I am well motivated by pleasure and fun. Money is useful but I’d rather be underpaid to work with people I like than to be overpaid to work on a project with a bad team.
Two days ago, I jumped into the end stages of a web development project. My role is minor (porting content from the old site to the new) and fair drugery, but I’m enjoying it tremendously.
It’s all because of the guys I’m working with. Jeremy Bogan and Daniel Bogan, at Segment Publishing in Sydney are fun, smart, and smell like elderberries. I may never meet them in person but we get along famously through intstant messaging. We’ve joked and teased, while excavating a mountain of tasks quickly and efficiently.
My very favorite jobs have been with good teams. The Multimedia Development Center crew at Duquesne in 1997 was a dream—everyone was intelligent, capable, willing to share knowledge and able to be silly while working hard. It was a highly creative environment. We’ve all gone our separate ways, but we keep in touch and I think all of us would choose to work together again if we could.
The MediaSense team here in Tokyo is another group of hard-working, hysterically funny people; I always free up my calendar when they call me for a last-minute job. We make videos for a corporate client and even though it’s always “the same thing as last time, but different” we manage to be creative within those limitations.
So for me, even toil becomes creative play when I like my collaborators.
Posted by kuri at June 10, 2005 11:48 AMThe Duquesne crew was a great team. I was but a student worker in ‘97, but after starting full time in ‘98, I came to understand what you mean - it was a great team and something I’ve yet to find again. I have a good crew now, but that group takes the cake. If JB ever called with a job offer, I’d drop everything and go, no question.
Posted by: Mike on June 10, 2005 09:40 PM