Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and Painters, wrote:

To make something good, you have to be thinking, “wow, this is really great,” not “what a piece of shit; these fools will love it.”

Many years ago, my day job consisted of working on a piece of software for the business market that I considered to be a piece of shit. Now, this is not the best opinion to have of the product you spend forty hours a week working on, and it would be true to say that holding that view did not help me add anything really great to the design of the product.

To design well, you must passionately believe that what you are working on is really great, and that even if it never sells a million copies, or even a single one, it is still really great.

Four months ago I went part time at my current nine to five to work on my own ideas. PageFour began life as a personal project, born out of my own frustrations with MS Word. I wanted to design a word processor that placed the emphasis on words; a word processor that made life easier for creative writers; a word processor without a single piece of business oriented functionality. I wanted to design a word processor for the way I worked.

I’m writing this in PageFour now, and I think it’s really great.

Since I began working in earnest on something I felt passionate about, my working day has gotten easier, my designs are better, and the new ideas that have been absent for the past year have started to flow again. I have a list of projects I can’t wait to start work on next year, and every one of them has the makings of a great project.