Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Side Project Ideas

Side Project Ideas

Maybe our side project ideas should be based on the fun of it.

I mean, instead of racking our minds about what we can turn into a growing business, what if we grounded our beginnings in both pleasure and leisure?

I read for fun. But that reading is the basis of most of what I do here blogging.

The first creates the second.

I don’t think I could keep going if I didn’t enjoy it, success or failure.

Instead of bending everything toward my company and clients and making money, I started doing side projects for fun. I had a few rules for them though. First, I had to consider them more than hobbies. This wasn’t just something cool I wanted to learn how to do. I had those too, but this was something I felt ran deeper for me. It had to come from that place inside of me that was still dreaming. The thing that pressed me to keep crawling forward. Second, I wasn’t allowed to put any external pressure on myself about “results.” I only worked on these projects as much as I felt like and I had no goals around them. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything per se. I just created space for these things in my life to see what would grow out of them. Or what wouldn’t grow. No matter.

-Tim Grahl, Running Down A Dream

Toil For The Love Of The Toiling

Toil For The Love Of The Toiling

I love this idea of doing our work for the love of the toiling itself.

Here is the heart of what I am talking about.

  • If you find yourself writing, just for the fun and utility of it – you might be a writer.
  • If you would paint everyday, no matter if people ever paid you for it or not – you might be a painter.
  • And if you think you would write code for free – you might be a software developer.

I think the secret might be:

If your work does not feel like work most of the time, you might be on to something.

Being the obsessive compulsive that I am, this prompted me to take a look at this Hindu scripture Pressfield was so enamored with. I found this line: “You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.” Reading this line helped me recall Willard’s teaching on separating my effort from my earning. What are the chances that three very different philosophical approaches for dealing with how to behave in this very complex world—one thousands of years old, one from the early twentieth century and one from a contemporary Christian philosopher—relied upon similar fundamental approaches to work without there being something to it? Pretty slim, I suspect. So what if I started doing the work for the work’s sake instead of doing the work to get something? What if my job wasn’t to toil for reward but to toil for the love of the toiling? This forced me to start reconsidering what my work was.

-Tim Grahl, Running Down A Dream

Sterling Terrell