A Project of One's Own

[A Project of One's Own]

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| June 2021A 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 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.
[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 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

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