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A Project of One's Own
June 2021
A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old
son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the
story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything
I've heard him say -- not just because he was excited about his
story, but because he'd discovered this way of working.
Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary
work as skating is from walking. It's more fun, but also much
more productive.
What proportion of great work has been done by people who were
skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.
There is something special about working on a project of your
own. I wouldn't say exactly that you're happier. A better word
would be excited, or engaged. You're happy when things are
going well, but often they aren't. When I'm writing an essay,
most of the time I'm worried and puzzled: worried that the
essay will turn out badly, and puzzled because I'm groping for
some idea that I can't see clearly enough. Will I be able to
pin it down with words? In the end I usually can, if I take
long enough, but I'm never sure; the first few attempts often
fail.
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.
Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of
their own. The hard part is making this converge with the work
you do as an adult. And our customs make it harder. 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. And instead of pointing out the route, we
conceal it, by implicitly treating the stuff kids do as
different from real work. [1]
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. And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very
different from working on projects of one's own. It's usually
neither a project, nor one's own. 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.
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.
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. [2]
It may be inevitable that school is the way it is. I'm not
saying we have to redesign it (though I'm not saying we
don't), just that we should understand what it does to our
attitudes to work -- that it steers us toward the dutiful
plodding kind of work, often using competition as bait, and
away from skating.
There are occasionally times when schoolwork becomes a project
of one's own. Whenever I had to write a paper, that would
become a project of my own -- except in English classes,
ironically, because the things one has to write in English
classes are so bogus. And when I got to college and started
taking CS classes, the programs I had to write became projects
of my own. Whenever I was writing or programming, I was
usually skating, and that has been true ever since.
So where exactly is the edge of projects of one's own? That's
an interesting question, partly because the answer is so
complicated, and partly because there's so much at stake.
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.
The edge of the former is quite sharp. People who care a lot
about their work are usually very sensitive to the difference
between pulling, and being pushed, and work tends to fall into
one category or the other. But the test isn't simply whether
you're told to do something. You can choose to do something
you're told to do. Indeed, you can own it far more thoroughly
than the person who told you to do it.
For example, math homework is for most people something
they're told to do. But for my father, who was a
mathematician, it wasn't. Most of us think of the problems in
a math book as a way to test or develop our knowledge of the
material explained in each section. But to my father the
problems were the part that mattered, and the text was merely
a sort of annotation. Whenever he got a new math book it was
to him like being given a puzzle: here was a new set of
problems to solve, and he'd immediately set about solving all
of them.
The other sense of a project being one's own -- working on it
by oneself -- has a much softer edge. It shades gradually into
collaboration. And interestingly, it shades into collaboration
in two different ways. One way to collaborate is to share a
single project. For example, when two mathematicians
collaborate on a proof that takes shape in the course of a
conversation between them. The other way is when multiple
people work on separate projects of their own that fit
together like a jigsaw puzzle. For example, when one person
writes the text of a book and another does the graphic design.
[3]
These two paths into collaboration can of course be combined.
But under the right conditions, the excitement of working on a
project of one's own can be preserved for quite a while before
disintegrating into the turbulent flow of work in a large
organization. Indeed, the history of successful organizations
is partly the history of techniques for preserving that
excitement. [4]
The team that made the original Macintosh were a great example
of this phenomenon. 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. There was a lot of
collaboration between them, but they all seem to have
individually felt the excitement of working on a project of
one's own.
In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how
they'd come back into the office after dinner and work late
into the night. People who've never experienced the thrill of
working on a project they're excited about can't distinguish
this kind of working long hours from the kind that happens in
sweatshops and boiler rooms, but they're at opposite ends of
the spectrum. 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. I wouldn't want to
work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.
Of course, it's easier to achieve this level of motivation
when you're making something like the Macintosh. 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. This sometimes alarms
managers, and measured by total number of characters typed,
it's rarely the optimal solution. But it's not always driven
simply by arrogance or cluelessness. Writing code from scratch
is also much more rewarding -- so much more rewarding that a
good programmer can end up net ahead, despite the shocking
waste of characters. 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. [5]
The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems
is one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high.
Not only is the market price of unsolved problems higher, you
also get a discount on productivity when you work on them. In
fact, you get a double increase in productivity: when you're
doing a clean-sheet design, it's easier to recruit skaters,
and they get to spend all their time skating.
Steve Jobs knew a thing or two about skaters from having
watched Steve Wozniak. If you can find the right people, you
only have to tell them what to do at the highest level.
They'll handle the details. Indeed, they insist on it. For a
project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient
autonomy. You can't be working to order, or slowed down by
bureaucracy.
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.
If your projects are the kind that make money, it's easy to
work on them. It's harder when they're not. And the hardest
part, usually, is morale. That's where adults have it harder
than kids. Kids just plunge in and build their treehouse
without worrying about whether they're wasting their time, or
how it compares to other treehouses. And frankly we could
learn a lot from kids here. The high standards most grownups
have for "real" work do not always serve us well.
The most important phase in a project of one's own is at the
beginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x
to actually doing x. And 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.
But if we couldn't benefit as kids from the knowledge that our
treehouses were on the path to grownup projects, we can at
least benefit as grownups from knowing that our projects are
on a path that stretches back to treehouses. Remember that
careless confidence you had as a kid when starting something
new? That would be a powerful thing to recapture.
If it's harder as adults to retain that kind of confidence, we
at least tend to be more aware of what we're doing. Kids
bounce, or are herded, from one kind of work to the next,
barely realizing what's happening to them. Whereas we know
more about different types of work and have more control over
which we do. Ideally we can have the best of both worlds: to
be deliberate in choosing to work on projects of our own, and
carelessly confident in starting new ones.
Notes
[1] "Hobby" is a curious word. Now it means work that isn't
real work -- work that one is not to be judged by -- but
originally it just meant an obsession in a fairly general
sense (even a political opinion, for example) that one
metaphorically rode as a child rides a hobby-horse. It's hard
to say if its recent, narrower meaning is a change for the
better or the worse. For sure there are lots of false
positives -- lots of projects that end up being important but
are dismissed initially as mere hobbies. But on the other
hand, the concept provides valuable cover for projects in the
early, ugly duckling phase.
[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.
[3] The complicated, gradual edge between working on one's own
projects and collaborating with others is one reason there is
so much disagreement about the idea of the "lone genius." In
practice people collaborate (or not) in all kinds of different
ways, but the idea of the lone genius is definitely not a
myth. There's a core of truth to it that goes with a certain
way of working.
[4] Collaboration is powerful too. The optimal organization
would combine collaboration and ownership in such a way as to
do the least damage to each. Interestingly, companies and
university departments approach this ideal from opposite
directions: companies insist on collaboration, and
occasionally also manage both to recruit skaters and allow
them to skate, and university departments insist on the
ability to do independent research (which is by custom treated
as skating, whether it is or not), and the people they hire
collaborate as much as they choose.
[5] If a company could design its software in such a way that
the best newly arrived programmers always got a clean sheet,
it could have a kind of eternal youth. That might not be
impossible. If you had a software backbone defining a game
with sufficiently clear rules, individual programmers could
write their own players.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld,
Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of
this.
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