June 2021A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old sontold me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story hewas working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard himsay — not just because he was excited about his story, but becausehe'd discovered this way of working. Working on a project of yourown 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 wereskating 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 beexcited, or engaged. You're happy when things are going well, butoften they aren't. When I'm writing an essay, most of the time I'mworried and puzzled: worried that the essay will turn out badly,and puzzled because I'm groping for some idea that I can't seeclearly enough. Will I be able to pin it down with words? In theend I usually can, if I take long enough, but I'm never sure; thefirst few attempts often fail.You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don'tlast long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why doit 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 itsnatural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not alwayshappy, maybe, but awake and alive.Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of theirown. The hard part is making this converge with the work you do asan adult. And our customs make it harder. We treat "playing" and"hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clearto a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long)route from that to architecture or engineering. And instead ofpointing out the route, we conceal it, by implicitly treating thestuff kids do as different from real work.[1]Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the pathto the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes throughschool. And unfortunately schoolwork tends to be very different fromworking on projects of one's own. It's usually neither a project,nor one's own. So as school gets more serious, working on projectsof one's own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin threadoff to the side.It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning theirbacks on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learningabout Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that madeDarwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to buildingtreehouses 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 pickthe projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but becauseI've been on the other end and I know which has more predictivevalue. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't careabout applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of theirown, I wanted to hear all about those.[2]It may be inevitable that school is the way it is. I'm not sayingwe have to redesign it (though I'm not saying we don't), just thatwe should understand what it does to our attitudes to work — thatit steers us toward the dutiful plodding kind of work, often usingcompetition as bait, and away from skating.There are occasionally times when schoolwork becomes a project ofone's own. Whenever I had to write a paper, that would become aproject of my own — except in English classes, ironically, becausethe things one has to write in English classes are so bogus. Andwhen I got to college and started taking CS classes, the programsI had to write became projects of my own. Whenever I was writingor programming, I was usually skating, and that has been true eversince.So where exactly is the edge of projects of one's own? That's aninteresting question, partly because the answer is so complicated,and partly because there's so much at stake. There turn out to betwo senses in which work can be one's own: 1) that you're doing itvoluntarily, rather than merely because someone told you to, and2) that you're doing it by yourself.The edge of the former is quite sharp. People who care a lot abouttheir work are usually very sensitive to the difference betweenpulling, and being pushed, and work tends to fall into one categoryor the other. But the test isn't simply whether you're told to dosomething. 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 todo it.For example, math homework is for most people something they'retold 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 testor develop our knowledge of the material explained in each section.But to my father the problems were the part that mattered, and thetext was merely a sort of annotation. Whenever he got a new mathbook it was to him like being given a puzzle: here was a new setof problems to solve, and he'd immediately set about solving allof them.The other sense of a project being one's own — working on it byoneself — has a much softer edge. It shades gradually intocollaboration. And interestingly, it shades into collaboration intwo different ways. One way to collaborate is to share a singleproject. For example, when two mathematicians collaborate on a proofthat takes shape in the course of a conversation between them. Theother way is when multiple people work on separate projects of theirown that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. For example, when oneperson writes the text of a book and another does the graphic design.[3]These two paths into collaboration can of course be combined. Butunder the right conditions, the excitement of working on a projectof one's own can be preserved for quite a while before disintegratinginto the turbulent flow of work in a large organization. Indeed,the history of successful organizations is partly the history oftechniques for preserving that excitement.[4]The team that made the original Macintosh were a great example ofthis phenomenon. People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld andBill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. Theywere not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose bySteve Jobs. There was a lot of collaboration between them, butthey all seem to have individually felt the excitement ofworking on a project of one's own.In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how they'dcome back into the office after dinner and work late into the night.People who've never experienced the thrill of working on a projectthey're excited about can't distinguish this kind of working longhours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms,but they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. That's why it's amistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance." Indeed, themere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work andlife are distinct. For those to whom the word "work" automaticallyimplies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters,the relationship between work and life would be better representedby a dash than a slash. I wouldn't want to work on anything that I didn'twant to take over my life.Of course, it's easier to achieve this level of motivation whenyou're making something like the Macintosh. It's easy for somethingnew to feel like a project of your own. That's one of the reasonsfor the tendency programmers have to rewrite things that don't needrewriting, and to write their own versions of things that alreadyexist. This sometimes alarms managers, and measured by total numberof characters typed, it's rarely the optimal solution. But it's notalways driven simply by arrogance or cluelessness.Writing code from scratch is also much more rewarding — so muchmore rewarding that a good programmer can end up net ahead, despitethe shocking waste of characters. Indeed, it may be one of theadvantages of capitalism that it encourages such rewriting. A companythat needs software to do something can't use the software alreadywritten to do it at another company, and thus has to write theirown, which often turns out better.[5]The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems isone of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high. Not onlyis the market price of unsolved problems higher, you also get adiscount on productivity when you work on them. In fact, you get adouble increase in productivity: when you're doing a clean-sheetdesign, it's easier to recruit skaters, and they get to spend alltheir time skating.Steve Jobs knew a thing or two about skaters from having watchedSteve Wozniak. If you can find the right people, you only have totell them what to do at the highest level. They'll handle thedetails. Indeed, they insist on it. For a project to feel like yourown, you must have sufficient autonomy. You can't be working toorder, or slowed down by bureaucracy.One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There aretwo ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projectsoutside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scalefinancially, 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 ofthe best ways to discover startup ideas is to work on a projectjust for fun.If your projects are the kind that make money, it's easy to workon 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 justplunge in and build their treehouse without worrying about whetherthey're wasting their time, or how it compares to other treehouses.And frankly we could learn a lot from kids here. The high standardsmost grownups have for "real" work do not always serve us well.The most important phase in a project of one's own is at thebeginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x toactually doing x. And at that point high standards are not merelyuseless but positively harmful. There are a few people who starttoo many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterredby fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeededif they had.But if we couldn't benefit as kids from the knowledge that ourtreehouses were on the path to grownup projects, we can at leastbenefit as grownups from knowing that our projects are on a paththat stretches back to treehouses. Remember that careless confidenceyou had as a kid when starting something new? That would be apowerful thing to recapture.If it's harder as adults to retain that kind of confidence, we atleast tend to be more aware of what we're doing. Kids bounce, orare herded, from one kind of work to the next, barely realizingwhat's happening to them. Whereas we know more about different typesof work and have more control over which we do. Ideally we can havethe best of both worlds: to be deliberate in choosing to work onprojects of our own, and carelessly confident in starting new ones.Notes[1]"Hobby" is a curious word. Now it means work that isn't realwork — work that one is not to be judged by — but originally it justmeant an obsession in a fairly general sense (even a politicalopinion, for example) that one metaphorically rode as a child ridesa hobby-horse. It's hard to say if its recent, narrower meaning isa change for the better or the worse. For sure there are lots offalse positives — lots of projects that end up being important butare dismissed initially as mere hobbies. But on the other hand, theconcept provides valuable cover for projects in the early, uglyduckling phase.[2]Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the lastwar. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to successwas to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder.But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. Howawful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, andthereby gave their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcingthem to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren'tharmed much by parental interference, but working on one's ownprojects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damagedvery easily.[3]The complicated, gradual edge between working on one's ownprojects and collaborating with others is one reason there is somuch disagreement about the idea of the "lone genius." In practicepeople collaborate (or not) in all kinds of different ways, but theidea of the lone genius is definitely not a myth. There's a coreof truth to it that goes with a certain way of working.[4]Collaboration is powerful too. The optimal organization wouldcombine collaboration and ownership in such a way as to do the leastdamage to each. Interestingly, companies and university departmentsapproach this ideal from opposite directions: companies insist oncollaboration, and occasionally also manage both to recruit skatersand allow them to skate, and university departments insist on theability to do independent research (which is by custom treated asskating, whether it is or not), and the people they hire collaborateas much as they choose.[5]If a company could design its software in such a way that thebest newly arrived programmers always got a clean sheet, it couldhave a kind of eternal youth. That might not be impossible. If youhad a software backbone defining a game with sufficiently clearrules, individual programmers could write their own players.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld, JessicaLivingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.
