

Optimize for Happiness (Followup to my Startup School talk) - mojombo
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html

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aaroniba
I love GitHub but this post doesn't provide much coherent advice.

"Optimizing for happiness" seems like a hard idea to argue against. The author
defines happiness as:

 _"I'm a hacker; I'm happy when I'm building things of value, not when I'm
writing a business plan filled with make believe numbers."_

That's a pretty narrow definition. The rest of the article implies that what
the author really means by happiness is freedom and lack of stress. He writes:

 _"When there are fewer potentially catastrophic events on the horizon, you'll
find yourself smiling a lot more often."_

That's actually an argument against doing a startup at all. Startups are
extremely stressful and freedom-limiting endeavors. Servers crash in the
middle of the night. Smart people launch competitive products that try to kill
yours. Users get pissed at you for removing their favorite feature. In my
experience there are always catastrophic events on the horizon in a startup.

Personally, I try to optimize for things like excitement, challenge, personal
development, impact, and fun. Raising a VC round may or may not contribute to
these, depending on a lot of things.

~~~
patio11
Are startups necessarily stressful or freedom limiting? Somebody recently
emailed me and invited me to speak in Europe. I started saying "Thanks but..."
before I realized "Wait, if I wanted to, I could totally go. I have the money,
and a week or two delay of launch won't kill anyone."

As for stress, I think my most stressful moment in six months was an
unexpected outage. I recovered in ten minutes. Other than that, laundry causes
me more stress.

~~~
aaroniba
_Are startups necessarily stressful or freedom limiting?_

That's an interesting question.

In my model of human psychology, when a person is passionately driven to
achieve an ambitious goal, he gets stressed out about obstacles that stand in
the way. Does passion necessarily cause stress? I think so, but if you know a
way to have passion without stress, please let me know.

As for being freedom-limiting, startups take a lot of time, and you generally
have cofounders, investors, employees, and (hopefully) users relying on you.
These external factors are big responsibilities. Does responsibility
necessarily limit freedom? I think so, but I would be interested in
counterexamples.

Thus, if you want to avoid stress and limits on freedom, you would have to
avoid passion and responsibility. I suppose you could start something not very
ambitious, that you aren't very passionate about, avoiding cofounders,
investors, employees, and users. I would have a hard time calling such an
endeavor a "startup".

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iowahansen
What's cause and what's effect?

Is GitHub a great product because the founders optimized for happiness or
where they only able to optimize for happiness because they had a home-run
product on their hands?

