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.
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.
If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I’d pick the projects. And not because I’m an indulgent parent, but because I’ve been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value.
That’s why it’s a mistake to insist dogmatically on “work/life balance.” Indeed, the mere expression “work/life” embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word “work” automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash. I wouldn’t want to work on anything that I didn’t want to take over my life.
It’s easy for something new to feel like a project of your own. That’s one of the reasons for the tendency programmers have to rewrite things that don’t need rewriting, and to write their own versions of things that already exist.
Writing code from scratch is also much more rewarding.
The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems is one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high. Not only is the market price of unsolved problems higher, you also get a discount on productivity when you work on them.
If your projects are the kind that make money, it’s easy to work on them. It’s harder when they’re not. And the hardest part, usually, is morale.
That’s where adults have it harder than kids. Kids just plunge in and build their treehouse without worrying about whether they’re wasting their time, or how it compares to other treehouses.