David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Like you can't articulate it, but it's spot on more times than not.

My favorite essay in Rework is the last one, and it's entitled Inspiration is Perishable.

And I think that captures a lot of it, that if you take the time to do a detailed plan, you may very well have lost the inspiration by the time you're done.

If you follow the inspiration in that moment and trust your gut, trust your own competence that you will figure it out,

you're going to get so much more back.

You're going to go on the adventure you otherwise wouldn't have, whether that's just a business decision or a life decision.

You have to seize that inspiration.

There's a great set of children's books written by this Japanese author about...

chasing an idea and trying to get ahold of it.

And it's beautifully illustrated as an idea, something that's floating around as something you have to catch and latch onto that.

I really feel captures this notion that inspiration is perishable.

It'll disappear.

If you just put it back on the shelf and say like, well, I got to be diligent about this.

I got to line up a plan.

You may run out and then there's no, there's no steam to keep going.

Which is going to be a bit of a biased piece of evidence here.

You should definitely have dictators and they should control everything, especially when the dictator is me.

Now, well, I think I learned very early on that a quick way to burn out in open source is to treat it as a business, as though your users are customers, as though they have claims of legitimacy on your time and your attention and your direction.

Mm-hmm.

Because I faced this almost immediately with Ruby on Rails.