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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.   
  
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 to 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.   
  
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.   
  
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.   
  
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 that 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.   
  
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.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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