Guido van Rossum, the founder of the Python programming language, created Python as a side project while working in a research laboratory in the Netherlands. Likewise, many authors have turned their side projects into major successes. For example, Frank Furedi, the British professor emeritus of sociology, once said during a talk on how he was able to write his book “Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter” that every Friday evening, while his audience was in the pubs or elsewhere, he was busy spending that time researching and collating materials for the book. This sort of situation keeps repeating itself in the history of successful people. On a personal note, I remember starting a side project by blogging about educational issues in Nigeria on edusounds.com.ng, and eventually the site clocked over 700,000 visits before I transitioned it to edusounds.com.
Recently, I have been encouraging some of my friends and postgraduate students to embark on what I’ll call a project of their own.
I came up with the idea of starting their project after observing that some individuals find it difficult to obtain industry experience, either through unpaid voluntary work or paid positions in project management in the UK. This post is about how to get into project management in the UK, but I think the advice is useful for getting a PM job anywhere.
While trying to put my idea of setting up one’s own project into practice, I noticed that most of the time, when I’m having a conversation about the concept with my listeners, I don’t seem to be communicating it clearly. Over time, I realised that there might be a gap in their understanding of two key issues:
- Money is a tool, not the end in itself, but a means to a goal.
- It’s crucial to understand how to generate wealth through the creation of value, as this is typically where the money generated from any economic activity ends up.
While exploring this idea (i.e., to create wealth), I saw an essay by Paul Graham, one of the co-founders of Y Combinator and a prolific essayist. I have read the lengthy essay “How to Make Wealth” more than five times, proving its worth. The essay takes the reader through the journey of how money is only a convenient means of actualising transactions and not the end product of the transactions conducted.
The essay establishes the significance of understanding that one needs to create wealth through value creation rather than pursue money. Reading the essay further establishes how, as an individual, one can create wealth with little or no resources. To bring this concept of wealth creation to life, I devised an independent and self-directed wealth-making course, which involves reading some of Paul Graham’s essays, putting them into practice, and utilising carefully selected free online resources. On the course, you’ll need to:
- Take notes.
- Create a side project.
- Monitor the side projects’ activities.
- Turn a side project into a financially viable endeavour.
Here is the structure of the self-directed learning project:
Week 1: Read the essay on “How to Make Wealth” and take notes on key points. Please identify the steps you need to take.
Week 2: After finishing the wealth-making essay, move on to the next essay, “How to do great work”.
Week 3: Following the reading of the essay on performing exceptional work, we will proceed to read “A project of one’s own”.
Week 4: You should read “How to Work Hard”. In between Weeks 3 and 4, I’ll suggest you listen to the Y Combinator podcasts on metrics and KPIs: “Setting KPIs and Goals” and “How to Choose a Metric and Set Your KPI”.
You should read these four essays sequentially and take notes.
At first, you read “How to Make Wealth” to understand the importance of creating values and what values mean in terms of wealth creation. These values could be in terms of goods, services, or experiences (e.g., a sense of satisfaction that comes from fulfilling a social non-profit goal). Afterwards, you read the essay on “How to Do Great Work”. This essay will teach you how to achieve real goals in your personal and professional life. The concept of work-life balance only becomes an issue if your work and life goals are not in harmony with each other. Next, you read an essay titled “A Project of One’s Own.” The main goal of this essay is to help you understand what it takes to initiate a project of your own, how to persevere, achieve the project’s objectives, and deliver the final product.
After reading the essay on “A Project of One’s Own,” I recommend watching these two episodes of the Y Combinator podcast on Setting KPIs and Metrics. This will help you understand and identify the need for setting measurable KPIs and metrics that align with your project objectives. After listening to the two podcasts, I recommend reading Paul’s essay on “How to Work Hard”, as it will help you refine your skills and further develop your project.
As a bonus, if your project involves engaging others, particularly a non-profit organisation, I’ll advise you to read the work on “Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)” and explore the adoption of the model in your work. And if the project is more tailored to what you have to work on individually, then I’ll suggest you read Chapter 2 on value creation in “The Personal MBA.”. Reading the book is worth every penny, page turned, and time spent on it. Additionally, the list of 99 business books at the end is valuable for both personal and professional development.
