Yep. I don't feel the advice in this piece is very useful if you want to create an actual mature product. When you create for just yourself or "one specific person", surely you scratch some specific needs, but how do you ensure that your product won't be a market failure? I'm totally for creating tools to your own heart's content, but this sounds like bad advice when you actually create a for-profit product as a full-time job. A lot of parts of this article also ring really hollow and sound like the cliched "follow your own passion" talk without much substance, which is not that surprising I guess seeing that the author is a uni freshman.
I think there is tremendous value in life in thinking about how to leverage your abilities to the maximum effect to serve and make an impact on the others, even if it might imply giving up part of what you thought you personally like to do the best. (Cal Newport's idea and his dislike towards the "follow your passion" slogan is somewhat similar to this.) A simple example would be trying to build something in your favorite but esoteric programming language which pretty much nobody else uses, instead of using a boring but mature technology with a lot of community support, which practically all big companies do. Will your pet product reach millions of people? Unlikely. Will you lose some of the "personality" that you tried to cling to, if you either join a big tech company, or grow your own company rapidly using battle-tested technologies? Probably. But in the end most wisdom seems to suggest that being able to serve the others (and by definition millions of others are bound to be "faceless") will be ultimately much more fulfilling and mature than attaching too much self-importance to your own peculiar quirks and beliefs that you just can't let go of.
I think there is tremendous value in life in thinking about how to leverage your abilities to the maximum effect to serve and make an impact on the others, even if it might imply giving up part of what you thought you personally like to do the best. (Cal Newport's idea and his dislike towards the "follow your passion" slogan is somewhat similar to this.) A simple example would be trying to build something in your favorite but esoteric programming language which pretty much nobody else uses, instead of using a boring but mature technology with a lot of community support, which practically all big companies do. Will your pet product reach millions of people? Unlikely. Will you lose some of the "personality" that you tried to cling to, if you either join a big tech company, or grow your own company rapidly using battle-tested technologies? Probably. But in the end most wisdom seems to suggest that being able to serve the others (and by definition millions of others are bound to be "faceless") will be ultimately much more fulfilling and mature than attaching too much self-importance to your own peculiar quirks and beliefs that you just can't let go of.