Wow. I have to say: if you opened the page and then left immediately due to all the spammy looking stuff up the top, GO BACK. This was a pretty good read.
It's basically about startups from the point of view of an artist but every point translates perfectly to software.
Thank you for writing that. It took 20 seconds for the ads at the top to load, and they kept pushing me away from the content. I would have bounced if I hadn't read your comment.
It's deliberately over the top. I don't know for sure how I'd react upon first seeing this, because I've known about Hugh McLeod's work for a long time, but I'd like to think that it would have made it past my filter.
It is true, but only half-true I guess. I have been bitten but this issue: With an engineering background, I loved music, and decided to try to live by music, so I became a sound engineer. I had to stop. After some time I could not listen to anything but raw classical (eg Bach). If you love music and want to continue loving it, don't make it your daily job!
I guess it is different with coding: If you like to code, maybe there is no problem in doing it also as a daily job (arguably).
I started coding when I was around 10. I wrote software every day for 12 years, enthralled and eager to try new things. I learned every language I could get my hands on. When it became a job, I lost all my passion for it. I quit coding for 10 years. Not a single line. I decided to become an automotive mechanic instead...
Today, I'm in IT and my creative outlet is board games. I not only play them, but I design them as well. Last year I licensed my first game and suddenly this dream that I have always had of being published was fulfilled. My first instinct was to embrace that success and use the boost to create more success. I had to pause. I was trying to force success again.
The difference this time was that I realized quickly that I was trying to monetize a hobby. Forget it. I'm not abandoning passionate game design for money. It's just not worth it.
I think the rub is that creative things (maybe almost everything, actually) really only grow out of intrinsic motivation. For most people, money is the exact opposite of that.
I completely agree with you. I also think that "most people" never truly understand and instead chase the almighty dollar believing it to be the measure of their success.
Money doesn't motivate me at all. It is a means of surviving without self-sustaining. I cut my pay in half to become an automotive mechanic and it was the greatest move I ever made. I was no longer working for the dollar, I was working for the joy of fixing things. Literally overnight I became poor and happy simultaneously.
That is really, really cool and inspiring. I think way more things can be fascinating and fulfilling than we think, its just a matter of thinking about them right. Shakespeare's "for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" rings truer every day to me.
Blaise Pascal: "We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others."
With a hobby, the simple act of doing it is the reward, and when money becomes the reward given to you by someone else, all of a sudden it becomes work. Hobbies are fun. Work is rewarding (and sometimes fun). But rarely do the two intersect. I think the point is if you can't find your hobby rewarding and/or you can't do it for 8+ hours a day, every day, then it shouldn't be your job.
With an engineering background, I loved music, and decided to try to live by music, so I became a sound engineer. I had to stop.
I can imagine. I designed my own book. Now every time I pick up a book I habitually look at the design before I read it. It is annoying as all get out. But at least I didn't become a font designer :-P
I got interested in photography some years ago while taking pictures for a web project. I guess I developed a degree of aptitude, and a friend asked me to photograph her wedding. She was totally kind and courteous about it, but I put so much pressure on myself to produce high-quality work that I decided I never wanted to do another wedding, and I probably didn't want to work for anyone as a photographer in any capacity.
It's just not the same delightful experience doing it for someone else as it is doing it for my own enjoyment.
I shot a wedding for a couple in the church who could not afford a professional wedding photographer. One of the most stressful experiences of my life. I promised myself I would never shoot another wedding.
(Now, as a pastor, I can tell you that I found performing a wedding ceremony to be less stressful than photographing one. Go figure.)
Unrelated, but related: I do not like classic music at all, but I love J.S. Bach, whom I accidentally found by listening to Carl Bach. Or maybe I should say I love Concerto 3 keyboard played by Glenn Gould. I have no idea why, but I can listen to this over and over and over again while still hating most classic music. I dug into it, and found I kinda enjoy most work from the Baroque era although I couldn't really tell what is and what isn't unless I look up the author.
This piece contains the immortal line "Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside." I've quoted that to my kids (and myself) many times.
These are hard topics to write about, because inspiring talk quickly slides into feel-goodness which is dangerously close to the black hole of complacency: one false move and you get sucked in. What Hugh writes doesn't do that (edit: mostly), perhaps because he's so direct about the loneliness and pain of creative work. "Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain."
There's also something about the contrast between his trivial business-card doodles and the life-and-death questions. The high and the low go together and understand each other. It's the mediocre middle that sucks.
> These are hard topics to write about, because inspiring talk quickly slides into feel-goodness
Don't you think that "Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten." Crosses that line? It's really easy to prove that wrong. Statistically, that's a bad advice. In my personal opinion, that sounds like a dishonest mean to get your readers to like you.
I don't blame him tho. I don't think he's doing any wrong. There's a difference between "scientifically correct" and "politically correct". And I understand that, unfortunately, life sometimes makes you choose the political path instead of the scientifically correct one. If a kid with mental disorder asks you "will I ever be an astronaut?", it might be dishonest to pat him in the back and tell him, of course you can, just try hard enough. But I wouldn't blame those who would.
No doubt he crosses the line - it's hard not to. I'm not sure I agree about that particular quote, though. If we all went by probability, nobody would do anything great. The soul does not live by statistics.
I am no authority, but FWIW my experience of creativity comes from a place I find hard to believe every human being doesn't have access to. As Bob Dylan sang: "In this you are not so unique". The difficulty is that we are governed almost completely by the desire to believe and do what other people say.
> If we all went by probability, nobody would do anything great.
You can be humble and productive at the same time. That's one of the goals of the Lean Startup.
Skeptically analyse the viability before doing something. That's different from avoid doing at all. You just need to be skeptical about your own knowledge and abilities, and then you can make a better decision. That's a good advice. But "believe in yourself above all else", not so much.
Funny you should bring that up. I dislike the Lean Startup ideology precisely because it is at odds with the creative process as I understand it. Did you see the interview with the Pinterest founder the other day? He said he was glad he hadn't known about it earlier because it would have convinced him to give up. Twitter may be a similar case; the founders said they kept going for a long time when people were telling them it was useless.
When you see something other people don't see, measuring their opinions is likely to tell you you're wrong. But what if you're not wrong? Emerson has a great line somewhere about the pain of having an original thought and giving it up under pressure, only to find out later that it was right.
The greatest insight I got from this (pretty awesome) book was that sometimes your friends criticize your ideas and projects, because deeply they are scared that your relationship will change if you're successful.
Hugh's been a favorite of mine too. One of the only newsletter's I've subscribed to. You might dig this blog post of mine that was up on HN awhile ago that mentioned Hugh and Jobs and the effort of going against the grain.
It's basically about startups from the point of view of an artist but every point translates perfectly to software.