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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#41

Post by rossdavidh »

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work.

My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.

The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#42

Post by bachmeier »

The essay starts out okay, but then kind of goes off the rails:

> 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.

There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both. Second, a treehouse is rarely the path to riches. Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended). Most kids do not have projects that are valuable from a career perspective.

> And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from working on projects of one's own.

Well sure, because the average kid needs to learn to write and do basic arithmetic. The author may be unaware of what most kids are like.

> 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.

That's true, but that's because teenagers would rather spend their time hanging out with other teenagers than working on a startup idea. Most high school kids in the US have time for projects but they choose to spend time on other things. And that's good, though maybe not for the VCs of the world.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#43

Post by [deleted] »

martindbp wrote: post #33

> If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Unfortunately kids in Sweden have to attend school by law, homeschooling is not allowed. By extension, you're not allowed to go on trips, or take any other time off without permission from the school. As my kid is only 3, I'm not sure how strict…

[deleted]

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#44

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

tmotwu wrote: post #21
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #10

> 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. The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing…

People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like activities provides them. Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right…

I was asking how to get kids to explore things where they might find something that sparks them to desire to spend time on "A Project of One's Own".

Competition in school or school-like activities is a fabricated incentive that doesn't have anything to do with kids doing what Paul is talking about with "A Project of One's Own". Chasing a GPA leads to a feedback loop akin to "keeping up with the Joneses" and basically the "plodding along" path in life.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

tmotwu wrote: post #21
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #10

> 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. The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing…

People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like activities provides them. Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right…

> being competitive in school-like activities provides them

To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration, instead of pitting students against each other?

I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me stop caring.

--

[0] - Particularly, games in which points are fake and only matter for brief status rewards and after-play joking.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#47

Post by andreyk »

rossdavidh wrote: post #41

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she w…

Yeah, I found this weird: "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. "

There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#48

Post by ant6n »

bachmeier wrote: post #42

The essay starts out okay, but then kind of goes off the rails: > 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. There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both. Second, a treehouse is rarely the path to riches. Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended). Most kids…

Going from plan to finish is extremely valuable no matter what the project is. I myself was always a dreamer, just planned stuff, and that tendency carried all the way into adulthood. Perhaps I should have finished more projects when I was a kid, maybe I‘d be a bit more productive and less of a dreamer today.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#49

Post by UncleMeat »

mpfundstein wrote: post #38
UncleMeat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of the rest of my time. At least with a founder th…

i think you really didn't get the message, did you? maybe read it again, carefully, and then edit your initial post

I know what PG is saying. And I'm saying that it is stupid and is (consciously or not) part of a larger culture designed to allow owners to extract ever more labor from workers without paying them more. It is so easy for him to make wild decrees about the best way to live, because he happens to hold the keys to the kingdom.

Even if I care deeply about projects and software and even entrepreneurship in my own time - that should have precisely zero bearing on my work.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#50

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacksonkmarley wrote: post #11
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free." I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing. But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as…

So do you make a living from your current company, or are you living off past income/superannuation etc.?

Basically, the latter, but I'd like to get back to making money. It just hasn't been an option.

I'm not kidding. The door was slammed on me, quite hard (I think part of it was because I live in New York. New York's ageism problem is much worse than Silicon Valley's). I'm very fortunate, in being able to work on my own. I can't imagine what it must be like for the folks that don't have that option.

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