Embody your principles.

Telling people that something is bad for them is often not helpful. It might make you feel good, as though you are enacting your goal of making the world a better place but I'm not so convinced. One of the founding ideas for this website was "Joy in the process, Joy in the creation". I believe, in some part, that to make something truly great, something that other people love and use, you need to enjoy making it more than you enjoy the result. The result, the impact, is not actually important. Starting this website I had grand goals of improving the lives of teachers and students, of building something beautiful, something useful, a way to share the joy that I find in Mathematics but building that was not enjoyable. Building this website became a "job", more like work than like play. Building for some non-existent, possible future audience did not work. Instead I build this website for me.

I have often thought that creating should be for the creator and not for the audience. The most impressive, the most famous artists, I believe, made art not for other people but for themselves. I believe that books and plays should not be written for the audiences but for the person writing them and as such I transitioned to making this website purely for my own personal gain. The tools I make are entirely for me, the passages I write again are for I and I alone. It took me a disproportionate amount of time and effort to reach this point. A point that I have been aware of for a long time. Because this website is for me it does not matter whether anyone else ever finds it or finds it useful. It has still achieved the goal that it was set out to do. That is to better the world.

It is freeing to create for yourself. However it is that you choose to do that. Build the thing that you want to exist whether you know yet what that is yet is not important. What is important is that you find something you love and do all you can to hang on to that.