A few days ago, on my way home from school, my nine-year-old son told me that he couldn't wait to get home to write a sequel to the story he was working on. It made me happy as nothing else that I heard from him - not only because he was delighted with his story, but also because he discovered this way of working. Working on your own project is as different from regular work as ice skating is from walking. This is not only more fun, but also much more productive.
What proportion of great work has been done by people who skated in this sense? If not all, then certainly a large one.
There is something special about working on your own project. I would not say that you are happier. Better to say that you are excited or involved. You are happy when things are going well, but often they are not. When I write an essay, most often I am worried and perplexed: I am worried that the essay will turn out bad, and I am perplexed because I grope for some idea that I cannot see clearly enough. Will I be able to express it in words? In the end it usually succeeds if I spend enough time, but I'm never sure; the first few attempts are often unsuccessful.
You have moments of happiness when everything works out, but they do not last long, because then you move on to the next problem. So why bother doing this at all? Because people who like to work this way, nothing else seems so right. You feel like an animal in its natural habitat, doing what it was meant to do - not always happy, maybe, but energetic and lively.
Many children get excited about working on their own projects. The hardest part is making it match the work you do as an adult. And our customs complicate it. We see "play" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work." It is not clear to a child building a treehouse that there is a direct (albeit long) path from that treehouse to architecture or engineering. And instead of showing the route, we hide it, implicitly treating what the kids are doing as different from the actual work.
Instead of teaching children that their treehouses can be a pathway to the things they do as adults, we tell them that the path is through school. And, unfortunately, school work tends to be very different from working on your own projects. Usually this is not a project, nor is it your own work. Therefore, as the school becomes more serious, work on their own projects, if it survives, is like a thin thread aside from studies.
It's a little sad to think that all high school students have turned their backs on building tree houses and sit in class obediently studying Darwin or Newton to pass the exam, while the work that made Darwin and Newton famous is actually closer in spirit to building. tree houses than exam preparation.
If I had to choose between good grades from my children and working on my own ambitious projects, I would choose projects. And not because I am an indulgent parent, but because I was on the other end and I know that it has great predictive value. When I selected startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about the candidates' ratings. But if they were working on their own projects, I wanted to hear everything about them. [2]
Perhaps it is inevitable that the school is what it is. I’m not saying that we should redesign it (although I’m not saying that we don’t), we just need to understand what it does to our attitude to work - it guides us towards conscientious hard work, often using competition as a bait, and away from ice skating.
Sometimes it happens that school work becomes its own project. Whenever I had to write an essay, it became my own project - except for English lessons, oddly enough, because the things that I have to write in English lessons are so fictitious. And when I went to college and started taking computer science classes, the programs I had to write became my own projects. When I was writing or programming, I used to “skate,” and it has remained that way ever since.
So where exactly is the edge of your own projects? This is an interesting question, partly because the answer is very difficult, and partly because there is so much at stake. It turns out that work can be your own in two senses: 1) that you do it voluntarily, and not just because someone told you, and 2) that you do it yourself.
The border between the first and the second is quite sharp. People who care about their work are usually very sensitive to the difference between how they are pulled and how they are nudged, and the work usually falls into one category or another. But the test isn't just about whether you're told to do something. You can choose to do what you are told to do. Moreover, you can understand this much more thoroughly than the one who told you to do it.
For example, math homework for most people is what they are told to do. But for my father, who was a mathematician, this was not the case. Most of us think of problems in a math textbook as a way to test or develop our knowledge of the material explained in each section. But for my father, the tasks were the part that mattered, and the text was just a kind of annotation. Every time he received a new book on mathematics, it was like receiving a puzzle for him: there was a new set of problems to solve, and he immediately began to solve them all.
The other sense that a project is your own - working on it alone - has a much softer boundary. He gradually turns into cooperation. And what's interesting is that it turns into collaboration in two different ways. One way to collaborate is to work together on the same project. For example, when two mathematicians are working on a proof that is formed in the course of their conversation. Another way is when several people are working on separate projects that come together like a jigsaw puzzle. For example, when one person writes the text of a book, and the other is engaged in graphic design. [3]
These two paths to cooperation, of course, can be combined. But under the right conditions, the excitement of working on your own project can last for a long time before dissolving into the rush of work in a large organization. Indeed, the history of successful organizations is partly the history of how to preserve that passion. [4]
The team that created the original Macintosh was an excellent example of this phenomenon. People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson and Susan Caret didn't just follow orders. They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets fired by Steve Jobs. There was a lot of collaboration between them, but they all seemed to individually experience the excitement of working on their own project.
In Andy Herzfield's book on Macintosh, he describes an incident where they returned to the office after dinner and worked late into the night. People who have never experienced the thrill of working on a project are surprised and cannot understand the difference between overtime work and work, for example, in galleys. But this comparison is far from the truth. That is why it is a mistake to raise the idea of “work / life balance” into a dogma category. In fact, the very juxtaposition of work and life is wrong. It implies that life and work are opposite. There are people for whom the word “work” means the monotonous exhausting performance of duty. But for outfield players, the relationship between work and life is more symbiotic than confrontational. I would not work on anything that I would not like to bring into my life.
Of course, it's easier to achieve this level of motivation when you're doing something like the Macintosh. It's easy to feel like a project is your own when you're working on something new. This is one of the reasons programmers tend to rewrite things that don't need rewriting and write their own versions of things that already exist. This sometimes worries managers, and judging by the total number of characters typed, this is rarely the best solution. But this is not always due to mere arrogance or ignorance.
Writing code from scratch is also much more rewarding - so much more rewarding that a good programmer may end up in the lead, despite the shocking waste of symbols. Indeed, one of the advantages of capitalism may be that it encourages such rewriting. A company that needs software for something cannot use software already written in another company for that, and so it has to write its own, which is often better. [five]
The natural fit between ice skating and solving new problems is one of the reasons the return on startups is so high. Not only are the market price of unresolved issues higher, you also get a productivity discount when you work on them. In fact, you get a double increase in productivity: when you do a clean design, it is easier to recruit skaters and they spend all their time skating.
Steve Jobs knew a thing or two about ice skating by watching Steve Wozniak. If you can find the right people, you only need to tell them what to do at the highest level. They'll figure out the details. Indeed, they insist on this. For a project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient autonomy. You cannot be commissioned or hampered by bureaucracy.
The guaranteed way to get autonomy is to have no boss at all. This can be done in two ways: to become the boss yourself, or to work on side projects outside of work, where no one will control you. Although startups and open source projects are diametrically opposed from a financial point of view, they have a lot in common: for example, they are often run by skaters. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin, and the best way to explore startup ideas for yourself is to work on a project just for fun.
If your projects are one of those that bring money, then it's easy to work on them. It is more difficult if they do not bring it. And the hardest part is usually the attitude. This is something that is much more difficult for adults than for children. Children simply dive in and build their huts, not caring about what they spend their time on and not comparing their huts to others. And honestly, we can learn a lot from the kids here. The high standards of most adults for "real" work may not always translate into good work.
The most important phase in your own project is the beginning: when you go from thinking “it would be cool to do X” to really start doing X. And at this stage, setting high standards is not only useless, but also harmful. There are a number of people who start too many new projects. But, I suspect, there are many more people who are stopped by fear of failure from launching projects that could be successful if they were brought to life.
But if we, as children, could not benefit from the knowledge that our tree house was only a stage on the path to "adult" projects, then at least we can understand now, as adults, that our projects are on the same path, rooted to the treehouse. Remember that frivolous confidence in new beginnings when you were a kid? It would be great to bring back this incredibly useful ability.
If adults find it harder to maintain this confidence, then at least we tend to be more mindful of what we are doing. Children jump from one activity to another, or they are forced to do some work with others. They hardly realize what is happening to them. While we know more about different types of activities and control the one we do. Ideally, we can benefit most from both options: be mindful of the choice to work on our own projects and be reckless but confident about starting new ones.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for proofreading the drafts.
Thanks to everyone who took part in the collective translation !
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