I’ll say right away: I don’t want to write about naïve gentlemen who believe that in business you can work less and earn more. You can’t. You can work more and earn more; you can work more and earn less — but you can’t work less. You can also increase risk, but increasing risk without increasing expertise will most likely lead you to our favorite scenario: “working more for zero money.”
Now let’s talk about people who are more like me — a bit less naïve, but still painfully romantic. So what actually pulls people into business? I think it’s the belief that there you can engage not in craft, but in creativity. That’s not entirely true either: as someone who nominally owns a legal entity, I can say that a whole lot of paperwork appeared out of nowhere. And yet, business is the freedom to bear responsibility for the result of your own activity.
Any creativity lives only when it cannot help but live. That’s exactly why my favorite Elon Musk resembles not Warren Buffett — who turned business into a craft — but Byron. “I want to launch a private rocket,” he said — and went off to launch one. I’m sure he didn’t care whether he’d end up bankrupt; he wanted it to fly. He simply couldn’t not work on launching it. And since no one else wanted to deal with private spaceflight, he had to sponsor his own creativity.
People often think: “I’ll quit my job and start my own business.” That’s nonsense, because the best place to start your own business is precisely the field you want to quit. And you’ll also have to do exactly the things you hate the most — because those are the things people are already paying you for.
But you can do pet projects. During the day you’re a boring programmer writing corporate code; in the evening, you’re a fun programmer writing code for the soul. The beauty of pet projects is that they don’t have to make money. You’re allowed to build a pet project with a different target metric — for example, so your mom likes it. Or so it helps the world.
For example, within emojievery.day I decided that I would violate every product law that I personally consider wrong. That’s why some features unlock only after time spent using the product, monetization actively discourages the user from purchasing, and explanatory texts turn into full blog posts. No product made for money can afford that. But emojievery.day can — because it’s made for me, and for people like me, so that it simply feels good.
The funniest part is that in the end it might make money — if the stars align. But that would be a side effect.
And this kind of creative approach is possible with pet projects because Misha-the-creator is sponsored by Misha-the-craftsman, who runs A/B tests and, with a bored face, explains to programmers what needs to be done in the game. And that, for me, is the biggest reason not to turn pet projects into a business — even though, of course, I really want to.