Should you keep your passion on the side?
August 11, 2008
Are you passionate about your day job? Do you eat, drink and sleep whatever it is you do? Or are you one of those people who can’t wait to get home to work on your side-project/job? Do you eat, drink and sleep your side project? I suspect you aren’t that successful at work or on your side project for that matter. I’ll tell you a secret, the most successful people are extremely passionate about their jobs.
The cost and difficulty of building the next big web application is now at the point that almost every software developer I know has a side project. What are the impact of these ’side projects’ on their careers? When I spend time with developers in San Francisco or Boulder I find that most of them are at a startup working on things they are passionate about. Very few of them have ’secret side projects’ instead opting to focus on their day job. At first I wondered if these developers were simply skilled at keeping their side projects secret, but after reviewing their blogs, tweets and flickr accounts it is obvious they are spending ALL of their time and investing ALL of their passion in their primary efforts.
Contrast that experience with my experience here in Dallas. Very few developers I meet in and around Dallas (with the exception of thos working for a few companies such as Viewzi and Firewheel) are passionate about their work. Most of them begrudgingly explain what they do for a living, but ask them about their side projects and their faces light up. It is amazing. Its almost like developers in Dallas have split personalities - a) the boring and unproductive guy who sits in a florecent-lit cube and b) the vibrant, excited, rockstar coder who is building the next Google-killer. Whenever we try to recruit developers at Big in Japan we meet lots of ‘a’-types because they are keeping the real them (i.e the ‘b’) buried deep inside. They don’t want me (as an employer) to know they are a bad employee (i.e. they could give a shit about their day job). Ironically, I want to find ‘b’s who are willing to get passionate about our projects (i.e. to make their day job at Big in Japan their passion). For example, I want to find someone who could get passionate about SimpleTicket. It is easy as pie to find a rails developer in Dallas. It is hard as hell to find one who understands that keeping their passion on the side is a mistake.
For Dallas to come out of its ’startup shell’ we need passionate people to stop playing office and start building companies. Quit living in fear, downside our lifestyles and give our passions a chance. I suspect if you do, you will have all of the ‘lifestyle’ stuff you want and eventually you will figure out that your Porsche won’t make you happy. Your family and your vocation can make you happy. Building cool stuff that other people love is the reward. That 5,000 square foot house in Frisco and the leased BMW M5 are not assets - they are expenses - expenses that are costing you your happiness. Dump them and figure out a way to start living your passion - full time. (yes I wrote this post for you)
