My last post (https://tfos.co/p/what-if-i-started-a-nonprofit/) sparked a couple conversations and has me thinking about what kind of career paths and supporting institutions I wish existed. I think I can describe my main thought in one sentence: those who want to should be able to spend up to 1/3 of their working time on exploratory work. "exploratory work" could be lots of things--entrepreneurship, research, open-source, invention, learning--the defining characteristic is that it's self-directed and not beholden to any external measures of success like profitability etc. I think this should be a thing throughout all of life, starting in grade school, continuing in college, and throughout your career. (In fact for some people it could even be a replacement for college.) As your exploratory work matures, you may be able to transition to working on it full-time. Perhaps it's turned into a profitable business, or you have grants/sponsorship, or a company hires you to keep doing what you're doing. But no matter how early-stage your work is, you can always spend at least 1/3 of your time on it, even without an arrangement like this. It would be helpful to have institutions that (1) help people get a sufficient income with no more than 2/3 of their working time, (2) provide/help people find a supportive community for their exploratory work.

Until right before the pandemic, I worked out of a sort-of-coworking space called Orbital, run by Gary Chou, a singular guy who created programming that supported this sort of exploration. (In our interactions here, I've often thought you would have fit right in at Orbital.) The shut-down wasn't pandemic-related, it was NYC real estate related, we lost the lease in late 2019. And then the pandemic. You might like reading some of what Gary has written about all of this, I don't know that there's a "best of Gary," but if you're interested, you'll find a lot by poking around at garychou.com. (Today, Gary runs "communities of practice" for folks in tech, a different animal.)

Thanks for the tip, that does sound interesting! I'll look through his site soon.