Go take a look at InstaPundit.Com. Go ahead, it’s okay… I’ll wait.
Now whether or you enjoy Glenn’s writing style (I do), or agree with him most of the time (again, I do), there is one inarguable fact about IP. There is a hell of a lot of text up there. 10 pages worth on an average day, at least.
How many of us turn out 10 pages of copy every single day for our jobs? I’m not asking how many of us CAN, I want to know how many DO. For our JOBS.
[crickets chirping]
Yeah. I wonder why that is. More and more, as I troll around the internet, exploring this whole online journal phenomena that sprang up “instantly” (over the last two years while I was apparently asleep), I see some great writing, and more to the point I see a LOT of it in many different veins.
No one’s going to compare bears-cave to instapundit (certainly not based on success — the guy gets 10000 hits a day and people send him money to keep writing — I get offered money to stop… it’s not the same thing), aside from other differences, we don’t write about the same things.
We both write - that’s the only parallel. We produce text… sometimes notebooks-worth of text, and it’s all for nothing, materialistically speaking.
Last thing I wrote for work? A one-page flier. Took about 13 minutes (less time than I’ve been working on this post, certainly).
So… why? Not “why do we do it” — I know why I do it, at least, and I’m narcissistic enough that I don’t really think much about why other people do it. Why is work a place where we have kill ourselves to make 3-month deadlines on 10-page pamphlets, even though we can turn out a similar amount of text in 3 hours ‘for fun’? How many of us spend more time on our hobbies than our job?
Here’s a tough one: how many hours, seriously, if you did everything at once, would it take you to do everything work-related that you accomplished last week? Five? Less?
[crickets]
The most disappointed coworker I’ve ever met was this woman named Susan who was looking for a job that made her happy. As far as I know, she’s still looking.
