To Build Something Awesome, You Need Two Things

To build something awesome, you absolutely need 1) time and 2) community.

I find people are compelled to say that passion, resources, opportunity are the essentials.  These are all important, and you or I could probably make a great case for them.  But, I’m not sure they’re absolutes.

I do know you need time.  Time is the most important thing we have.  Few things affect us as much as time.

Time doesn’t necessarily mean only “the limited quantity of time that we have.”  Time also includes “timing.”

The necessity of community is a little less obvious.  Richard Hamming hits the nail on the head:

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. –Richard Hamming, Talk at Belcore, 1986

If you’ve ever worked on a really hard problem, particularly one that’s never been solved, you’ll probably understand.  Are you on the right track?  Is it working?  Does it matter at all?    If you’re working in a bubble,  you lose sight of the answers to these questions.

-Kevin
11.10.09

(You can follow me on Twitter @KevinVogelsang)