Over my career I’ve built quite a lot of things that work really well. All of them had a clear purpose and timeline laid out ahead of time, and I either constrained myself or was constrained to executing on that timeline and delivering the product as promised. These were fascinating projects and I learned a lot from them, but not nearly as much as I’ve learned from the things I built on a whim. The 3AM “Hey imagine how hilarious it would be if we made this thing” cobbled-together pieces of shit I designed with my friends have been a huge source of both knowledge and enjoyment, and I think everybody should be doing that type of thing as often as possible.
Honestly, I think the greatest benefit of a project you don’t need to do well on is exactly that- it doesn’t have to be good! This allows you to try new things in ways you never otherwise would have. Sure, you hope that the end product works, but if, for example, you’re trying to make a 2.5kg cube of tungsten break the sound barrier, you probably don’t really care if it’s a perfect or even well-built assembly. Situations like that give you the free reign to try ideas that you don’t actually know will work, just to see what happens. You have no deadlines, no bosses, no investors, nothing holding you back except your budget and what you and your friends can come up with. Failing forwards in this way is exactly what’s made a lot of tech companies as successful as they are, and it’s critical to learning on a personal level too.
You absolutely should be trying this yourself, that’s the entire point I’m making here, so here’s what I believe to be the essential formula for a project like this:
Besides the fact that projects like these are an amazing way to make new friends and strengthen ties to old ones, this whole thing is about learning. You can get a lot out of professional projects, courses, labs, and all the other things that have to work. In fact, it’s really important to have a balance and do enough of that stuff too so you learn how to manage deadlines and more complex projects. However, there’s a bit of a constraing on them in the sense that, well, they have to work once you’re done with them.
In giving yourself permission to fail with a more fun, loose personal project, you’re giving yourself permission to do a whole lot you otherwise couldn’t. Want to try 3D printing that high-heat part? Why not, worst case you order a replacement off sendcutsend or similar. Been meaning to learn a new language or architecture, but haven’t had the time or didn’t want to mess something up at work? No problem, there’s nobody to get on your back about schedules here. You’re entirely open to explore all possible avenues to solve the problem, and not only does that allow you to try out new skills, it sharpens your reasoning. When you don’t constrain yourself to the set of solutions you know you can make work, you discover new solutions that are, oftentimes, better than the “safer” options, and sometimes just as functional. You’ll never know until you try, and that’s the point here.
Go crack open some beers with your friends and make something dumb. You might just learn something.