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Projects without purpose
I like making things.
I mostly invest my time into making things that have purpose; work projects, side projects or freelance projects.
Each of these projects include stakeholders or milestones. Usually the project contributes to a larger, overarching goal. This means my role is to contribute my skills towards a small piece of a large puzzle that needs to fit together nicely.
I enjoy working on these projects. As I dig deeper into the problems that need to be solved or challenges to overcome I’m greeted with new opportunities, and learnings.
As I learn from these projects I graduate towards making bigger and more complex things. Overtime I’ve seen the learnings contribute towards my own career and influence my goals.
But there’s something I’ve been thinking about lately – does every thing I make have to be filled with purpose?
What would happen to a project if you stripped the purpose away? Imagine if, suddenly the purpose was taken from you. What would you do with the project?
Perhaps you’d continue on doing it, just for yourself. Is that selfish?
I was recently talking to a friend who’d been listening to the 10,000 hours podcast. He told me he’d listened to a particularly striking episode. In the episode there was a…
