if you want something important or fun create it

This is why it is so important to figure out the big question you’re trying to answer. Putting yourself in situations that feed your mind what it’s hungry for lets you outwork everyone else without even realizing you’re working. You’re just trying to answer your question!

It is clear that the path forward for me is to seek that balance of hard, valuable, and fun in every project I start, join, back, or advise. Hard is for intellectual engagement, the search for solution by any means necessary. Valuable is the knowledge that if this, whatever this is, works, the world will never be the same. Fun is the sense of

I truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

Young people look at so many of the status games of older folks—what brand of car is parked in your garage, what neighborhood can you afford to live in, how many levels below CEO are you in your org—and then look at apps like Vine and Musical.ly, and they choose the only real viable and thus optimal path before them. Remember the second tenet:

There are also people who are para-academic researchers. While there’s a lot of great computer science and human-computer interaction research happening in academia, I’ve often been disappointed by some of the actual interfaces being produced by the ivory tower. Some of the most interesting work seems to be happening outside academia.