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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 biog

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.
- godshatter 5y ago
  Thinking about my own projects, a lot of them fall into your #2 (I chose "yes" for your question for some of my projects). There is a #3 that is missing, at least for me, though. That's the category where I work on something just to see if it will work at all. Sure, I'm unwinding and I'm improving my skills, but I really do want to see if I can accomplish the task at hand. I'll often think something like "if I had never heard of image compression (bitmaps were all we had to work with), how would I go about writing an image compression program?" and then try something new without searching the internet for how compression algorithms work for images. These programs will most likely not do as well as something like jpeg, but they are where derive most of my fun from. Maybe some day I'll come up with something truly novel, and then I'll probably panic because I won't know what to do with it.

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.
godshatter 5y ago
Thinking about my own projects, a lot of them fall into your #2 (I chose "yes" for your question for some of my projects). There is a #3 that is missing, at least for me, though. That's the category where I work on something just to see if it will work at all. Sure, I'm unwinding and I'm improving my skills, but I really do want to see if I can accomplish the task at hand. I'll often think something like "if I had never heard of image compression (bitmaps were all we had to work with), how would I go about writing an image compression program?" and then try something new without searching the internet for how compression algorithms work for images. These programs will most likely not do as well as something like jpeg, but they are where derive most of my fun from. Maybe some day I'll come up with something truly novel, and then I'll probably panic because I won't know what to do with it.