I'm beginning to think (after nearly 30 years of failing) that succeeding as a maker may involve something larger than ourselves.
I think that we have major, structural, institutional problems throughout our society and culture that prevent any individual from accomplishing much of anything over the course of a lifetime that is outside the mainstream status quo of participating in a nuclear family.
I think a possible way out of this predicament is shining a light on the smallest of things that prevent us from moving forward.
For example, any student debt at all is a major setback. So our choice is either to not go to school or to work a lot and pay it back fast. This is a false dichotomy. If you flip the problem on its head, you see that this was orchestrated by the owner class to keep people locked into the system (any increase in ignorance being an inconvenience or even politically convenient).
The layout of our cities highly encourages car ownership, another huge cost. The fossil fuel industry gets billion dollar subsidies while renewables do not. We no longer have the room in population centers to grow our own food. We don't have the disposable income to build robots to automate something like that. Even dating requires cashflow.
Everywhere we look, at every level, we are blocked. So I think something more useful than borrowing the hours and minutes of our leisure time for risky ventures might be to form a vision of how we'd like our society to be. Name each problem and attack it head on.
I don't mean to downplay the article because it has very good points about self-discipline. But I would very much like to see us all start succeeding, because if we try to do it alone, we will fail.
Much of Europe has free universities, walkable cities with good public transport, and culture and climate where a date can just be a picnic on the beach or in the woods.
Europe is not notably more full of successful makers than the US.
(As for growing food - it would take you a lot more time to grow enough to feed yourself than it would to earn enough to buy the food you need to feed yourself)
Europe does seem to create a different class of 'maker'; consider Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard, both notable for their immense contributions to open source software. Who in the US is creating on that scale and not doing it for their employer or some other payout?
That's a slightly amusing post given the gigantic open source contributions that US makers have had.
First let's get the obvious out of the way: you have to earn money somehow to live. Linus Torvalds hasn't spent the last 20 years living in a ditch. He monetized his work on Linux to his own benefit, as any sane person would do.
Prominent US examples of makers/creators in that mold: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Michael Stonebraker, Brian Behlendorf, Bill Joy, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Brendan Eich, John Resig, Ian Murdock, Richard Stallman, Brad Fitzpatrick, Keith Bostic, Paul Vixie, Jon Postel, Eric Allman, Larry Wall, Marc Ewing, Ray Tomlinson, Alan Kay, Robert Metcalfe, Douglas Engelbart, Donald Knuth, Thomas Kurtz, Larry Tesler, John McCarthy.
One would have to include the contributions by Leonard Kleinrock and Lawrence Roberts. They were critical to making the Internet happen.
Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt broke the IE monopoly with Firefox, an enormous contribution. Dave also has several other relevant contributions.
Matt Mullenweg was instrumental in the creation of WordPress (and the WordPress Foundation), which runs 1/4 to 1/3 of all sites.
John Carmack open sourced the id engines, which was a particularly abnormal thing to do at the time. Especially given their commercial value and the fact that id was in competition with countless other developers to lead the way on cutting edge 3D tech. His open technical contributions to the industry are immense, possibly larger than anybody else in gaming history.
Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. There have been few greater positive contributions in the history of the Web than Wikimedia.
These examples keep going.
Linus Torvalds also happens to have spent the last two decades living in the US and is an American citizen. Only five years after he began work on Linux, he moved to the US. Out of the ~28 year history of Linux, for 22 of those Linus has worked on it in the US.
By your own premise, the best maker you offered up, prefers being in the US and has spent the vast majority of his adult life building in the US.
Many of these people are academics, doing it as their professional work--academics do seem to have that same kind of European giving mentality. Most of the others were paid by a company to do their work.
Stallman though I will grant you. Even with his academic 'support' he is clearly giving heart and soul without any desire for compensation.
most of your examples paid for college REALLY REALLY easily. gimme an example of someone who applied for loans, then proceeded to zoom off into the heady world of open source and makership
I have noticed there is a crazy amount of open source and related stuff coming out of Europe. There really does seem to be a culture of giving freely in europe that isn't seen as much in America unless it has some kind of business justification.
I have heard that openstreetmap in Europe has flawless coverage but in America its fairly bad.
> I have heard that openstreetmap in Europe has flawless coverage but in America its fairly bad.
It's not quite that simple. OSM in Germany is very good, but Google Maps is still popular. OSM in many other European countries is pretty good, and better than Google maps, but in those places Google Maps is still very popular in general. OSM in some other European countries is rubbish.
This is an extremely valuable point that that I think most entrepreneurs don't appreciate enough.
If you think about any large project you know - say a business - they are highly networked systems. They have partnerships and vendors and customers and employees and investors and external deadlines and internal deadlines.
In other words, they become deeply embedded in a "fabric" of connections. Once you become part of the ecosystem - and people rely on you - it becomes harder to just quit.
I have always thought that if you want to build a business, build a network (and not just one of people). Integrate with as many entities as possible. Have them share a vested interested in your success; have them depend on you and vice versa. The more you dig into the system, the harder you are to get out. This prevents startups from dying.
The idea here is to create a complex adaptive system - it adapts no matter what you throw at it. These are established by creating a highly networked systems (ie. creating relationships) with other adaptive entities who are aligned with your goals. The more of these you create, the harder it will be to get rid of you (this is true even if your startup is not particularly good). Again, the goal here is to become embedded in the network.
I think that we have major, structural, institutional problems throughout our society and culture that prevent any individual from accomplishing much of anything over the course of a lifetime that is outside the mainstream status quo of participating in a nuclear family.
I think a possible way out of this predicament is shining a light on the smallest of things that prevent us from moving forward.
For example, any student debt at all is a major setback. So our choice is either to not go to school or to work a lot and pay it back fast. This is a false dichotomy. If you flip the problem on its head, you see that this was orchestrated by the owner class to keep people locked into the system (any increase in ignorance being an inconvenience or even politically convenient).
The layout of our cities highly encourages car ownership, another huge cost. The fossil fuel industry gets billion dollar subsidies while renewables do not. We no longer have the room in population centers to grow our own food. We don't have the disposable income to build robots to automate something like that. Even dating requires cashflow.
Everywhere we look, at every level, we are blocked. So I think something more useful than borrowing the hours and minutes of our leisure time for risky ventures might be to form a vision of how we'd like our society to be. Name each problem and attack it head on.
I don't mean to downplay the article because it has very good points about self-discipline. But I would very much like to see us all start succeeding, because if we try to do it alone, we will fail.