Realizing your egoistic dream

I hope this will be an entry document for anyone with ambitious, egoistic dreams. People who care about realizing a dream that currently exists only in their head. I wish it had existed for me.

By an egoistic dream I mean something you’re chasing on your own account: not because a boss assigned it, not because a class requires it, not because anyone else is waiting on the result. The only person responsible for whether it happens is you. That’s also what makes it hard.

This is for anyone with one. Founder, researcher, poet,…

Stay loyal to the dream, not the product

To those of you who are ambitious and care intensely about a product, I say: drop it. Either figure out what underlying principle or dream made you care about that product in the first place, find a dream worthy of your ambition, or, if you can find neither, climb a ladder. Build because you are trying to make some capability real or to shape the world (Inventing on Principle, 2012).

A dream should be for decades. Einstein’s “temple of science” sorts builders by motive: if an angel expelled everyone who came for comfort, status, ambition, or mere intellectual sport, only a few would remain — the ones driven by a particular vision of the world they want to see (Albert Einstein, “Principles of Research,” 1918). That is the test. Are you serving the product because it is yours, or are you serving a vision that could outlive the product?

Companies fail when they define themselves by the product they sell instead of the human need they serve (Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,” 1960).

Commit to a product and you fuse your identity with that specific instantiation. Sunk cost becomes becomes defensiveness; and defensiveness closes you off from the most valuable things at the start: discarding bad ideas, collaborating with people, and building on existing work. But commit to your dream or guiding principle, and the product becomes disposable. It is no longer your identity. It is merely the current attempt.

The product is not the dream. The product is a temporary argument about the best way on how the dream might be made real.

Do not spin

The best taxonomy of spinning is more than a century old: the “diseases of the will” (Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator, 1897). Cajal describes several forms of this disease:

  • The dilettante flits between problems.
  • The bibliophile reads endlessly.
  • The megalomaniac makes plans that outrun his output.
  • The instrument-builder tinkers forever with tooling.
  • The theorist builds frameworks divorced from data.

The names sound old; the behaviors are not. They are what ambitious people do when they want to feel serious without being forced to finish anything.

You’ll sit down to work and start doing things. Answering messages. Skimming a paper. Tweaking the design. Three hours pass and nothing real has happened. This pseudoactivity can easily become the default when no one else is watching.

The cure is artifact-based work. Your work has to produce something: a doc, a prototype, a benchmark, a writeup, a repo, a video, a demo. Not “thoughts.” Not “progress.” A thing, dated, outside your head.

A real artifact has four properties. First, it is concrete: someone else could open it, read it, run it, watch it, or react to it. Second, it is bounded — what counts as “finished” is decided before you start, not negotiated while you are working. Third, it has an exact deadline. Fourth, it is public (more on that below).

A good artifact has one additional one, being recurring. [explain]

The output is better published than good. In fact, making “good” the requirement is often another way to avoid finishing. The requirement is that the output exists in the agreed form at the agreed time.

The artifact isn’t a record of the work; it’s where the work happens. When no one is checking on you, dated artifacts are the only mechanism that catches you drifting.

The deadline is supreme! I cannot understate this. If you said Thursday at noon, then Thursday at noon you publish what exists. Not because the world cares about your arbitrary deadline, but because you must learn to care about your own word. If your deadlines become negotiable, then you cannot trust yourself anymore.

Schedule your disliked work

The second discipline is to schedule the work you dislike: the conversation you’ve been avoiding, the technical problem you keep skipping, the honest writeup of why something failed. Easy work fills your days by itself. Hard work has to be put on the calendar. The schedule is supreme! Never change it once it is in your calendar.

We squander time as if its supply were unlimited, when it is in fact the one resource we are losing every day (Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, c. 49 CE).

The world

Talk to people

The highest-leverage move early is to talk to people who already work on the problem you care about (practitioners, researchers, people one step ahead, people who tried and failed).

Ask a narrow question, or send an artifact and ask for a reaction. You will see many people will respond. People who don’t ask for help usually don’t know what their real problems are. And people who don’t know what their real problems are move slowly.

Artifacts and the world

The artifacts also help you to show that you have worked on the problem, forces you to finish to a presentable standard, builds a track record people can look at, lets the right people find you, and commits you to what you’ve shown. The clearest living example is an entire research life conducted in the open, with continuously updated working notes (Andy Matuschak, independent researcher on tools for thought).

The obvious objection is that public work invites criticism, and that your early work will be bad. Both are true. The answer is not to wait until you are safe. The credit, in Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” speech, belongs to the one with their face marred by dust and sweat and blood, not to the cynic who sneers from the stands (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910).

Your first outputs will be bad. You’ll publish things and wince when you reread them. The argument for shipping the bad version is the ceramics-class parable (David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear, 1993): one half of a class was graded on the quantity of pots produced, the other on a single perfect one. And the quantity group made better pots, because they were forced to ship, learn, and iterate.

If you start working with other people, the boundary for “public” can change. You can have more secrets. You can keep more things private. But: the work must be visible to someone whose judgment matters. If not to the public, then to your collaborators, advisors, users, or inner circle.

Further reading

All freely available online.

Appendix: Witnesses for the dated-artifact rule

A curated roster of ~30 historical voices — verified against primary sources — who argue that work must terminate in something concrete: a line drawn, a page written, a thing built, a paper shipped. Most quotes are short enough to drop into a paragraph; a few longer ones are paraphrased or trimmed. Attribution flags appear where popular short forms differ from the original.

The roster runs chronologically rather than by domain, so the reader sees the principle re-emerging across 2,700 years of unrelated traditions — Greek farmers, Roman painters, Benedictine scribes, Zen masters, Victorian novelists, Bell Labs mathematicians — converging on the same rule: the artifact is the work.

I. Ancient Greek and Roman

Hesiod (c. 700 BCE), Boeotian farmer-poet whose Works and Days is addressed to a brother who would rather argue inheritance than till the field: “Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.” (Works and Days 311, Evelyn-White / Loeb). The poem’s whole rhetorical engine is the contrast between the producer and the drone.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) builds his metaphysics around the etymology: “The word energeia [actuality] is derived from ergon [work, finished product] and points toward entelecheia [being-at-an-end].” (Metaphysics IX.8, 1050a22). To be something, in Aristotle, is to be at-work as that thing; mere potential is not yet real. This is the philosophical bedrock under every entry below.

Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE), the Roman austerity moralist, gave the canonical formula for substance over style: “Rem tene, verba sequentur” — “Grasp the matter, the words will follow.” (Preserved as a fragment of his lost Ad filium, in C. Iulius Victor’s Ars Rhetorica; Loeb LCL 552, p. 291). The thinker who has the thing produces the words; the thinker without it produces only words.

Horace (65–8 BCE) on the unfinished manuscript: “Nonumque prematur in annum” — “Let it be kept back until the ninth year, the parchment kept at home.” (Ars Poetica 388). The point is not delay but the existence of the parchment: revision presupposes an artifact, and “the word once sent forth can never come back.”

Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), recording the painter Apelles: “It was a regular custom with Apelles never to let a day of business be so fully occupied that he did not practice his art by drawing a line, which has passed from him into a proverb.” (Naturalis Historia XXXV.84). Caveat for citation: the slogan “nulla dies sine linea” in that exact form is a Renaissance coinage (Polydore Vergil, c. 1500); Pliny’s actual Latin is lineam ducendo — “by drawing a line.” The proverb is best attributed as “the maxim derived from Pliny.”

Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), writing privately on campaign: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” (Meditations X.16, Staniforth / Penguin trans.). The Meditations themselves — a private, dated journal that became the philosophy — are the first-person enactment of the rule.

II. Contemplative and religious traditions

Confucius (Analects 7.1, c. 5th c. BCE): “A transmitter and not a maker; trusting in and loving antiquity.” (述而不作; Watson trans., Columbia UP). Confucius defined his life-work as transmission — concrete teaching, recording, ritual — never as private speculation withheld from students.

Hillel (1st c. BCE), in Pirkei Avot 1:14: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Sefaria translation). The third clause is the rabbinical thunderclap against deferral: today’s artifact is the only honest answer.

Rabbi Tarfon (1st–2nd c. CE), Pirkei Avot 2:16: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” (Sefaria). The session does not need to complete the work — but it does have to advance it. Stopping with nothing on the page is forbidden.

Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547), Rule ch. 48: “Otiositas inimica est animae” — “Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brothers should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading…. When they live by the labor of their hands, then they are truly monks.” The Benedictine day is structured so that no period of vacant thought goes un-replaced by tangible labor; the codex copied today is the prayer.

Cassiodorus (c. 562 CE), Institutiones I.30, on the scribe: “It is possible to fight against the devil with pen and ink…. Every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a wound inflicted on Satan.” The manuscript is the spiritual act — undocumented devotion is wasted breath.

Dōgen (1200–1253), Shōbōgenzō, Genjōkōan: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things.” Dōgen’s doctrine of shushō-ittō — practice and realization are one — leaves no room for an enlightenment held privately in the head. The brushstroke (in hitsuzendō, Zen calligraphy, the brushstroke cannot be redone) is the realization.

Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), founder of the Shakers: “Put your hands to work and give your hearts to God” and “Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live; and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.” (Testimonies, 1816). Devotion must be embodied in a finished object made today — the Shaker chair is the theology.

III. Renaissance and early modern

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is the cautionary tale, recorded by Vasari quoting Pope Leo X: “Alas! This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning.” (Vasari, Vite, “Vita di Leonardo”). 5,000 pages of brilliant notebooks; few finished public works.

Michelangelo (1475–1564), Sonnet 151: “The best artist has no concept that a single block of marble does not contain within itself; only the hand that obeys the intellect can draw it out.” The idea is latent in the marble; only the hand carving the stone reveals it. Thought without the chisel is invisible.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Preface to the Lives (1550): “I have wished with these my rough labours… to repay to them in some measure the debt that I owe to their works… rather than, living in sloth, to be a malignant critic of the works of others.” Vasari programmatically inverts the medieval hierarchy that elevated contemplatives over artisans: the dated, made object is the unit of historical record.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands (1520–21): the diary itself is the artifact-discipline made concrete — dated daily entries listing what was given, made, received, paid. There are no “I have been thinking about” passages.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Novum Organum I.73: “Of all signs there is none more certain or more noble than that taken from fruits. For fruits and works [fructus et opera] are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies.” Bacon’s whole Instauratio Magna is a polemic against Scholastic disputation that produces only words. A theory yielding no concrete output is, by Bacon’s standard, a fraud.

IV. The Royal Society and the Enlightenment

Isaac Newton (1642–1727), General Scholium to the Principia (1713): “Hypotheses non fingo” — “I feign no hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses… have no place in experimental philosophy.” Pair with Newton’s lab-notebook practice (the Waste Book, the alchemical and optical notebooks): every claim deduced from a written, dated record.

The Royal Society (1660), motto adopted 1662: “Nullius in verba” — “Take nobody’s word for it.” Drawn from Horace, institutionalized by Hooke as the first Curator of Experiments. The motto enshrined the rule that arguments are accepted not on authority but on demonstrable, recorded experiments — the primary scientific artifact.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1738: “If you wou’d not be forgotten / As soon as you are dead and rotten, / Either write things worth reading, / Or do things worth the writing.” Pithy and exact: legacy requires either a written artifact or deeds substantial enough to generate one. Franklin himself kept a dated ledger of the thirteen virtues (Autobiography, Part 2).

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), “What Is Enlightenment?” (Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784): “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!” Kant immediately specifies that the “public use of reason” means the scholar “who speaks to his own public through his writings.” Enlightenment is not introspection — it is published argument.

Michael Faraday (1791–1867), advice to the young William Crookes, recorded by his biographer John Hall Gladstone: “The secret is comprised in three words — Work, finish, publish.” (Gladstone, Michael Faraday, 1872, p. 123). Faraday’s own laboratory diary ran to 16,041 numbered, dated entries (later published in seven volumes). The popular “Work. Finish. Publish.” is a 20th-century stylization of the Gladstone original.

V. Nineteenth-century producers

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), An Autobiography (1883), ch. XV: “It had at this time become my custom… to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.” And ch. VII: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Forty-seven novels, each session a measured, dated unit.

Karl Marx (1818–1883), Theses on Feuerbach #11 (written 1845, published by Engels 1888, inscribed on his Highgate tomb): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” The single most pithy formulation in Western philosophy of the artifact-over-thought rule: interpretation is contemplation; only practice counts.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), Lothair (1870), ch. 41: “Action may not always be happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” Coming from a working novelist who finished books while serving as Prime Minister, the line carries weight.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), letter to Nadezhda von Meck, Clarens, 5/17 March 1878: “There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), letter to Theo, The Hague, 21 July 1882: “Today I promised myself something… to treat my illness as if it didn’t exist. Enough time has been lost, work must go on. So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning until night.” ~900 paintings and ~1,100 drawings in ten years, each letter to Theo a dated production log.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), Sorbonne address, 23 April 1910 (“Citizenship in a Republic”): “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Credit accrues only to those whose effort leaves visible marks.

Thomas Edison (1847–1931), confirmed in the Ladies’ Home Journal (April 1898) and again by his lab assistant Rosanoff in Harper’s Monthly (September 1932): “Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” Backed by the artifact: ~5 million pages of dated, witnessed lab notebooks at the Edison Papers (Rutgers); 1,093 US patents, each requiring a witnessed notebook entry.

VI. The twentieth century — scientists, mathematicians, philosophers

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), My Inventions (1919), ch. III: “When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain.” Even the famous mental visualizer ends every cycle with an external artifact; the externalization is non-negotiable.

G. H. Hardy (1877–1947), A Mathematician’s Apology (1940), §1: “Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds…. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.” The theorem-as-artifact is the unit of a mathematical life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Tractatus 7 (1921, Ogden trans. 1922): “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Pair with the preface: “What can be said at all can be said clearly.” A radical artifact-discipline: language must terminate at what can be said clearly. The remainder is silence — not endless thinking.

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), An Autobiography (1936), ch. VII: “For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge…. The uninitiated imagine that one must await inspiration in order to create. That is a mistake…. Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.” A near-translation of the artifact rule.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), interview with Christian Zervos, Cahiers d’Art X (1935): “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” The work session is the precondition for any inspiration worth having.

Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969), Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, 14 November 1957: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” The artifact (the plan) becomes obsolete on contact with reality, but the act of producing it is what builds capability.

George Pólya (1887–1985), How to Solve It (1945), §13 “Looking back”: “Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important and instructive phase of the work.” The written-down argument is the unit; review of the artifact is the next session.

Richard Hamming (1915–1998), “You and Your Research,” Bell Communications Research Colloquium, 7 March 1986: “It is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it…. Presentation comes in three forms: published papers, prepared talks, and impromptu situations. You must master all three forms.” Hamming tells the story of reworking his integration method because he had to file a written military report — and the artifact-discipline changed the science. Undocumented work disappears.

Richard Feynman (1918–1988), interview with Charles Weiner, 4 February 1973 (AIP archive; quoted at length in Gleick, Genius):

Weiner: “[The notebooks represent] a record of the day-to-day work.” Feynman: “I actually did the work on the paper.” Weiner: “Well, the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” Feynman: “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”

This is the single most direct quote in the literature for the rule: writing IS the thinking. The artifact is not the residue of the work — it is the work.

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), letter to Betty Hester, 1957 (The Habit of Being, FSG 1979): “I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place…. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), ch. 2: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives…. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” Each day must yield a tangible piece of labor or be lost.

Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” NYT Book Review, 5 December 1976: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” Thinking does not precede writing — the artifact IS the thought.

Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995): “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t.” Inspiration produces feelings; habit produces artifacts.

Chuck Close, interview with Joe Fig, 25 April 2006 (in Inside the Painter’s Studio, 2009, p. 42): “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work…. Things will grow out of the activity itself.” Direct refutation of waiting for ideas.

VII. Modern engineering and the firm

Andy Grove (1936–2016), High Output Management (1983), chs. 1–3: “A genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).” The activity/output distinction is the book’s spine. Hours thought-about, meetings held, calls made — these are activity. Only the shipped artifact is output.

Donald Knuth (b. 1938), “Literate Programming,” The Computer Journal 27(2), 1984: “Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.” Code-without-document is not a deliverable.

Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel mailing list, 25 August 2000: “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” A one-line cultural enforcement of the rule: a working patch beats unlimited mailing-list discussion.

Jeff Bezos, 2017 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon, April 2018): “We don’t do PowerPoint presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’“ Bezos institutionalized the rule: ideas don’t exist in a meeting unless they exist in a written, dated, six-page document. Bullets are explicitly banned because they let thinking masquerade as work.

Paul Graham, “Putting Ideas Into Words” (2022): “If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.” The strongest single-sentence argument that thoughts unwritten aren’t yet thoughts.

Attribution flags worth knowing

A few popular quotes that look perfect for this essay are not safe to use, and have stronger substitutes already on the list:

  • Michelangelo, “Ancora imparo” — misattributed; traces to a 1534 Giuntalodi engraving via Duppa (1806). Use Sonnet 151 instead.
  • Faulkner, “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning” — earliest print attribution is a 1966 Washington Post profile (post-Faulkner death); no primary source. Pressfield retells it as a Somerset Maugham line. Hedge as “attributed to Faulkner” or use Stravinsky / O’Connor.
  • Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed” — the Drucker Institute itself disclaimed this attribution in 2013; the spirit is closer to V. F. Ridgway (1956). Use Andy Grove instead.
  • Epictetus, “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it” — not in Discourses or Enchiridion; a 21st-century paraphrase. Marcus Aurelius 10.16 (“Be one”) makes the same point and is verified.
  • “Nulla dies sine linea” in that exact form — a Renaissance coinage, not Pliny’s Latin. Attribute as “the proverb derived from Pliny’s account of Apelles.”
  • “No plan survives contact with the enemy” — short form is a 20th-century compression; Moltke’s 1871 essay reads, “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

Coda: what these voices share

Read in sequence, the roster shows that the dated-artifact rule is not a productivity hack invented in 21st-century Silicon Valley. It is the rediscovered conclusion of nearly every tradition that has thought seriously about producing knowledge — Greek metaphysics, Roman rhetoric, monastic copying, Talmudic ethics, Zen practice, Royal Society experimentalism, German philosophy, Russian composition, Bell Labs research, Linux kernel development. Each tradition uses different vocabulary — energeia, opera, manual labor, the brushstroke, fructus, falsifiability, output, the patch — but the structure is the same: what was not externalized today did not happen. The artifact is the test of the thinker. Everything else is rumor about a thought.