Daniel Crenna

Code Soloist #13: Don’t trade on happiness

Here are two concepts that have risen, seemingly in opposition, in the last two years in product-focused business engineering, specifically for soloists of all trades:

1. Do what’s in your DNA and avoid everything else. Follow your passion.

This is most definitely the mantra in Gary Vaynerchuk’s first book “Crush It!”, and his many talks leading up to that release. The thinking is, passion sustains the motivation to relentlessly pursue building a self-central brand that eventually leads to profit, maybe. If it doesn’t, maybe you aren’t passionate enough or maybe you’re not truly listening to your DNA (which I’m taking to mean your specific skillset within a narrow band of digital media, which boils down to whether you develop content for video, audio, or written channels).

2. Do what will bring a profit. Don’t follow your passion.

Most eloquently captured by Amy Hoy’s latest product development blog “Unicorn Free”, this strategy means to circumvent the passion argument to avoid burn out and to help you navigate the many unpleasant aspects of turning something you love into a business. You start by mentally picturing a passion you have as a real business, amplifying the discomfort of the downsides until the only things left are the specific interactions in the business that you would still enjoy. You weigh your unhappiness dealing with the balance of this fictional business against its true potential of making money.

While these ideas are useful as lenses, both require you to trade on happiness. There’s money, and there’s happiness, and you have to either cling to money and accept misery, or cling to a false form of happiness that promises money, and if the money doesn’t follow, will make you miserable.

Better might be to take happiness off the table completely. If you don’t play that card, you can’t lose it to luck, timing, or poor judgement. Happiness is too important to risk simply for the chance that your financial success might produce more of it. Misery has never guaranteed success, and never will. You don’t win by sacrificing more, or being more uncomfortable than your competition.

How do you get to keep your happiness while still progressing towards some tangible result that has commercial viability? Go slower. Build what makes you happy, without thinking about the financial implications. Really. If you get lost in the possibility of profit then you’re doing the wrong project.

A big part of this is doing the work you need to, to understand that somewhere along the line you decided to use money as a proxy for your happiness, and placed all of it on the other side of having a lot of money.

Happiness doesn’t guarantee success any more than misery does, but at least you can fail with your happiness intact. And like any delicious paradox, truly inspired creation sticks out on the shelf.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.