• Enough optimistic naivete to interpret catastrophic failures as steps along a continuous path, but the sensitivity to recognize the real gotchas (like your own change of heart) when they subtly appear • Enough arrogance to ignore the warnings and skepticism of people with far more experience, but the wisdom to shut up and listen quietly to the advice of practitioners in a completely unrelated field People who behave this way are often described as having attitude problems, difficulty working well with others, and a tendency to jump around and not finish assignments. These are not the things managers look for in employees. What I’m trying to tell you here is that if you are one of these troublesome folks, you need to shape your environment to support your passions: nothing is more important than removing the barriers that our culture erects around creative madmen, and few companies are willing to customize a job description to allow your brain to go berserk in its own juices. In severe cases, you might even need to jump ship and accept the insecurities that accompany working alone. (On the other hand, if you are in management and are trying to pull off the impossible, then you need to recognize and encourage the hackers in your midst, giving them the freedom to be profoundly annoying and unpredictable.) All this is simply a contextual backdrop for the real point here, which is that massively audacious feats of creativity fall out of a way of thinking that is much more a lifestyle than a toolset. I find myself smirking at books about management and team-building, when virtually every world-changing cusp in the fabric of technology can be at least partly attributed to the obsessive-compulsive behavior of some intense character who broke the rules, dropped out of school, irritated colleagues, jumped between careers, got in trouble, or, as the schoolbooks used to say about the inventors I tended to identify with, “died alone in poverty, an embittered man.” It seems we keep returning to this theme: a lifestyle of dedication to a mad dream, with everything else shoved aside as necessary to make room for equipment, learning curves, relationships with gurus and assistants, testing phases, and the endless quest for support. It’s not necessarily profitable, nor is it particularly fun (in the amusing sense), but there is something blissful about having a raison d’etre, a central passion, an unwavering navigational objective that allows every instant of your life to be tagged unambiguously with Distance To Go, Cross-Track Error, Estimated Time of Arrival, and Speed Over Ground. Such clarity may be illusory, but it beats floundering around every day, changing direction on a whim, and questioning your purpose even while working your butt off and looking forward mostly to evenings, weekends, vacations, and retirement. It’s also no guarantee of success. But even going spectacularly down the tubes feels kind of noble when it’s part of your life’s enduring quest. Still, I keep wanting to overlay some kind of formality on this. Aren’t there a few rules we can apply that are a bit more useful than saying “just dream it,” like some incongruously successful relic of the 60s who became a crystal-sucker in the New Age fringes of Silicon Valley before stumbling into a founder’s PragPub January 2013 31