Creating
18 Oct 2018
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
Why create?
There seem to be two sides to this, one is from the viewpoint of the self; Why should I selfishly care about creating? The second is from society’s viewpoint; Why does society need us to create?
For ourselves, Happiness is said to be derived from Joy, Flow and Meaning and the last two in particular are tied to productive output.
Flow is doing work that you enjoy and are good at, Meaning is doing work in service of others. Other reasons;
- Because we can ,
- Because it’s how we exercise our freedom ,
- Because it’s how we learn
- Because it’s how we learn that we can influence our experience of the world .
For society because we have things to make better, old problems to solve, new problems to solve, old solutions to destroy or replace and scope for new possibilities.
How to create?
Ask questions from different viewpoints
Challenge the norms and hierarchy
Consistently evaluate what you’re good at and what you care about
Take your time , be patient with yourself
Work with others, or just learn from them
Challenge; conventions, words without thought and most predictions
Make up your own mind
Write them down, draw them up , challenge them
In bite-size chunks, make one real
Improve it through experimentation
Continuously move it forward as quickly as you can and should ,
Commit, or don’t
Reflect
Loop.
What to create?
Whatever you can and want to. Creating is a habit, so start to make the things you want to see, do the things you want to do and fix things that bug you and never stop. The thing doesn’t need to be a company, it could be a tweet, a blog post, a podcast, a book, a talk, a NPO, a temporary project, don’t constrain your ideas to think about money making, that comes later.
“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.”— Richard Feynman
This was part of a letter that Richard Feynman wrote to a former student, you can read the entire letter at the Farnam Street Blog .
“No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. “Stuff” can be a lot of different things — open source projects outside of class, a startup, a new sales process at a company you work at — but, obviously, sitting around talking with your friends about how you guys really should build a website together does not count.”
— Sam Altman
From his blog post, ‘ Advice for ambitious 19-year-olds ’.