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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#111

Post by gregorymichael »

crispyambulance wrote: post #78

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign…

As a father of two kids who enjoyed this article, I clicked on the comments thinking, "I bet the top one is a criticism of PG." I don't understand how a predictable snide remark about PG's writing elevates this conversation. If the purpose of writing is to be read and to provoke thought and action, PG is a great writer.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#112

Post by jart »

Gluing together personal projects is the foundation of the UNIX operating system. It's the point of any operating system really, but UNIX does it best. Docker and the microservice paradigm have also had a meteoric rise, probably because they promise to plug together clean slate personal projects.

One management technique I've seen companies use to grant employees the freedom to pursue personal projects, without it being seen as treachery, is to have a contract that says the company owns everything your mind produces, and then define quarterly expectations. That way you can sprint for a month doing what management wants, and spend the rest of the time inventing things like voicemail for fun.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#113

Post by germinalphrase »

chubot wrote: post #109
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'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life. Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city. And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configura…

As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract.

An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#114

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacksonkmarley wrote: post #94
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That does suck. I guess there are different approaches you could take to work around it, e.g. spamming more companies or filtering out certain types of company, what kind of numbers did you put in? Do you think an early, unpleasant rejection could have discouraged you prematurely?

I did write a big whiny rant, but deleted it. I don't think it adds to the conversation.

Let's just say that I can't work in today's industry, and maintain my personal sense of Integrity.

It's not them; it's me. My choice.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#115

Post by iamwil »

“ The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems is one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high ”

In my experience, startups aren’t always run by skaters nor do they recruit skaters, but can be, by most measures, successful.

Anecdotally, these characteristics appears to be a subset of successful startups.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#116

Post by codezero »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #81
crispyambulance wrote: post #78

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign…

I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is joyful and is more akin to play than work. Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is great as well. I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.

A very suspect position coming from an investor who wants to turn your passion project into a profitable corporation that he has a large stake in.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#117

Post by tornato7 »

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…

I wish I could have more of that "ship" mentality. I have dozens of quite interesting personal projects that are stuck in the 80% complete state, because ultimately the final stages of releasing a project just aren't fun to me (bug fixing, tests, docs, build systems, code polish)

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#118

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

streetcat1 wrote: post #104
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…

Social media apps are very hard to monetize, since consumer only want free, and hence you would need traffic, which is very hard to get. Why not do B2B. The market is much more fragmented and thus you can always find a niche.

Not for monetization.

It is a free app, done by a 501(c)(3), and targets a specific demographic (recovering drug addicts). That said, it has an architecture that could, quite easily, be adapted for monetization, but that's not why we're doing it.

When I said "I'm working for free," I meant it. The people I'm working with are getting something way beyond what they expected. It would be silly to attach a dollar figure to the work. The government doesn't let you write off sweat equity.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#119

Post by ryandrake »

tmotwu wrote: post #66
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where do you find the balance between spending time maximizing your child's entry into a safe and secure future versus entertaining their passions? Not that being passionate about something and school-like activities are mutually exclusive anyway. Anyway, kids are far too young to decide what they want to do, so college is a good time and place for that already. Most students coming in to top universities come in und…

As a (relatively new) father, I think about this a lot. The way I see it, when I was my kid's age, we used to have middle-class opportunities for A students, B students, C students and D students. Maybe A students went on to good universities and did really well, B students went to college or something but still lived a solid middle class life, C students maybe could do a little community college and still eek out a living, and D students got by with hard work and some assistance. There was a reasonable shot at a middle path for everyone. But now the middle class is disappearing, and society is very quickly bifurcating into two classes: "Well off" and "Crippling poverty/prison". The bar is higher and the stakes are higher now than when I was a kid. The world is now a brutal and competitive slug-fest for those shrinking number of top slots, and if my kid doesn't get one of them, she's doomed to a really tough life. Only the top-tier of the A students gets a crack at "well off" and the rest--will be left behind. There's no middle path anymore. There is a huge tidal wave of inequality coming, and I am willing to sacrifice to ensure my kid gets on one of the few boats left. She can figure out what she's passionate about once she's safely on the boat.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#120

Post by omarhaneef »

gregorymichael wrote: post #111
crispyambulance wrote: post #78

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign…

As a father of two kids who enjoyed this article, I clicked on the comments thinking, "I bet the top one is a criticism of PG." I don't understand how a predictable snide remark about PG's writing elevates this conversation. If the purpose of writing is to be read and to provoke thought and action, PG is a great writer.

Same thought.

PG gets held to a higher standard than anything else on here. If some random smart person put up the same article, everyone would congratulate them for at least the effort.

I can't tell if PG's (cultivated) simple style makes people think the "idea" is simple.

In any case, even if people don't like something, they don't usually go out of their way to tell the author, especially when it is something as personal as PG's essays.

This is something else PG does in this essay: he pays attention to his own feelings and sensations, and draws lessons out.

Not saying you have to like that sort of thing, but at least look at it based on its own goals.

p.s. I keep adding to this response but Russell's answer doesn't really contradict PG, at least not the way I read them.

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