| HN Mirror

Reading and keeping up with the news is kinda odd. 99% of what you read is absolutely useless. It will never make a difference in what you do, and you'll probably never use it. However, that remaining 1% can save you *huge* amounts of time or open up massive opportunities.

Just a couple examples where procrastination has changed my life.

When I was 16, my family went shopping at the Tanger 2 supermall in Riverhead NY. I hate shopping. So, I did what I normally do: I found a bookstore, grabbed an interesting book, curled up on the floor, and read half of it by the time my parents got back. On that particular occasion, the book was "Learn Java 1.0.2 in 7 days" or some other tripe like that, the year was 1997, and the Java wave was just taking off. One book led to a second and third, and then a whole shelf full, and eventually an internship at MITRE corporation.

While on the job, I was asked to learn Perl. A couple years later, immediately after high school graduation, my math teacher's wife was starting a company and had an immediate need for some Perl programming. In the year I spent at that company, I got to experience a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers, 3 different business plans, all the tribulations of a startup, and eventually an ugly VC takeover.

While slacking off at that company because I had no work to do, I found Fanfiction.net and the Harry Potter fandom. I read a whole bunch of fics, then my workload picked up again and I promply forgot about it. I went back to it during college, and ended up joining FictionAlley.org, which was just starting at the time. Over the 4 years that I volunteered for FA, I saw it grow from 2,000 registered users to 100,000 registered users, from one machine to three, had my first experience managing teams of software developers and got to take my first major project from conception to completion.

Separate thread - at an internship after my freshman year, I was goofing off at work and reading Ward's Wiki. I ended up getting pretty involved in housekeeping there after the internship ended, and struck up a few friendships. One of them led *directly* to the startup I'm currently employed at, via a couple of internships.

Now that I'm co-founding a startup of my own, I'm finding that all the different internships and threads and so on pull together. I know what to expect in terms of growing a community. I've had experience with 2-3 different technology stacks (and found they all suck ;-), but at least that led me to one I'm reasonably happy with). I know all about scaling concerns and breaking an app out over multiple boxes. I've got some experience in judging whether a business model will fly or not. (I think our business model sucks, BTW, and really doubt it'll get us off the ground, but we've gotta start somewhere.)

All of this came, in some way or another, from procrastination.

Incidentally, running a startup seems much the same way. The vast majority of stuff you do is worthless, but the 1% that pays off really pays off big. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing what that 1% is until you try it. People talk about how Bill Gates got lucky with the IBM deal - the thing is, Microsoft had a zillion balls in the air at the time, and if they hadn't gotten lucky with IBM they might very well have gotten lucky elsewhere.