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I have always done it, and will continue to do it. It's absolutely essential for my mental sanity and growth as a person. After I finish a project, I take 1-2-3 years off. During this time, I start working on personal stuff driven by personal needs and interests, and I explore stuff I wouldn't be able to otherwise. Eventually one of these projects turns into something more concrete that's useful to someone else, who then hires me for 1-2-3 years to bring it to production. And the cycle repeats. I do think things through pretty thoroughly. Even though everything I do is driven by personal needs and interests, I always have a plan about how it could potentially serve someone else, and I always have someone concrete in mind for whom it could be useful. Although I almost never get involved with my original target, and even though what I do turns out to be useful in ways I didn't originally envision, this planning is absolutely critical. As Eisenhower said plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Even though my projects span many layers of technology and abstraction, from firmware, to programming languages and up to pure math, I always have a very clear path in my mind about how they relate in some fundamental way. The lessons I learned in my previous project are always essential for my next one. My time is very important for me, and I couldn't envision a life spent for someone else. This way not only I can achieve approximativelly 50% personal time, but by construction, when I work for someone else, I am completely interested and totally dedicated. Everybody wins. Btw, when I say project, I don't mean a product, I mean a project in a very abstract sense, which can either be a product (rarely), a technology (more often), or becoming some expert in some niche. |