This one is for the people who often ask me, when I embark on another “for pleasure” project, “when are you going to do something that makes some money?”. Well, how about this for an example: Marco Kaiser, a german developer, had his own little personal project called Twhirl. Twhirl is a Twitter client written for Adobe’s AIR – I use it, and it’s the best Twitter client there is. Who knows what motivated him to do it, he was probably a Twitter user frustrated by the state of current desktop clients, so the guy goes ou there and makes his own. He probably had a couple of friends who told him “why waste your time on this when you could use these hours to take up another freelance customer”, or “go do something profitable”, or anything along those lines. Today we hear that Marco has sold Twhirl to web startup Seesmic. Not only has Marco’s past hobby suddendly become very profitable, he now has something of a name among startup circles, plus a new job working full time on Twhirl’s development, paid for by Seesmic. It’s fairly safe to say his life has changed a bit.
This fits right in to something I’m reading right now, and which has completely fascinated me – Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. To keep it short, the book is all about how we are greatly affected by completely unexpected and unpredictable events (the Black Swans). So Marco Kaiser was just hit by a black swan – there he was, happily coding away at his hobby project, when one day he gets offered a nice amount of cash and a job because of his previously unprofitable time-sink. It’s just like the book’s analogy to a turkey that gets continuously very well fed for one thousand days, making it feel very good about life in general, until it gets slaughtered to be served for dinner. So, never throw away an idea so lightly, you never know when a black swan might be coming your way – and keep spending all the time you like in your worthless, non-profitable hobbies 
To finish off: readers who have read the book might say that I am falling for confirmation bias, that is, I am using one single success story to justify my point, ignoring the millions of failures out there. Not quite true – all I am saying is that if you enjoy it, keep doing it, and you might just find a black swan around the corner. If you don’t find it, but enjoy yourself in the process, then all is well.
