A Project of One's Own

“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.”

Creativity & Innovation · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Darwin's actual work resembled treehouses more than 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.”

Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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Projects over grades: better predictor of future success

“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.”

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Ownership is internal: can own what you're told to do

“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. Remember that careless confidence you had as a kid when starting something new?”

Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Project start: lower standards, higher confidence required

“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.”

Leadership & Management · Technology & Engineering

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Rockets not tennis balls: autonomous execution under direction

“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.”

Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Skating vs walking: intrinsic motivation transforms productivity

“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.”— Paul Graham

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Work-life: dash not slash for meaningful work integration

“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. 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.”

Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Natural habitat: struggle plus alignment equals aliveness