In some cases, the activity is the hobby for its own sake. In other cases, it’s a means to an end that’s the real hobby. My current tinkering is a mix of both. The 3D printing is mostly means to an end. The electronics dabbling is more of an end in itself.
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Hmm... something interesting about troubleshooting as the essence. When you’re going a new thing, the scope creep from that is unpredictable. It could remain sustainable at a couple of hours a week, or take over your life if you decide you’re not going to let setbacks stop you.
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Like take the rover I’m trying to build. For a more skilled maker, who has already done a lot of 3D printing, electronics, RPi coding etc, this is a well-defined, well-scoped, *contained* project. It can stay hobby grade. They’ll avoid most dumb bugs, troubleshoot things quickly.
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It can’t be life changing for them because it’s not a true growth experience.
For me otoh, new to all of it, it could easily consume my life because I am making way more dumb mistakes, taking far too long to troubleshoot trivial setbacks, etc. Open scope.
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Disruption means you’re leaning a new activity and allowing yourself to be transformed by it. The “fixing one bug creates two more” effect dominates. You have to let the scope creep proceed as much as it needs to. If you try to budget time/resources too much, it will fail.
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The real risk is, you’ll run out of growth headroom before you get anywhere sustainable. For every successful disruptor there are a hundred carcasses of overreach.
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Possibly the only thing you can do to derisk is ask if you can handle the transformation overall. Which means accurately understanding the strengths that allowed past transformations to succeed, not “peacetime” skills between self-disruptions.
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This is the what’s toughest in my current attempted self-disruption. For eg. writing is a “peacetime skill” for me that I find a way to use in every new adventure. But it’s not a relevant strength for self-disruption. I’m trying to remember what sustained my last big leap.
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Often it’s a window of opportunity to grow with a young medium. Looking back, my last half dozen self-disruptions over 20 years all piggybacked on a newish medium for the context. Early adoption is possibly the secret weapon for self-disruption. It ties in to what you can waste.
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Damn. I’ve figured it all out. Don’t feel like fleshing it out in a post though.
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Self-disruption is next door to play but IMO isn’t truly playful.
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Replying to @bobz44
I’m avoiding the word ‘play’ because it doesn’t quite feel like play. There is an irrepressible awareness of existential stakes in self-disruption that undermines the ludic immersion of play.
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In the short-term, early on, it’s like play, but beyond a point it gets too big and dangerous. Capped vs uncapped stakes. Safe fail vs unsafe bets.
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As when reading any commentary on 'disruption' a feeling accumulates that a need to narrow the scope of the objective is being counterproductively deferred.

