Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor's Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life

Feb 03, 2022

Dear Friends,

Ten years ago this week, Bret Victor spoke at a software engineering conference in Canada. Bret’s a technologist — and his talk of one of the best examples of public speaking I’ve ever seen.

“I don't have any prizes to give out,” he said. “I'm just going to tell you how to live your life.”

Here’s a distillation of his talk, “Inventing on Principle,” that’ll change the way you think about your career. I encourage you to watch the talk and marvel at Bret’s demonstrations. But I also know having a clean and distilled reference is a fast and effective way to revisit this great talk.

There's a way of living most people don't talk about.
When you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion or doing something you love.
I’m going to talk about something different: finding a guiding principle for your work.
The principle that guides my work is creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. Without an immediate connection, many great inventions and theories will not emerge.
When I see my principle violated, I feel that's wrong. Not wrong in the sense of violating a UI guideline or going against a best practice, but wrong in a deeper sense.
I don’t want important ideas, world-changing inventions, and life-saving discoveries locked in heads.
For each of us, the important part of the story is why.
Why do we have a principle? Why do we do the things we do?
When a principle is violated, it hurts. You see a tragedy; it feels like a moral wrong. An injustice.
You don't see an opportunity to make a product or start a business, you feel a responsibility to uphold a principle.
Injustice, responsibility, and morality aren't words we normally hear in technical fields.
But technologists can recognize a wrong. You can have a vision of what a better world could be. You can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle.
Social activists fight for their cause by organizing. Technologists fight for their cause by inventing.
Throughout history, we've been fortunate to have people who recognized wrongs and saw it as their responsibility to address them.
Many people have lived this way.
Learning about their principles can help you think about what you believe in and how you want to live your own life.
In the mid '70s at Xerox PARC, Larry Tesler felt personal computing could change how people thought and lived.
At the time, software interfaces were designed around modes, and Larry believed modes turned people off from computers.
This threatened Larry’s dream for what personal computing could be. So he made it his personal mission to eliminate modes from software.
He formed a principle: no person should be trapped in a mode. This principle informed everything that he did.
Alan Kay invented object-oriented programming. His goal was to “amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.”
Alan believed if children became fluent in thinking in the medium of the computer, then they'd become adults with new forms of critical thought.
Alan invented on the principle that programming literacy would enlighten society.
Richard Stallman started the GNU project. His principle is software must be free: software freedom is a matter of right and wrong.
And he’s taken an uncompromising approach to realizing his vision.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton wasn’t a community organizer.
No, she established a principle: women's suffrage. That's who she was. That’s the identity she chose. That was her vision and she brought it to the world.
Influential people dedicate their lives to ideals with a sense of right and wrong.
They often fight against an authority or mainstream that doesn’t recognize their wrong as being wrong.
They see a world in crisis, far from their ideal. They keep fighting and always will.
Your career counselor is not going to say you should start a personal crusade.
In a social field they might, but not in technology. Instead, the world will try to make you define yourself by a skill.
That's why you have a major in college. That's why you have a job title. You’re a software engineer.
If you want to spend your life pursuing excellence and practicing a skill, you can do that. That is the path of a craftsman. That is the most common path.
The only other path you hear about much is the path of the problem solver.
There's the set of problems in a field or needs in the market. You choose one, work it, and make your contribution there. Later, you choose another problem, you work it, you make your contribution.
Solving a problem can be worthwhile and valuable. You can take that path.
But inventing on principle is neither of those paths.
When you’re inventing on principle, you’re not contributing to a field and you're not choosing an open problem to solve.
You're coming up with a problem that exists only in your own head. You’re not defined by your craft, but rather by your cause.
I'm not saying you should live this way. What I'm saying is you can.
This activist lifestyle is an option that's available to you, and it's not one you're going to hear about much.
You can choose this life – or maybe it’ll end up choosing you.
Finding your principle might not happen right away. It takes time because finding a principle is a form of self-discovery: you're trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be about.
It can take a decade before any real understanding of your principle solidifies.
At first, you get glimmers of what matters to you, but not the big picture.
For a long time, it’s unclear and distressing. To gain clarity about your guiding principle, you just need to do a lot of things. Make many types of things. Study many things. Experience many things.
Use your experiences as a way of analyzing yourself.
Take each experience and ask, “Does this resonate with me? Does this repel me? Do I not care?” Build a corpus of experiences you feel strongly about and try to make sense of it. What’s the secret ingredient to your reactions?
A principle can't just be any old thing you believe in.
People say they that want to make software easier to use. Or they want to delight their users. Or they want to make things simple. Those are nice but they're too vague to be actionable.
A principle is a specific nugget of insight. It gives you a new way of seeing the world. In an objective way, it divides the world into right and wrong.
Once you have your principle, look around.
Notice places where your principle is violated and try to fix that.
Follow your principle and it’ll lead you to the work you need to do.
When you’re following a principle, you can look at what people are doing and ask if it violates your principle. If the answer is yes, you must do something about it. When your principle guides you, you’ll always know what you’re doing is right.
Maybe the most important thing you can realize is there are many ways to live your life.
Every aspect of your life is a choice – but there are default choices.
You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that's been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to.
If you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle and fight for a cause.
Take time and think about what matters to you. What you believe in. How you want to live your life. What you might fight for.