble (SV bubble?) attitude. Working outside of FAANG, I've never encountered such absolutist thinking around the use of JS. Most developers are just trying to get the feature working as specified, regardless of whether it uses a core mechanic or a bit of JS. Better developers simply know the spectrum of options for implementing their features and choose what they perceive to be the best tool for the job based on the available tradeoffs, they don't declare certain options to be heretical or proof of moral lacking.
• myth2018 5y ago
  > What proportion of great work has been done by people who were skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot. I used to think like that. However, the years I spent on my masters and on my startup were a watershed. I was finally working on projects of my very own. But, after some months of extreme excitement, I was resorting to medicine and self help articles to heep me motivated and focused, especially when the boring intricacies started to pop up. The passion, due to its very nature, fades away. In my case, I alleviated those issues with method and discipline. They help you overcome the boring parts. The passion even became cyclic, as the growing body of work and solved problems made me feel engaged again. Nowadays I even feel much better about the plethora of not-my-own-projects I've worked on along my life.
  • swalsh 5y ago
    If it helps, I used to be motivated out of sheer wanting to get that thing that was in my head out, and see it working. That might be enough for a youtube video or a product demo with some executives at the company. Heck you can turn that 80% into a real career booster (I've done this), but it's not a production ready product. The last 20% of the work will take 80% of the time. It's really hard to be motivated for that last part. It's all the hard stuff that seems insignificant... and you've already got the cheese. If you can accomplish it, the trick to staying motivating is to figure out the mental gymnatics to move where you put the cheese in the trap. If you can do that... you have a real chance at being motivated past the proof of concept.
• nindalf 5y ago
  > That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance." Indeed, the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word "work" automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash. So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.
  • UncleMeat 5y ago
    Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of the rest of my time. At least with a founder they capture more of the economic output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for most founders.
    • mpfundstein 5y ago
      i think you really didn't get the message, did you? maybe read it again, carefully, and then edit your initial post
      • GavinMcG 5y ago
        That comment is entirely unhelpful, and a net negative with the condescension. If you think someone misunderstood, help them by restating the idea in a way you find more understandable.
        • mpfundstein 5y ago
          op can defend himself i guess second, it was on purpose. i wanted to trigger op to explain his position more. and it worked. he did. so chill out. not everyones out to get ya
• thrower123 5y ago
  This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern work: the obsession with collaboration. If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely difficult to care about what you are doing.
  • WJW 5y ago
    My word, so much this. It is astounding how companies manage to kill initiative at every level as they grow. Individual team members can't change anything because they are at the bottom of the ladder and have to conform to the wishes of "the team" and low/middle managers somehow have even less autonomy because they can't go against their own managers but also have to navigate the peculiarities of their reports and various committees. You'd think that high level managers get more autonomy, but the demands of office politics (one serious mistake and you lose the shot at the C-suite you worked your whole career for) combined with their distance to people who can actually implement any changes they'd wish to make ensures that high level managers also have very little actual autonomy. It does not help that the word "ownership" has become a euphemism for "you must now care about this thing and fix it when it breaks at 2am, but economic benefits of any improvements to it will still flow to the shareholders". You get the drawbacks of ownership but not the benefits.
  • 0xFACEFEED 5y ago
    I don't think the problem is an obsession with collaboration. I've observed that it's mostly a defensive measure. The amount of damage that (sorry for putting it this way)... stupid people... can do is unbounded. The potential blast radius of bad decisions grows with the size of the company. Recovering from bad decisions is also very costly. The flip side of autonomy and empowerment is just that. When it's in the hands of a person that has a sense of pride in their work, a high bar for quality, determination to get the job done, loves the customer/user, etc then it's a recipe for productivity and happiness. When it's in the hands of a person who constantly ships broken code, has no work ethic, blames or doesn't care about the user, is jumping on every newest fad, etc then it can kill a whole company or a department. The only solution I've seen is hiring VERY defensively ("one bad apple..."), keep the team small, and keep the scope/focus very narrow. That's just not possible in the enterprise space though.
• paulcole 5y ago
  > If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. If all you have is a hammer, you’re going to go around looking for nails.
• ampdepolymerase 5y ago
  > If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. That's quite rich coming from pg considering that the YC application explicitly states that they may ask for transcripts if you are still in school.
  • bko 5y ago
    Why does everything written on the internet immediately trigger such a dunk reflex in some? Is your comment productive to the ideas presented in this article?
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    pg wrote, "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator". Did the YC application state that back then? Also, is it known how YC is actually evaluating those? Myself, if I were trying to pick people to fund, I'd consider grades a weak signal, and apply a concave, ^-shaped function to it, i.e. bad grades are obviously bad, but if the grades are all perfect, this may indicate lack of independent thinking.
  • tomhoward 5y ago
    Where does it say this? I can't find any mention of anything like this on the application form or FAQs. https://apply.ycombinator.com/app/edit https://apply.ycombinator.com/app/edit https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/ https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
    • ampdepolymerase 5y ago
      Under your personal profile: > Schools, Degrees (including field of study), and Years of Graduation
      • tomhoward 5y ago
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Tangentially related, I am writing a book each with each of my (older) kids. Its nothing much (just some fun sci-fi that got them a bit interested in the project(s) at all) but it is theirs. Its rumbles along as they have ideas - I try and type up and edit a bit, we sometimes kick around ideas at 'storytime' (which is a bit less fun for them as they enter teens). The final goal will be a few copies printed off the Amazon-whatjamacallit and read 'for real'. But yes. Something real, that is theirs.
• choonway 5y ago
  [2]Oh but it already has happening in Singapore. IF the kid can't make it through the conventional academic path, and has to rely on the discretionary route, there are plenty of coaches who will 'teach' your kid how to interview and even 'help' write the essay on his 'interests'. Of course, the interviewers can easily spot those coached this way, but that is not going to stop the tiger mom from doing what she wants.
• martindbp 5y ago
  > If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Unfortunately kids in Sweden have to attend school by law, homeschooling is not allowed. By extension, you're not allowed to go on trips, or take any other time off without permission from the school. As my kid is only 3, I'm not sure how strict they are with this, but it feels very suffocating to me. I want him to have breathing room to spend time on projects and whatever he's passionate about, even if that means missing out on regular school for a while or getting worse grades. The last resort is to move abroad, but that has obvious downsides. The intention for this law was probably good: ensure that all kids get an education, and are not brainwashed by religious nuts, but it really really bothers me.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • prawn 5y ago
    Can't speak for Sweden, but here in Australia, we went to our son's school and explained that we intended to take him out for three months for an extended holiday. His teacher had no issue with it and based on that, the principal signed off easily enough. For a struggling kid, there might've been push back, but you have to ask to find out. When I was in high school, my parents took us out of school for 3-4 months to travel Asia including months in China. I've always appreciated them having done this for us. I was studying Chinese at the time, so it was an incredible opportunity on that front alone.
  • tomjen3 5y ago
    If that is at all an option for you, cross the belt over to Denmark, not only is homeschooling allowed, but you can get 85 (I think) percent of what is paid towards a normal school to be paid towards a school of your choosing in case you want your kid to attend a private school, making private schools very affordable.
    • martindbp 5y ago
      Denmark has been growing on me. Less crime, less woke, further south (slightly better weather), still fairly close to home, Copenhagen seems super nice. But Stockholm is still where friends and family are so at the end of the day it's not really an option. Also I don't want to add to the confusion of learning 3 languages for my son (Swedish, Chinese, English) by adding a fourth!
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there. The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.
  • andreyk 5y ago
    Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. " There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem. "Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.
      • idiotsecant 5y ago
        I disagree with your disagreement! Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations scratch some very different itches. One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  The essay starts out okay, but then kind of goes off the rails: > Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through school. There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both. Second, a treehouse is rarely the path to riches. Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended). Most kids do not have projects that are valuable from a career perspective. > And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from working on projects of one's own. Well sure, because the average kid needs to learn to write and do basic arithmetic. The author may be unaware of what most kids are like. > So as school gets more serious, working on projects of one's own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread off to the side. That's true, but that's because teenagers would rather spend their time hanging out with other teenagers than working on a startup idea. Most high school kids in the US have time for projects but they choose to spend time on other things. And that's good, though maybe not for the VCs of the world.
  • ant6n 5y ago
    Going from plan to finish is extremely valuable no matter what the project is. I myself was always a dreamer, just planned stuff, and that tendency carried all the way into adulthood. Perhaps I should have finished more projects when I was a kid, maybe I‘d be a bit more productive and less of a dreamer today.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both [projects and school]. Do they, though? Between schools offloading teaching as "homework", making kids do after school what should've been done in-class, and the cultural pressure making parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford - there's not that much time in a kid's day left. > a treehouse is rarely the path to riches pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.
    • solipsism 5y ago
      pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work. Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you are already rich.
• sombremesa 5y ago
  This essay works well if you imagine the audience to be a batch of YC founders, or other entrepreneurial types. I read this essay three times. First, I read it as pg probably intended - I'm in the midst of founding my own company, and the nature and quality of effort I bring to my own endeavors is orders of magnitude apart from what I bring to an employer. Much of my life growing up has been suffering abuse for choosing to pursue my passion followed by vindication, so the essay rings true for me in that sense. The second time, I read this essay as an average kid from my underprivileged background might've read it. School was never a path to 'work' (there was plenty of 'work' for the unschooled), it was a route to escape poverty - one of a scant few that were close to reliable. That's the reason having a passion outside of school was frowned upon, you were risking starving any future family you might've had at a point where risk wasn't all that tolerable. In my last reading, I just saw this essay as pg getting excited about something his kid was doing, and going about highlighting the importance of letting kids be kids - but in a very strange way such that it could fit among his other essays.
• yoz-y 5y ago
  For me the thing that distinguishes hobby from work is the second 90% of the project. Working on the ideas, the architecture, the interface and piecing it all together is fun and I don't mind staying up long if I do say a game jam. However, once everything is up and running, you get into the tedium of making the project actually work. This might be fixing all books or making sure that the door on your tree house can, in fact, be closed. In a hobby project you can say 'good enough' and be done with it. In work setting, not so much.
  • amackera 5y ago
    Sadly, in my experience at least, most commercial software projects also suffer from the "treehouse door doesn't close" problem. I think far too many "professional" developers give up after good enough.
• emc3 5y ago
  Ugh, PG discounted his earlier works, again. I can't relate to "workers" (employees) and I haven't been out of the workforce for nearly as long as PG. Dalio emphasizes the importance of being believable, and I don't believe that PG understands the concept of work/life balance(or "work-life" or whatever). Disclaimer: @paulg blocked me on Twitter.
• bluefox 5y ago
  It's a good start for an essay, and there was even a paragraph getting close to the crux of the matter (about projects of the kind that doesn't necessarily make money). The problem is that of the starving artist, and a solution, or a big step towards a solution, is universal basic income. This kind of safety net would let us at least partially revert back to the carefree ways of the child and give us the freedom to work on our own projects without the fear of and actual possibility of falling into destitution.
  • prawn 5y ago
    Derek Sivers had a related comment I always think of. Very roughly, the idea is: instead of trying to love what makes you money (or make money from what you love), pick a tolerable career that makes you decent money, and then don't force your passion to be profitable. Of course, it's hard to get excited about that when you throw 40 of your most energised hours of the week at a grind.
• beepbooptheory 5y ago
  This is really nice and particularly resonant with me. I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in kitchens and teaching guitar and such). I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs, gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that understanding by example. Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin it. But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.
  • and0 5y ago
    I can say as someone who fell in love with coding that doing it professionally did not extinguish that fire. Still spent 12 or so hours doing game dev this weekend, and a few hours every night this week. e: To clarify I started learning in 2013ish, became a full-time dev in late 2015. So 6 years later, still finding joy in the day-to-day, but definitely have a special fire for the pipe-dream projects.
    • EarthLaunch 5y ago
      That makes me curious what project you're working on, and you might be interested in my own pipe-dream project! There's a playfulness in doing something seemingly impossible, because succeeding at it simply means having fun playing with it.
• crispyambulance 5y ago
  Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain. ...and... > I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
  • nickthemagicman 5y ago
    I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is joyful and is more akin to play than work. Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is great as well. I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.
    • crispyambulance 5y ago
      I feel similarly. I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway (wormhole) into a start-up! > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a lot in common, including the fact that they're often run by skaters. And indeed, there's a wormhole from one end of the scale to the other: one of the best ways to discover startup ideas is to work on a project just for fun.
      • mcguire 5y ago
        I guess VCs wouldn't be considered "bosses"?
        • 5y ago
• erwinh 5y ago
  Small new project of my own, doing NFT platform analytics: https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1402020462268387336?s=21 https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1402020462268387336?s...
• Ontol 5y ago
  Russian translation: https://habr.com/ru/post/561716/ https://habr.com/ru/post/561716/
• splithalf 5y ago
  “ the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct” Going to have to meditate on that one for awhile. It seems “privileged.” For many work amounts to a set of indignities required for survival. A 2 hour daily commute to pay Bay Area rent prices doesn’t feel like “life” at all. Sort of Marie Antoinette vibes to the featured essay. I’m actually ok with that. Not everyone needs to be a slave, and the more people who can forego work and just tinker the better. But acknowledge it. Paul’s not talking to the proles here, but to other gentlemen of leisure who had mathematician dads, or those who had Paul graham type rich celebrity dads. Most people are in essence slaves to debt. Retirement is when work stops and life starts, for most of us in the second class.
• jart 5y ago
  Gluing together personal projects is the foundation of the UNIX operating system. It's the point of any operating system really, but UNIX does it best. Docker and the microservice paradigm have also had a meteoric rise, probably because they promise to plug together clean slate personal projects. One management technique I've seen companies use to grant employees the freedom to pursue personal projects, without it being seen as treachery, is to have a contract that says the company owns everything your mind produces, and then define quarterly expectations. That way you can sprint for a month doing what management wants, and spend the rest of the time inventing things like voicemail for fun.
  • pram 5y ago
    I worked at a place that had explicit “20% time” to work on “whatever” and it (incredibly) turned into more micromanaged bullshit. Now I had to set separate goals and milestones for that project too, and report it in one-on-ones with my manager. I just dropped the whole thing because it was literally more work than doing my regular job!
    • jart 5y ago
      Try saying, "I work on this project every fifth business day, so how about we discuss it at every fifth meeting?" Micromanagement is when a manager tells you how to do your work. Goals and milestones is a management task, so it's not an unreasonable ask. If they're asking you to write those yourself, then maybe they're wondering if you'd make a good manager. Imagine yourself as the 10x developer who needs to report to the director on what the other 9 developers are (1) doing and (2) intend to do. Also, who cares if it's more work? Programming for me is not just a job but also a hobby. So if I'm working a job where the employment contracts states the company owns everything I do during the 168 hour work week, then my 20% time usually becomes 160% time (80% + 80%). You have to be willing to go to great lengths to keep people happy. Particularly the people who end up working on your project as part of their 80% time.
• iamwil 5y ago
  “ The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems is one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high ” In my experience, startups aren’t always run by skaters nor do they recruit skaters, but can be, by most measures, successful. Anecdotally, these characteristics appears to be a subset of successful startups.
• gdubs 5y ago
  Another aspect of personal projects is that if they’re truly enjoyable they can be a kind of salve for burnout.* If you feel like you can’t even open your IDE, a personal project can generate the excitement that reinvigorates your passion. There’s also less of a speed limit with personal projects — the things like: “before you go down that road let’s talk with X; hold off on that idea for now; let’s wait until...” This freedom is conducive to learning new things. My career success rests heavily on skills I gained pursuing personal projects, where I was able to try ridiculously complicated or “out there” ideas. I’ve worked for people in the past who were strongly against me spending free time on personal projects, but benefited from all the skills I had gained doing so. Beware of this mindset — it’s fear based and leads to unsuccessful outcomes in other ways. * Side note is: careful not to burn out on what’s supposed to be a fun personal project.
  • convolvatron 5y ago
    I disagree about the sidenote. go for it. get as far as you can.
    • EarthLaunch 5y ago
      I'm curious, why push through on a fun personal project into causing burnout? Asking for...a friend.
      • notsureaboutpg 5y ago
        Do you remember in Uni pulling all nighters for projects / classes? It was stressful, often painful, often resulting in you being a mess for a few days afterwards. If you did this, you'd know it had all the signs of burnout attached to it. And yet... sometimes your projects ended up super cool and you were really really proud of them and when you showed them off you felt really accomplished. And sometimes that feeling is worth a little foray into burnout world.
      • convolvatron 5y ago
        I guess I have a different theory of burnout. to me it happens when I can't connect the dots anymore. its not because I worked too hard. company found a vertical and how I spend all my time trying to fix 'bugs' that are really because the product is being mis-applied. most of the senior team left and its clear that we aren't going to be taking on any other work than cleaning up. sales are flagging and its clear that the whole narrative was corrupt to begin with. the only projects I can remember, paid or not, are the ones that took up a huge fraction of my output and really did something cool. do that. shoot big. make something really different. don't turn programming into sitting at the end of an queue, picking up random things and gamifying retiring them as fast you can. you have a chisel. make a sculpture.
• truetraveller 5y ago
  As an aside, PG is a fantastic writer. Truly one of my favorites reads. His writing reminds me of Joel Spolsky's writings in some ways, Joel also being a gifted writer. PG's writing is not pretentious; it employs "easy" words and grammar on purpose. And his writing genuinely provides a tremendous amount of new insight.
  • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Yes, one must wonder at the way he effortlessly expresses his largely half-baked ideas.
    • approxim8ion 5y ago
      Glad someone mentioned it. The man is pretty much unanimously worshipped around here but his writing just doesn't resonate with me. It's not just that I don't agree, I think it's possible to appreciate someone's talent without agreeing with it, but it just doesn't feel particularly thought-provoking or insightful to me. That might say more about me than him but it is how it is.
      • truetraveller 5y ago
        Wow, I truly have a different taste I suppose. Do you like Joel Spolsky's writings?
        • approxim8ion 5y ago
          I hadn't heard of him until your comment. Will reply here after I've done my due diligence, thanks for the recommendation!
• deleted 5y ago
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• mcguire 5y ago
  The really neat thing about being so excited about your own projects that you have to work on them is that no one has to pay you for it. (See the state of open source.)
• brhsagain 5y ago
  Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily. It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first programming job and eventually skipped college to start working right out of high school. I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and their mom would immediately start making them drill it three hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it anymore. It's a sad story.
  • opportune 5y ago
    Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking and consulting.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • throwawayboise 5y ago
• Kevin_S 5y ago
  I find that ownership of one's work is a gigantic motivator for me, though not necessarily for others. I moved from a consulting job to academic research and am significantly more fulfilled doing research projects rather than being a small piece of a greater machine at a corporation. There is nothing I love more than finding the seed of an idea and spending a whole day getting it started.
• swman 5y ago
  I'll just say that it is way, way more fun to work with people who also look at software engineering as a hobby. End of the day we're just playing with lego bricks that happen to be computer bits. Do you want to be the person who only knows how to follow the step by step book, or can build anything out of any legos?
• corpMaverick 5y ago
  This resonated with me. I have been developing software professionally for 32 years. And I am counting the days until retirement. I don't really want to retire, I want to own the work that I do. I don't care if it is boring or if somebody else tell me what they want. But having autonomy on HOW I do the work is what is important. And when I have that, may productivity goes through the roof and that is when I am truly happy.
• srikanthap18 5y ago
  there is a saying and it may be relevant to quote here - "first 30 years of your life you make hobbies, the next 30 years of your life your hobbies makes you"
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> There turn out to be two senses in which work can be one's own: 1) that you're doing it voluntarily, rather than merely because someone told you to, and 2) that you're doing it by yourself. Maybe that's why I sometimes get more involved in helping other people at work than doing my own. Helping someone else is voluntary, while doing my own work is a bit more of an obligation. Helping out is also more transient and not a constant daily thing, so it serves as a break from work even though its still work. So now that I've said all that, it's obvious that people are more motivated to do something they choose vs something they're told to do. Sounds like a discipline problem when phrased that way.
• ruthvik947 5y ago
  Needed to read this, thank you Paul! Was on the edge about a summer project -- deterred mostly by high-expectations, the project being likely non-monetisable, and a fear of failure. I see now none of those are valid excuses!
• Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  There’s a video about a Chinese kid going through this exact dilemma https://youtu.be/4L6RKFbQoxs https://youtu.be/4L6RKFbQoxs
• andreyk 5y ago
  I think one thing this essay misses is that schools enable and encourage having one's own projects. Some examples from my experience: - In third year of high school I joined the FIRST robotics club, and it was a pretty transformative experience. Doing such a big project for the first time, which I could not have possibly tried on my own, was amazing. And of course it improved my social skills, my communication skills, all that. - In fourth year of high school, I took our follow up to AP CS which was on making video games (yeah, I was at a nice high school). And we just got to make whatever games we wanted, within some limits. Tons of fun. - In college I spent a ton of time in the Solar Racing club (http://solarracing.gatech.edu/ http://solarracing.gatech.edu/). Like, all four years - and this was some serious engineering work. - In college I went to lots of hackathons. My favorite project was one that visualized music libraries, I spent a few months on it after the hackathon (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/meta-music/ https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/meta-...). - In college I got into 3D printing and laser cutting, since that was available there (for free). I tried going to maker spaces after, but those are NOT cheap. - In my Masters program at Stanford, most CS classes have a project component where you do whatever you want. To take just one example, I built a neat little website in which you could visualize neural net models (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/KerasJS3D/ https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/Keras...). And, society encourages this stuff too, in terms of interviews asking about your projects and colleges wanting to see extracurriculars. Of course it's not perfect, most classes could provide a lot of leeway in terms of self direction. But it's worth acknowleding, especially in terms of schools enabling larger group efforts and providing the environment and equipment and knowledge for doing fun stuff. If anything , school did not beat out the drive for projects, it enabled it. I miss doing such things quite a bit, as it gets a lot harder to find people to do them with and it's seen as kind of weird.
• babarganesh 5y ago
  a small gripe about the otherwise excellent writing: > at that point high standards are not merely useless but positively harmful. There are a few people who start too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeeded if they had. I think this buries the lede a bit. And "success" isn't a good measure, when the important thing many times is self-development or even just the skating feeling.
• gluegadget 5y ago
  Off-topic but I tried https version of paulgraham.com but got a bad cert domain name error. SANs are for store.yahoo.com, leftover of Viaweb?
• openthewindow 5y ago
  Paul Graham's essays now reflect his life which is obviously much less about startups and YCombinator and much more about family life.
  • akkartik 5y ago
    It has always been thus. 2002: http://paulgraham.com/icad.html http://paulgraham.com/icad.html 2003: http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html 2006: http://paulgraham.com/love.html http://paulgraham.com/love.html 2007: http://paulgraham.com/head.html http://paulgraham.com/head.html 2008: http://paulgraham.com/lies.html http://paulgraham.com/lies.html
• Lammy 5y ago
  > People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve Jobs. Jef Raskin*
• trilinearnz 5y ago
  A delightful read. Certainly my most elative moments have come from personal projects, mostly games. Something I struggle with is gaining traction on subsequent projects when my burnout is at it's worst, as it's obviously a mentally-intensive endeavor despite the possibility of net gains.
• elihu 5y ago
  It's not important, but I wondered if the title was an allusion to one of the patterns in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" titled "A room of one's own", about the necessity in designing houses to give everyone some bit of space that's distinctly theirs. The theme seems kind of similar, and PG makes a lot of architectural references in the essay. In googling for "A room of one's own", though, I discovered that it's also the title of an essay by Virginia Wolfe written in 1929. It's possible that might possibly have inspired the name of the pattern in Christopher Alexander's book.
• borroka 5y ago
  "This is why it is a mistake to insist dogmatically on the 'work/life balance'. In fact, the phrase 'work/life' alone embodies an error: it assumes that work and life are distinct." A beaten horse if there is one. It's not a matter of being dogmatic or seeing the 6 sides of a die. It's that, as PG says between the lines, for most people there is no particular excitement about work. For some it depends on the working conditions, for many it's their personality. I don't look for any particular excitement at work: I'm happy to work a few hours a day for a great paycheck on something I more or less enjoy. PG, who writes as someone who has had overall a terrific time at work, by focusing only on work misses the larger behavioral point. Let me offer an example: I don't know these days, but looking at PG's photos from a few years ago, I can say with certainty that he was, and I hope for his sake that he is no longer, in not very good physical shape. I've worked out all my life, playing individual and team sports, in the gym alone and with others, and for me exercising and playing sports has overall been tremendous fun and has contributed greatly to who I am, what I've done, and what I'm doing. But I suspect for PG, to go to the gym or sweat or do anything physical has to be unpleasant, if not a nightmare. And I'm fine with that, he'd rather be doing other things, he's probably (I'm speculating here) not particularly athletically gifted, and since he's a very smart person, he can probably come up with 15 different rationalizations as to why he avoids doing enough physical activity to look better, feel better, and greatly reduce his risk of getting sick now and in the future. But, and I don't think I'm exaggerating here, it's likely that he simply doesn't like to exercise and there's no narrative about Olympic medals, great feats of physical endurance, or any dream of looking like a Greek god that would convince him to become a gym rat. Similarly, there is no Apple story that could push me toward a 12-hour workday (or whatever time is being talked about) working for others (assuming I can avoid doing so)..
  • Lammy 5y ago
    > It's that, as PG says between the lines, for most people there is no particular excitement about work. It's because "most people" earn money by selling their labor out of a finite 24-hour day, but PG is a Venture Capitalist whose capital works 24/7.
    • borroka 5y ago
• consultSKI 5y ago
  >> Remember that careless confidence you had as a kid when starting something new? That would be a powerful thing to recapture. Indeed. Never lost it. Thanks for sharing.
  • imperialdrive 5y ago
    Amen :)
• schoen 5y ago
  Wow, the footnote mentions that we get the term "hobby" from "hobby-horse", rather than the other way around. I didn't realize that at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_horse_(toy)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_horse_(toy)#Etymology
• tppiotrowski 5y ago
  The difference between kids and adults is that adults compare themselves to one another and will abandon projects that don’t earn them recognition from their peers. Kids seem less influenced by this, at least until puberty.
• surajs 5y ago
  a third kind of project of one's own can be the things you do for the heck of it, to demonstrate.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  Paul Graham writes some very thoughtful and interesting stuff... that only applies to the circumstances of a very tiny minority of people
• puchatek 5y ago
  > It's easy for something new to feel like a project of your own. That's one of the reasons for the tendency programmers have to rewrite things that don't need rewriting, and to write their own versions of things that already exist. A more positive spin on what i feel is partly also driven by arrogance but I'm happy it's being pointed out. This is a thing and it's big.
• zeckalpha 5y ago
  The title and takeaway mirror “A Room of One’s Own” where Woolf recognized the power of having a domain in which to exercise autonomy.