The Remarkable Life of Giles Bowkett
Giles Bowkett loves what he does for a living. In fact, my first encounter with Giles was an e-mail he sent me with the subject line: “My remarkable life.”
Giles, however, didn’t always love his career. There were points when he was broke and unemployed, and other points when he suffered through jobs that bored him into a stupor. The turning point came in 2008 when Giles became a rock star in the community of computer programmers who specialize in a language called Ruby. “It seems as if every Ruby programmer on the planet knows my name,” he told me, reflecting on his newfound celebrity. “I literally met people from Argentina and Norway who not only knew who I was but were absolutely shocked that I didn’t expect them to know who I was.”
I’ll dive into the details of how Giles became a star soon, but what I want to emphasize now is that this fame allowed him to take control of his career and to transform it into something he loves. “I had a lot of interest from companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley,” he told me, reflecting on the period that began in 2008. He decided to take a job with ENTP, one of the country’s top Ruby programming firms. They doubled his salary and put him to work on interesting projects. In 2009, Giles was bit by an entrepreneurial bug. He left ENTP and built up a blog and a collection of mini–Web applications that soon brought in enough money to support him. “I had an audience who wanted to know what I thought about a whole ton of different things,” he told me. “In many cases they were happy to pay money just to ask me questions.”
Eventually, he decided that he had had his fill with the solo lifestyle (“working from home is kind of lame when you don’t have roommates, a girlfriend, or even a dog”), so he pursued a longstanding interest in filmmaking by going to work for hitRECord: a company started by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt that provides a Web-based platform for collaborative media projects. It’s not that the money was great (“the Hollywood understanding of what programmers get paid is wildly inaccurate”), but just that it sounded like a lot of fun—one of Giles’s most important criteria for his working life. “It was a pretty great experience,” he told me. “I got to hang out with one of the stars of Inception and the next Batman, drinking beers at his house, that kind of thing.” Not long after I met Giles, after he had successfully scratched his Hollywood itch, he once again moved on. A publisher had asked him to write a book, and he had agreed—and why not? It seemed like an interesting thing to do.
The speed with which Giles bounces from opportunity to opportunity might seem disorienting, but this lifestyle is a perfect match for his hyperkinetic personality. One of Giles’s favorite presentation techniques, for example, is to begin talking faster and faster, accompanying his speech with a rapid series of slides, each featuring a single keyword that flashes on the screen at the exact moment that he utters the term—the oratorical equivalent of a caffeine rush. In other words, he used his capital to build a career custom-fit to his personality, which is why he now loves his working life.
The reason I’m telling Giles’s story here in Rule #4 is that at the core of his rise to fame was his mission. In more detail, Giles committed himself to the mission of bringing together the worlds of art and Ruby programming. He made good on this commitment when he released Archaeopteryx, an open-source artificial intelligence program that writes and plays its own dance music. Watching Archaeopteryx in action can be eerie: An innocuous command typed into the Mac command line starts an aggressive and complicated techno breakbeat; a single value is changed in the Bayesian probability matrices underlying the AI engine; and all of a sudden the beat transforms into something entirely different. It’s as if musical creativity itself has been reduced to a series of equations and some lines of terse code. This feat made Giles a star.
But the question that interests me most about Giles is how he made the leap from a general mission—to bring together art and Ruby programming—to a specific, fame-inducing project: Archaeopteryx. In the last chapter, I highlighted the importance of using little bets to feel out a good way forward from general mission to specific project. Giles, however, adds another layer of nuance to this goal. He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat. His marketing-centric approach is useful for anyone looking to wield mission as part of their quest for work they love.