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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The first and the third, which I would guess are identical. What we look for is an incurable tendency to build stuff. And if people have this quality, they'll presumably already have shown evidence of it by building stuff.

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I feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?

this article shows that you dont need a lot of time to build cool stuff

40 manhours is HUGE if you have a day job.

But its also quite small compared to how long you might expect it would take to make a game.

the average american watches 4 hours of tv a day. if you're average in that respect, you could churn out one of these projects every week and a half.

I'm not American, I don't watch more than 40 minutes TV per day.

Also, I can't imagine how anyone with a full-time day job (40 hours, nothing spectacular) can even manage 4 hours of free time. I don't think I have 4 hours a day.

Joshua Schachter might be a useful example. He built Delicious while working on Wall Street. One of his most useful tricks was to build something every day, however small. I suspect that keeps your brain working in much the same way that running every day keeps your metabolism high.

I can attest to this. Most of OurDoings was built on 35-minute train rides.

That is good to hear. It seems that quality (perfection?) is secondary to actually building stuff, making mistakes, improving it, learning. As said in your essay, determination is more important than intelligence. Though "an incurable tendency to build stuff" sounds less depressing.

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