Part of the problem is that people rarely hire someone to be creative. They hire because they have a distinct need. I think it was 37Signals that referred to

Part of the problem is that people rarely hire someone to be creative. They hire because they have a distinct need. I think it was 37Signals that referred to this as "the tyranny of the client." I've always performed better when I had wide latitude, but this is difficult to pull off in "the real world." In college and especially grad school, I could get out of all kinds of exams and assignments by suggesting a different project to a professor. They'd get interested and say "sure, do that instead." Thing is, it really didn't cost them anything. Giving a student an "A" even though he didn't do the assigned homework is, of course, very different from cutting a programmer a check even though he didn't complete the assigned project. In general, I'd figure employers are looking for the 10X productivity, whereas investors are looking for the creativity. You have to live an edgier life to get to be creative. The closest thing I've heard in the corporate world is Google's 20% thing. There are other avenues as well: I worked a while at Sun, and I managed to get a couple of projects accepted well enough that they became my full time job.