A Project of One's Own

June 2021

A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son
told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he
was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him
say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because
he'd discovered this way of working. 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.

What proportion of great work has been done by people who were
skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.

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.

You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't
last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do
it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way,
nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its
natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always
happy, maybe, but awake and alive.

Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of their
own. 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". It's not clear
to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long)
route from that to architecture or engineering. And instead of
pointing out the route, we conceal it, by implicitly treating the
stuff kids do as different from real work.
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