Nadia, a 12-year-old seventh grader in New Orleans, was struggling with math. So much so that she was at risk of her school placing her in a slower math track.
While visiting her older cousin and his wife in Boston, she explained her plight. Her cousin, a hedge fund analyst with multiple STEM degrees, offered to work with her and get her back on track.
He tutored Nadia remotely, mostly via telephone, and using Yahoo! Messenger and its Doodle notepad and image-sharing program. Nadia responded well to the tutoring and thrived, and soon a dozen or so more cousins were seeking tutoring.
To manage the increased demand more efficiently, he built a personal website where he could post practice problems. A couple of years later, a friend suggested he start posting tutorial videos on YouTube.
Once the videos were public, they began to reach an audience well beyond just family members, and were soon being viewed by tens of thousands of people each month.
The man, Sal Khan, incorporated as a nonprofit and continued to operate it in his spare time for another year or so, until he decided to quit his hedge fund job and devote himself to the venture full time.
Khan Academy would soon receive its first major donation from venture capitalist and philanthropist Ann Doerr, followed by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, among others.
Today, Khan Academy reaches over 18 million learners monthly in 190 countries and in over 40 languages.
What started as a favor for a cousin grew into a demanding but rewarding side project that in turn became an immensely successful educational nonprofit with a global reach.
Now, I don’t know Sal Khan personally, nor do I know his dreams or goals or what sort of career or life trajectory he envisioned for himself prior to his decision to tutor his cousin in math.
All I know is that he has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT, and graduate degrees in computer science and business from MIT and Harvard, respectively. And I know that prior to founding Khan Academy, he was a hedge fund analyst.
So, there’s nothing obvious about his prior education and experience that would indicate he would pursue professional or entrepreneurial interests related specifically to education.
But according to his official bio, he did demonstrate some interest in the field of education as an undergrad. He developed math software for kids with ADHD, tutored public school students, taught MCAT prep courses, and was named Teacher of the Year by a national test prep company.
Did Sal Khan’s experience tutoring his cousins spark the interest that led to Khan Academy? Or did his previous undergrad tutoring and teaching experience ignite a passion that was the reason he offered to tutor his cousins in the first place?
Either way, Sal Khan’s story is often used as an example of a side project that became tremendously successful.
But was it really a “side project” in the traditional sense?
What is a motion project?
Usually, we think of a side project or side hustle as something someone does to supplement their primary income.
Sal Khan wasn’t tutoring his cousins for money. And even after the project grew to the point where he decided to pursue it full time, Khan Academy was founded as a nonprofit educational organization.
It was a side project only in the sense that it was something he dedicated time to that didn’t relate to his primary occupation as a hedge fund analyst. It wasn’t originally intended as an auxiliary income stream.
I’ve heard other terms for projects like these, such as “passion project” or “purpose project.”
In my propinquity post, I use the term “motion project” to describe some type of work we are doing, paid or not, that relates to a purpose or goal. A motion project could be a side hustle for extra cash, it could be related to our overarching dream or vision, or it could be related to some short-term goal.
Even our full-time job could be considered a motion project, if it is moving us toward some bigger long-term vision or goal.
In their book Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business, Thor Muller and Lane Becker describe motion as “the raw material of luck,” and being in motion, they say, is essential for stimulating serendipity.[1]
Muller and Becker define “being in motion” as putting oneself in unfamiliar situations, but within familiar environments. Since serendipity often involves finding what we aren’t looking for, they explain, being in motion is about breaking out of our routines, seeking the unknown, and encountering new experiences, information, and opportunities by actively placing ourselves where they might exist.[2]
Motion, then, is similar to one of our core serendipity strategies, variability.
Muller and Becker do say that while motion involves shaking things up, we are usually operating in familiar environments, and looking for opportunities that are relevant to us and our goals.
So, we can generally think of motion as variability coupled with movement toward our vision, purpose, or goal.
In my propinquity post, I also explained that a motion project should demonstrate our commitment to our vision. This allows others to connect us to this enterprise, and it makes it more likely that they will send related opportunities, ideas, and information our way.
A motion project, then, is any undertaking that demonstrates our commitment to, and helps move us toward, realizing a vision, purpose, or goal.
A side project or side hustle may or may not be considered a motion project, depending on whether it relates to our vision or moves us toward a goal. A side hustle could be nothing more than an additional income source.
Similarly, our motion project need not be intended to generate income.
A motion project moves us toward our vision, and shows others that we are serious about our pursuit.
Why have a motion project?
Working on a project that aligns with a greater vision or purpose can have a range of personal and professional benefits.
You are actively pursuing your vision
If you are always working on a motion project, you are always actively moving toward your vision.
A motion project substantiates your vision. You are no longer just dreaming or visualizing or hoping or planning – you are doing. Your vision will have now become an active pursuit.
You become invested in your vision
When your vision becomes an active pursuit, you become personally invested in it. You invest time, effort, money, or whatever other resources are necessary.
Now you have skin in the game.
By making some personal resource investment in an active project, we are validating our vision. Because if we didn’t think it was worthwhile, we wouldn’t be willing to dedicate much of ourselves to it.
This resource investment – coupled with the belief that our pursuit is worthwhile – strengthens our commitment.
You will expand your opportunities
Working on a motion project will introduce you to a greater number of opportunities, both sought and unsought.
Here are three types of opportunities that a motion project can help present:
- Considered opportunities. These are the types of opportunities that you anticipate might come your way as a result of your project.
- Collateral opportunities. These are the types of opportunities that are secondary to your project, and are initially unanticipated.
- Contingent opportunities. These are purely circumstantial, “right-place, right-time” type of opportunities that only arise because of your efforts related to the motion project.
Let’s say you’re a foodie, and you have a passion for Soul food, Native American, and Tex-Mex cuisine. Your current motion project is a blog. You write about recipes that you personally test and modify, and in your travels you frequently visit and review restaurants that feature these cuisines.
If a big part of your blog content is writing about recipes that you have tested and modified, or developed yourself, then writing a cookbook seems like an obvious step somewhere along the way. If a publisher offers you a cookbook deal, this is a considered opportunity.
Now, suppose your own research challenges lead you to develop a tool that lets food bloggers scrape recipes based on specific ingredients, and this becomes a popular plugin, extension, or app. This is secondary to the purpose of your blog, but it is still related to – and resulted from – your blogging activity, so this is a collateral opportunity.
Now let’s say you’re relaxing in a bar, and you overhear the woman two stools down talking to the bartender about opening a new restaurant. You introduce yourself and strike up a conversation, and it turns out the woman is a fan of your blog and her new restaurant features the very cuisines that you write about most. You stay in contact, and a week or so later she offers you a menu concept and development consulting gig. This is a contingent opportunity.
Motion projects will expose you to more opportunities, and will enhance your ability to recognize and evaluate opportunities.
You will make valuable connections
Your motion project will place you in a community of like-minded people with shared interests and pursuits.
Your motion project will demonstrate that you are serious about this shared purpose, and will give others something tangible to connect you with.
This network will provide you with a sense of connectedness and belonging, will give you support and feedback, will motivate and inspire you, and will send opportunity your way.
You will learn new things and build new skills
Any new undertaking will require you to learn and do new things. And you can prioritize the acquisition and application of this new knowledge as you see fit, which we can’t always do in our regular jobs.
Learning something new and applying new skills gives us a sense of pride and accomplishment that keeps us motivated and increases our awareness of future possibilities.
Learning also makes us more confident and boosts our feelings of self-efficacy, which enhances our overall psychological well-being, makes us more persistent and resilient, and makes us more willing to experiment with new ideas.
Also, most new knowledge and skills can be transferred to other areas of our life.
Nelson Mandela once said, “I never lose. I either win or learn.”
If our motion project teaches us something useful, it’s a success.
Your autonomy will make you more creative and productive
When a project is truly your own, you will have the highest possible degree of autonomy. You have complete freedom to choose how tasks are accomplished.
A high level of autonomy allows us to experiment, to find creative solutions to problems, to approach our work in ways that maximize our productivity.
We can learn a lot about ourselves – and how we think and work best – when we are free from organizational constraints and unrealistic or arbitrarily-imposed deadlines.
Autonomy not only allows you to approach tasks more creatively and execute them more efficiently, it allows you to control when and where you work, the tools and technologies you use, and what metrics will be used to measure success.
You can experiment with minimal risk
Your motion project gives you the freedom to experiment with different tools, technologies, techniques, methodologies, channels, and strategies without much risk.
This might be one of the greatest benefits of having a motion project. You can refine your approach and your strategy without mush exposure to loss.
And if your motion project eventually becomes a successful full-time venture, the experimentation you were able to do before making a substantial investment will prove invaluable.
You can reconsider and refine your aspirations and expectations
Working on a project that is moving you toward your vision will shed a lot of light on the attainability of some specific goals and milestones.
You may realize that some things are just going to take a lot longer than you originally planned, or that you simply won’t have access to some of the resources you thought might be available to you.
Before his “fade into Bolivian,” Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Motion projects will expose the shortcomings in your plans before you get punched in the mouth.
Start before you’re ready
Don’t wait too long to jump in and start doing something. There’s likely no good or bad – and almost certainly no “perfect” – time.
Your motion project can be big or small, easy or challenging, long-term or short-term, limited use or multipurpose. It can be meant to last forever, or it can have an expiration date.
And the idea isn’t all that important yet. It could solve a problem, accelerate or simplify a process, teach someone something, build your authority or credibility, or it could just be fun.
Working on a motion project provides a lot of benefits, most of which can readily transfer to other areas of your life.
Don’t get sucked into an abyss of endless analysis, research, and planning. Will you still be waiting to get started one year from now? Two years? Five?
There really isn’t much resource commitment or risk until – like Sal Khan’s tutoring – its success pushes it further than you expected.
The worst thing that is likely to happen if we start before we’re ready is that we might be successful sooner than we thought.
