Or my 100 hour contribution.
In his talk “Scope”, which opened the reboot11 conference, Matt Webb discussed the notion of 100 million hours of human effort and resulting achievements possible, e.g. the Lunar Landing and Wikipedia. At the tail end of the slides, he issued a challenge to the participants to set aside 100 hours over a 12 week period and do something. Get out there and make some culture instead of just consuming it or complaining about it.
Now 100 hours isn’t 100 million hours. And there weren’t a million people at Reboot. Webb even argues that 100 hours isn’t enough time to come close to becoming an expert at something.
But 100 hours can be a pretty good start for many things. Who knows you might go on to put enough time to become an expert. Or find the thing to does capture your fancy. Or build a community that generates 100 million hours.
I’ve been meaning to start some kind of focused project as a release from the daily grind. Webb’s call to arms resonated. I won’t be able to do my 100 hours over the summer, but I’m game to kick something off in August or September. The current thought is circle back around to pygame and visualization. Reworking a number of, or even all the, examples from one of the processing books provides a nice ramp up, with some easily defined goals.
Of course I also have this fantasy of one day picking up photography, in a semi-serious amateur way, but you can’t do everything at once in life.