One thing that surprised me when I switched plans from "earn lots of $ and donate" to "build important things," is how much more productive I became.
I thought if I was earning the $ by doing intellectually interesting work I'd stay motivated. Turned out that wasn't true!
I thought if I was earning the $ by doing intellectually interesting work I'd stay motivated. Turned out that wasn't true!
Actually, it was even worse—I *thought* I was motivated while I was doing plan A, and only when I switched did I even realize *how motivated it was possible to be.*
Several friends had this experience as well. Makes me wonder how many people are stuck in that state.
Several friends had this experience as well. Makes me wonder how many people are stuck in that state.
(For example, I never thought I'd be pumped enough about work to live for 1+ yr in a country where I didn't speak the language! Or to have the stamina to spend 20+hr/wk on the phone with an accounting firm. Or etc.)
I went into this a bit in my interview with Alexey: 
To be clear, the motivation wasn't about working longer hours. It was about being *laser focused* on figuring out how to do things that would move the needle for users, because I didn't have competing motivations.
When earning-to-give, it was a lot easier for me to get distracted by things that were more interesting/fun, but ultimately unimportant. Like doing a bunch of fancy machine learning when our real bottleneck was sales.
By contrast, when I started working on something where I was really aligned with the end goal, it became interesting/fun to spend ~all my brain cycles optimizing for that end goal. And that made me way more effective.
The scary part, of course, is that I lucked into realizing this—if Wave hadn't recruited my then-partner at the right time I might never have joined + thus never learned what it was like to be actually excited about what I was working on.
Is there anything I should have done differently? My guesses:
• Pay more attention to what you get obsessed by
• Try hard to stay close to the end product (talking to / being a user)
• Have a higher bar for what you consider to be an awesome job
• Pay more attention to what you get obsessed by
• Try hard to stay close to the end product (talking to / being a user)
• Have a higher bar for what you consider to be an awesome job
Strongly agree with Divia’s point here. 16y of school was a major reason I had no idea what being actually motivated felt like. (No offense to the many teachers who gave it their best shot—it’s just a terrible structure.)
https://twitter.com/diviacaroline/status/1374804254066569216
Oh, and I feel dumb for not dropping this here earlier but: come build important things with me!
https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1369836790539034627
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