# notes --- - [[{5.1c} projects are play]] - [[{5.2e} the tyranny of real work]] - work / life balance might be better seen as work-life balance for project-based creatives - [[i wouldn't want to work on anything that i didn't want to take over my life]] # summary --- project-based work over which you have sufficient autonomy and ownership are vital for innovation, personal satisfaction, and balance in work / life / creativity. # highlights --- >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. >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. >to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right >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". >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. >People who care a lot about their work are usually very sensitive to the difference between pulling, and being pushed >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. >The other way is when multiple people work on separate projects of their own that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. >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 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.** >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. >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. >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 >[hobby] just meant an obsession in a fairly general sense (even a political opinion, for example) that one metaphorically rode as a child rides a hobby-horse