It also depends on your own risk/reward equilibrium for personal side projects vs. career projects.
I take much bigger risks with personal projects than career projects. I don't care if 95% or more of them fail or are not completed for good reasons (cost, physically impossible, etc.).
To a great degree, I don't even tell people about the failed personal projects. In fact that's one thing I love about personal projects. With career projects, the most annoying thing to me is that you are forced to tell people (cofounders, employees, investors, customers, family, friends) what you're going to do, and then you have to try to live up to it. With personal projects you don't have to tell anyone. And because you don't tell anyone, you won't be discouraged by anyone. You can set out to build A, and end up building B, or end up building nothing and just having a good time, and you don't have to worry about leaving a bad impression.
If you built A, you say you built A. If you built B, you say you built B. If you built nothing, you say nothing at all. It's awesome. The point is I don't like saying anything until I've actually built something that minimally works.
If you're motivated and disciplined enough, this is an excellent framework for exploration. In particular, the human ego/desire to say something means that I'm motivated to keep at it until I have built something that allows me (under this framework) to say something.
I take much bigger risks with personal projects than career projects. I don't care if 95% or more of them fail or are not completed for good reasons (cost, physically impossible, etc.).
To a great degree, I don't even tell people about the failed personal projects. In fact that's one thing I love about personal projects. With career projects, the most annoying thing to me is that you are forced to tell people (cofounders, employees, investors, customers, family, friends) what you're going to do, and then you have to try to live up to it. With personal projects you don't have to tell anyone. And because you don't tell anyone, you won't be discouraged by anyone. You can set out to build A, and end up building B, or end up building nothing and just having a good time, and you don't have to worry about leaving a bad impression.
If you built A, you say you built A. If you built B, you say you built B. If you built nothing, you say nothing at all. It's awesome. The point is I don't like saying anything until I've actually built something that minimally works.
If you're motivated and disciplined enough, this is an excellent framework for exploration. In particular, the human ego/desire to say something means that I'm motivated to keep at it until I have built something that allows me (under this framework) to say something.