“Work” being used in the sense of energy spent on doing important (to myself) tasks:
Stage 1: Do unpaid work for yourself
Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others
Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <— I am currently here
Stage 4: We’ll see
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015469196300337153?s=21
And Visa follows up the next day with:
Btw, just to circle back: for a lot of people, Step 1 is “go to school”, and not only is it unpaid, YOU actually pay to do it, and the work that you get out of it often isn’t actually all that useful or interesting 🤔
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015509304571383809?s=21
I am looking at these thoughts through the eyes of someone who has followed a different (i.e., traditional) path and is currently doing Stage 1 as a method to getting to Stage 3 as a method to break free of the constraints of that path.
I am spending an unreasonable amount of effort on one thing tangentially related to my business, because it is fun and awesome to me.
It is a writing project—an Explanation. The reason it takes so long to write it? Draft 1 is “this is so utterly simple.” First revision efforts make me realize “oh wait a minute, actually things are more complex than I thought.” Draft 2 metastasizes into incoherency. In my despair, while trying to beat clarity into the mess, the answer suddenly becomes simple and clear in Draft 3.
My draft manuscript travels the dimwit / midwit / topwit normal distribution. 😀 So does my brain. Who knew there were three of us in here?
I am going to stick with the writing. The task in life is to transcend one’s inner midwit.
The project is doing something for me. It will never make money on its own to replace the opportunity cost time spent. But it may open a portal for me.