Will I do this if I get nothing in return?
Text
Will I do this if I get nothing in return? — My only criteria for deciding if I will work on something.
My criteria for doing anything used to be:
Will I do this if I die tomorrow?
— something I learned from Steve Jobs, from his 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford. (Note 1)
But as I grow older, I realized that that time really is very limited, and so I care more about whether something is truly worthwhile for me to spend my most valuable resource on.
In 2012, I wrote about how money is not an important factor for me:
Work should be play and play alone. Do what you love — that's the only thing which matters.
When you do what you love, you will have passion. When you have the passion to do your job, you will be good at it. When you are good at your job, people will love you for it and usually happy to pay lots of money for it.
Don’t ever work for money. Money always follows when you do what you love. Money should be the result, not the reason.
Work - 2022-12-04
Identifying what drives me, and what makes me happy, is what I’ve ultimately decided is what is most important to me.
It took me a long time to find that — and for me, I’ve identified that I simply want to be helpful.
The tricky aspect about this is that I learned early on in my career that most people see my offer to help as an insult — an insult to their abilities to solve a problem themselves.
I’ve learned the hard lesson to never offer help unless someone asked for it.
But I’ve found a better way now. In 2017, I started a personal project to help myself play a game better. It was never intended to become anything, but out of nowhere, people also found it to be helpful — as evidenced by the one million monthly active users that we have.
I didn’t work on it for money — in many ways, this site is possibly the worst way to generate money, given the fan content policy from Supercell strictly prohibits revenue other than from ad revenue. (Note 2)
But the positive feedback from players makes me happy — it allowed me to be helpful — which is my drive.
So come 2024, my only criteria to do anything at all is to ask myself a simple question:
Will I do this if I get nothing out of it?
i.e. Will I spend the most valuable resource of my life — my time — to work on something that doesn’t generate fame, fortune, influence — things that many people do tend to chase, but which are unimportant to me?
It’s the best test to know if it’s ultimately worth my time.
There are usually some costs associated to the things that I do, so I will try to find revenue sources regardless, but the most important factor is to decide if I should even spend time on them — and hence, this question is the most important.
Notes
Steve Jobs 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says. This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
Supercell Fan Content Policy
When Supercell invited me to Helsinki to give feedback about some games in development in June 2023, I raised the issue of server costs with them, and how it’s at odds with the original Fan Content Policy, which disallowed creators to generate revenue besides ads. After I raised this issue with them, they have changed the policy in November 2023 and allows top-tier content creators who operate websites to offer premium services.
I raised this issue mainly because while most of the content creators create content on YouTube, which is a platform that allows anyone to upload and stream videos for free, we as website operators have very real server costs — costs that exist regardless if there are users. Display ads do not generate a lot of revenue.
The CPM for video ads — which can be served on YouTube but not for a website — is often in the order of 40x to 100x of a banner ad. So there’s a very real financial burden to do what I do. I could easily support 1-2 kids and probably send them to private schools for the amount of money I’ve spent purely on the servers. I don’t take any salary for this project, so every penny I get from display ads were spent on the servers.
That I don’t ever want kids (because I don’t have time), and also there’s no external pressure for me to ever have kids — highly unusual for Chinese people, due to my rather unusual circumstances — contribute to the many reasons why I would even allow this website to run for so long, for it defies business sense in every way.