Prove or Disprove

There is a common phrase in discrete mathematics textbooks where they say "prove or disprove the following conjecture."

I think of this when I decide that I am going to work on an application. I don't know whether my ideas for apps are any good (so far, none of them have been good). But I can be motivated to work on them because I can have the following attitude: demonstrate that this app is useful, or not useful. This attitude goes a long way toward destroying nervousness about working on an app.

If you actually go through the trouble of coding up an app, you can then use it, and decide whether or not you like it. It's no longer just an idea in your head. It exists in tangible form. You can see it in Chrome. If you go that far, you cay say "at least I tried." You've discovered whether your judgement of what was useful was on point. You had no idea whether your app idea was any good. It's even a little sad because no one was going to try to test its usefulness except you. It was your idea.

So many business endeavours can be viewed this way: show that the business works, or does not work.

While this reasoning has its place in my journey through life, I do not consider it ideal. It is missing the element of curiosity. Sometimes we make apps because it is plain as day that they will be successful, if only someone makes them a reality. Here, the element of curiousity is present. We are curious to know whether it does or does not work. We are curious about how it will feel when the app takes our breath away. We want to taste the finish line, the success, of the app. Although it is a stretch to say so, I would claim that such curiosity stems from the same root motivation as leads to ambition. If you want to call the desire to make an obviously useful app real ambition, then my response is "you say tomato, I say tomahto".

There is a scene in My Neighbor Totoro where the Dad is seen working inside the house at a desk. He is writing things down on paper. His daughter is outside playing, or something. This scene has always made me jealous of the Dad. He looks peaceful, being at that house in the countryside, and yet doing paperwork. He doesn't look stressed.

To use the definition of curiosity that everyone agrees on, I would say that curiosity eliminates financial stress from product development. Steve Yegge used to say that working at Google was like being at grad school, and I think there was a lot of curiosity that motivated the employees there. Not financial need.

Working in the field of information technology, even without financial stress, is commonly filled with pain. They came up with the term "death march" many years ago because software projects felt doomed very frequently. That pain becomes a ward that discourages one from embracing the practice of writing code. It is too bad that this happens everywhere.

The pain of competing for one's lunch comes from the general problem of not knowing ourselves. To get to know yourself, you have to go on a journey of making friends, talking to them, and growing. You have to confront your fears by employing courage. If you don't do this, your won't be able to access pure curiosity whenever work calls, because your curiosity will have died. Life without light destroys what little, vulnerable machinery of curiosity we have in our hearts.

Do you believe me?

I've said this elsewhere, but when my store of courage is being used, that's when I know my curiosity is missing. Mattias Johansson used to conclude his programming YouTube videos by saying "stay curious". If only it were so easy. Curiosity is the best problem-solver. We call on courage when our curiosity is absent. And that's the hard way of doing work.