"It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." - Bill Watterson | Hacker News Reader

"It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." - Bill Watterson

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18 pointszach7 comments

I suppose there are correlations between his life and founders. He failed as a political cartoonist right out of college, and failed for a couple of years drawing C&H...not a lot of newspapers wanted to take his work.

The most amazing thing to me, though is that he chose a stopping point. He stopped C&H at what one might call the pinnacle of his popularity because he felt he had completely explored what he wanted to explore with the medium, unlike those long running one-liner and uninspired strips like Garfield.

Software might be amendable to the same time of attitude--they only should go up to a certain point, instead of add feature after feature, ad nauseum, creating an uninspired pile of features.

It might be like how the Ilwrath just got a little bit too good and wrapped around to evil.

Even if there isn't a cut-off for adding features to software, there's probably a cut-off for where adding features is the best occupation for the founder. Either the software fails, and its moot, or it takes off, and if it takes off, there is probably a point at which it makes more sense for the founder to leave and work on a new project--one where the hard problems still have to be solved.

The first link I submitted to reddit. It garnered 27 points, at that time a huge number. Watterson is a fascinating character. He's last storied to be painting landscapes near his hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, burning them once they're completed.

It's only surprising if you've missed out on the last thirty years of research into motivation.

Rule of thumb: As books read decreases, the insightfulness of other people's blog posts increases.

Kvetching aside, the speech as a whole is a great read.

Open up a newspaper, and look at some of the strips. Rubbish. Absolute utter rubbish. And yet they all got published! Somebody looked at them and said, "Yep, that's a winner."

And here, unsurprisingly, is Watterson talking about how hard it was to get into print. Maybe--since this website is intended for businesspeople as much as creators--maybe it would be fitting if everyone remembered just how completely powerful people can fail--and not even realize it, nor be punished for it.

Well, though I share the same sentiments in general (there are a few good strips), someone out there is reading all that rubbish. Either we're not like most people, and most people like rubbish, or good content is not how strips are being evaluated to make it to print. Perhaps they're catering to something else other than good content.

I think it's the former: we're not like other people.

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