What is worth building?

How personal values, ego, excitement, and our skills shape what we should do with our lives.

TL;DR: Determining what's worth building involves: 
1. Dissecting our individual values and ego to know how we define worth for ourselves.
2. Taking stock of our skills and understanding what we're capable of building.
3. Assessing the timing of opportunities and choosing high-utility projects that naturally excite us.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m currently looking for my next role. While I am interviewing at companies and searching for products and missions I really care about, the question of what is a good personal and professional investment for the next 5+ years of my life has been continuously top of mind.

It’s mostly been top of mind because I’ve come across a lot of really boring companies. Companies that are supremely uninspiring or seem to be working on a very small solution for a subset of people’s lives.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure they are great places to work and if they’re chugging along they’re probably alive because they are doing something right (for now). There are good reasons to work at companies besides their products or missions too. Stability, learning, or forming new friendships are all examples of why you may want to spend your working hours somewhere.

Knowing myself in this stage of my career though, I am optimizing towards working on something with a high amount of utility and what I perceive as high impact, so the question of “What is worth building?” keeps bubbling up.

In the world of tech and side projects, we have endless possibilities to choose from. But how do we find ones that align with our interests, passions, values, and skills, and ultimately ones that we think are worth our energy?

Dissecting the phrase "What is worth building"

In admittedly a very rudimentary way, I’ve found that breaking down the question has lead to some revelations, so I’ll start here.

1. “What” – The answer to the question. We’ll get to this at the very end.

2. “Worth” – A reflection of our own values, ego. and how we perceive what is useful to the world. ← There’s a lot here

3. “Building” – What we’re capable of and how aware we are of our strengths.

Worth as a reflection of yourself

No other section in answering this question is as important as worth.

Worth is what we perceive to ourselves as important enough to go out and do, and thus what our own egos are satisfied in doing. What I think is worthwhile is different than what you think is worthwhile, so knowing yourself is key to determining worth, because it is individualistic.

What you think is “worthwhile” is heavily influenced by your environment and the people you are around, but you still own your definition of worth. Depending on how much agency you have in your own life you can be convinced that something that objectively isn’t that big of a deal is the most important problem in the world. We have a tendency to go deep inside of our own bubble and think that everyone sees things the same way we do. This is why reflecting on your worldview from time to time and testing it with travel and interactions with other people is important because it helps remind you how diverse and uncertain a lot of the world is.

The area under the curve

To be mathematical about worth, you can apply the concept of utility that Elon Musk (a controversial figure to some of the people subscribed to this but go with it) discusses:

Interviewer: How should someone figure out how they can be most useful?

Elon: Whatever this thing is that you're trying to create, what would be the utility Delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect. So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great as is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people like the area under the curve...

Elon Musk on How to Build the Future : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

The way I think about worth for myself is by trying to maximize both sides of that equation: how can you improve the “state of the art” substantially for as many people as possible?

Take transportation as an example. The industry is fascinating to me because it is along one of the four fundamental rights of life – shelter, food, sleep, and the ability to move. The area under the curve for transportation, even with an emerging category like e-scooters, is massive because everyone needs to move!

On the other hand, the area under the utility curve for business to business Software as a Service products (B2B SaaS or “Bleeeeeecccchhhhh”)¹ certainly exists, and yes you can help people save time at work, but I think that the area under the curve for a lot of companies is less than something like transportation. Or at least it’s less obvious.

I tend to lean towards projects that address problems in the physical world because their impact is obvious and my own ego feels satisfied by working on them. Software can be useful and worthwhile because it’s an extremely efficient way to speed things up in people’s lives for very little effort and energy (thank you, computers) I just look at that category as

1. saturated with a lot of products, especially over the past decade as it’s been easier than ever to code something and

2. challenging to affect a ton of people widely by. Remember that not everyone is in tech and cares about pixel-perfect websites.

AI is a new catalyst for innovation in this space especially with how crazy fast ChatGPT was adopted, so it’s started to make the category of “Future of Work” interesting, but picking a winner is really tough this early.

Money is a bad proxy for value

It’s tempting to consider the financial aspect of something as the indicator of a project's “worth”. However, it is crucial to remember that simply moving money from one hand to another might not translate to actual impact.

Is it worthwhile to work for a massive bank or financial services company?

If that money is being put to work on funding projects like housing or environmental projects then perhaps it could satisfy yours or someone else’s definition of “worth”. That seems to be a very up-stream way of solving a problem, but can also be lucrative if you enjoy trading your hours sleep for purely making money.

Isn’t money supposed to represent the value of something? Maybe for the average of all of the investor masses, but remember that a lot of the financial value of something is always mis-priced – we all have different ideas for how much something is worth.

But that’s my perception of what’s worthwhile. Maybe your ego sees it differently. Generally, I think it isn’t smart to use money as the main indicator.

Knowing yourself when it comes to assessing worth

It’s a more valuable exercise to recognize how we think about what is worthwhile internally than what other people think has because at the end of the day our egos will always be aware of and shaped by what other people think.

Simple example: you should know that you like or don’t like chocolate rather than making decisions on whether it’s trendy to like chocolate.

When thinking about worth, consider what motivates you, what you think is important and why you might think that, and consider how something can be both useful and satisfying for your own ego to work on.

Building

Knowing our own skills

In order to build or create anything, you need the skills to make it happen. By continually learning and developing your skill set you can equip yourself with the tools needed to succeed.

Crafting a career thesis that revolves around your interests and values can help steer your professional journey in a direction you like. For me, I have found that transportation and cities have been the most exciting categories for me, so I’ve tended to lean towards projects that fit that genre of work, and have used my skills to build in that arena.

The importance of agency

While worth is a reflection of our ego, building is a reflection of our agency.

I say agency because in order to get anything done you really need to be able to have the decisiveness and drive to pick yourself up and learn what you need to learn. Sometimes we perceive something to be worthwhile but know there’s a gap in our skillset, so we can use our agency to actually get the skills we need to create something in the world.

If you don’t have the agency to learn the skills you need, then you won’t find the “what” that will best complement what you think is “worthy” of your time and can be realized with your full potential. What you think is worthwhile will not be attainable and you’ll be unsatisfied with your “what” that you choose to work on because you know that there are greater “worthwhile” endeavors.

The simplest way to put this, is that finding something you find worthwhile but failing to rise to the challenge of learning how to apply yourself to it is a recipe for regret.

By continuously nurturing and cultivating your motivation, you can push yourself to tackle new challenges and seize unique opportunities.

What

So if you know what you think is worthwhile, and you know yourself well enough to understand what you are capable of building, what do you decide to build?

At any one moment you are faced with a 3D axis of what you think is worthwhile, what you are capable of building, and when is the time to work on an idea.

Here you can actually play around with this graphic in 3D how cool is that

It’s important to know that you are always gradually shifting what you see as worthwhile and what your skillsets are. That’s why, like in the above graphic, you can see that opportunities overlap, they fade in and out, and there are good times and not so great times to pursue opportunities. The opportunities are ovals as a way to represent maximizing upside. Some are too early, some fade away the later you participate in them because they become saturated or lose their value, some are waiting down the line the future, and some are great to work on right now. You can play with the model it’s very cool.

The strongest indicator for answering this question that I’ve found is to follow what sounds exciting.² The excitement you follow though needs to be durable and consistent. The strength of your excitement can be temporary pulses, but longer vectors of excitement that press us towards our interests over time can be great indicators of what your own ego wants to do.

Your excitement is heavily influenced by your ego and agency, so it can be useful to go back to the exercise of the utility curve from earlier to think objectively about what to work on.

What is worth building – for ourselves

Figuring out what's worth building in our lives comes down to understanding our values, interests, skills, and motivation, but primarily what you perceive to be worthwhile for yourself. You need to pay attention to what drives yourself and accept that your goals and abilities will change over time, just like the world around us.

To make the unknown of our careers more enjoyable, it's crucial to do things that excite us and feel important to us personally.

As you consider what you do with your working hours, you shouldn't be intimidated by everything you could do. Instead, see these choices as chances to learn more about yourself and push your world view. By focusing on what really matters and improving your skills, you’re more likely to have a fulfilling career that not only keeps you happy but also makes a positive impact in the world.

While a lot of what we would think makes a career a success is wrapped up in our own egos, we can hopefully realize our full potential by reflecting on what motivates us and what we can do for the world.

1. Guess which companies I find to be most boring?

2. Thank you Sam Donner for reminding me how important excitement is for anything we do.