Given the projects and work I’ve been involved it in the past few years, I occasionally get asked how I have time to work on different things consistently for a long period of time. It’s a well-meaning question, but one I haven’t been able to provide a good answer for - in part because I didn’t have a good answer, and in part because of some complicated imposter-esque feeling that I refuse to untangle. I’ve been thinking about this recently, and I may I have an answer to atleast one part of it.

My side-project problem started when I was just finishing school and getting into college, and ever since then I’d say the one constant is that none of things I’ve meaningfully done have been alone. Doing things solo is a bit over respresented in culture I think - whether you look at the late-stage capitalism hustle-culture discourse or self-love and mental health.

I think I can actually mark out my entire adult life timeline as a series of relationships with different partners-in-crime, it’s been such a core source of motiviation, creativity, and all that other good stuff you need to feel fulfilled and happy.

The earliest version of this I can think of is one of my closest friends Kishore and I as two 18 y/o “geeky” kids wanting to do tech support and explainers for friends and family via a very short lived blog called SlowMoTech. (As an aside, having this still accessible 14 years later is another tiny testament to posting on the open-web and not in silos)

I was incredibly fortunate that Kishore and I ended up in the same college (and were even roommates for a while). Every few months he or I would find a rabbit hole, and convince the other to jump in. Some choice examples from then:

  • We built this attendance-tracking app that scraped our internal web portal. I learnt Git, Android, and building a python webserver and cloud hosting (back in 2012!).
  • We finessed our way into making some money with some truly boring graphic design work from craigslist listings in random US cities and getting paid via PayPal.
  • A few friends discovered Breaking Bad and listened to Tool so we obviously decided our opinions were worth publishing as an online magazine.

I’m definitely romanticising this era a fair bit, but this was the time when so many aspects of my personality and worldview took shape, and having people to indulge and be indulged by was really a big part of that.

It gave me (and I suspect him as well) a lot of confidence that we could jump into something and back ourselves to figure things out. It took away some of the fear of failure and replaced it with… excitement? That ability has been core to my professional career and whatever success I’ve had. I feel like it unlocked my ability to be Man+. We already come with more blind self-confidence compared to half the population, I felt like this put me in the 90th percentile.

In the years after college, that same pattern played. I would meet someone interesting, hit things off, and we’d end up doing something together. Mithun and I starting ReRoll in 2016. Harish, Nemo, and I started Puzzled Pint Bangalore in 2018. During the first covid lockdown, Kishore and I started a discord server for his friends (he lives in the US) and my friends in Bangalore to meet, and that became 40+ people who’ve now done international trips together, secret santa gift exchanges, etc.

None of these are particularly well-thought out plans, it was just a fun thing to do with someone I love and that was all it needed.

Punjit and I started Underline Center in 2024, but the seeds of our shenanigans were planted years ago. We’ve done some random things like live streaming board games to working on a puzzle hunt for his office. We co-hosted christmas/nye parties for our friends.

I’m a bit self conscious even writing about some of this because it feels a bit like tooting my own horn, but what my personal learning as been is that it’s so easy to get lost in the sauce of working on something by yourself. If you are reading this post I suspect you already know what I mean. Find a partner in crime, even if they are the driver and you are along for the ride. It will teach you to be accountable, to articulate and communicate why you care about something, to vocalise what you want to achieve, and it is also an exercise in learning to share and let go of control (which I still struggle with at times). Not everything is going to work, there will be many dead ends, but it’s a lot more forgiving a process when there is someone to bitch about problems with.

Part of why I think I’ve found it hard to answer this question is because all my experience basically boils down to - meet some great people and convince them to jump into things with you? I think you’ll find most advice on soul-searching to be telling you the benefits of working on something by yourself, but I think some of the best things you will do will take two.

This was inspired by June’s IndieWebCarnival theme - Take Two.