Staying Motivated on Independent Projects

Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash

Out running errands the other day, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said “My working on a theory of everything shirt.” I struck up a conversation. He was a software engineer, like me. He was working on a physics theory of everything and said if it succeeded, I’d definitely hear about it.

When choosing a side project it’s natural to choose the most exciting topic. I mean, who wouldn’t want to revolutionize physics and be mentioned alongside Einstein? The problem is, lots of other smart, knowledgeable people have tried and failed, so the odds of you succeeding are small. You’ll learn a lot, but if you really were motivated by your dreams of success, then hitting endless roadblocks will be discouraging and learning from them will be cold comfort.

My way around this is to not attempt the grand vision in a single project, but rather, work on a stepping stone toward the grand vision. There’s often something the field is overlooking, some shared assumption or simplification that’s holding it back. If you relax that, can you solve some immediate problem that’s vexing the field? If so, you’ll attract people’s interest, and perhaps can parlay that into a dialog about the grand vision.

For example, SpaceX has a grand vision of starting a human colony on Mars. But they started by launching satellites more cheaply than competitors. Although difficult, it was relatively straightforward as the competitors weren’t too focused on minimizing costs, but rather on lobbying governments and being reliable. Launching satellites 30% cheaper is a stepping stone towards a Mars colony, and also something valuable in its own right.

The start of a project is often an exciting time. Ideas are coming quickly, there’s no legacy code in need of refactoring. The sky’s the limit. At the other end, the completion of a project is also satisfying, when you actually solve a problem and can show it to people. It’s the middle that can seem like a long slog. This is especially true if there’s no deadline and nobody is waiting for the result.

Staying motivated in the middle is definitely a challenge. Having a concrete goal, where the steps are clear and you know why it’s likely to succeed, can really help. So can working iteratively.  Get something basic working quickly, then improve it a little at a time.  Back when we were teenagers we got interested in these topics by playing around with them, perhaps dreaming big, but working on small things.  Richard Feynman talks about being in high school and playing, inventing problems then seeing if he could solve them, just for entertainment.  Later in life, when he felt burnt out, he returned to playing.  But of course, at this point his thoughts would naturally turn to the bigger questions, the sort he did for his Ph.D.  He found it effortless to play with those things.  And the work that got him his Nobel prize came from that play.

A grand vision is what motivates many scientists.  Johannes Kepler believed he could understand God’s plan for the heavens through geometry, specifically the 5 platonic solids.  He developed his laws of planetary motion, the ones that later lead to Newton’s Laws, as a stepping stone to his grand vision.  The stepping stones helped establish observation as the arbiter of truth, a key plank in the Enlightenment.  His grand vision, on the other hand, is a footnote to history.

The ancient Greeks believed that all phenomena in the universe could be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios.  For example, one was related to the intellect and being, the two to thought, etc.  This is why it totally shook their world when they proved that was irrational.  This belief is also why they spent so much effort understanding numbers and their relationships.  We’re grateful today for their insights such as the Pythagorean theorem, but have dumped the mystical aspects which motivated them.

So, it’s great to want to discover a theory of everything, create general artificial intelligence, or create the next trillion dollar company.  This has motivated many people throughout history.  But rather than trying the entire thing in one go, pick a core insight, then use that to take a step or two in that direction.  That can not only shorten the “middle slog,” but give you intermediate results to share and create interest.  And in the end, if you never achieve the grand vision, the steps can be very valuable contributions in their own right.