Saturday Morning Project

Cal Newport idea from How To Be A High School Superstar.

aka Side Project

cf Product Oriented Unschooling, Project Based Learning

Apr'2021 Venkatesh Rao thread. When you first think of a creative project, it is sort of naturally born with 10-80-10 proportions of clear/vague/mysterious task buckets on the to-do list. That’s what makes it a creative project rather than a cookbook project or a bureaucratic chore... Mysteries solved and vagueness clarified in improv mode after you’ve started tend to be way more inspired. They often simultaneously increase doability and inspiration, expanding Pareto and making you feel more powerful. But you’ll be more inefficient and wasteful getting there... there’s a kind of upfront planning you can do where doability may or may not increase, and may even slightly decrease, but motivation can radically increase. This is moving things “upstream” from obvious to mysterious. Take a clear part of the project and make it mysterious... I’ve become highly suspicious of “vision” thinking outside an active tinkering/muddling-through experimental activity. The active trial-and-error, even in highly inefficient and unsinspired (= low hit rate) early muddling-through phase, acts as a control rod to prevent meltdown.... The doer context cannot be a safe-failure pure test environment. It has to be production tinkering/muddling. It has to be at least open-play as they call it in war games. Or field trials over lab trials.