Side Quests Are The Main Thing
One of my favorite productivity quotes is “keep the main thing, the main thing”. Respect to Stephen Covey, but it needs a refresh.
What happens when the main thing is no longer a thing?
Last week tech Twitter shamed Soham Parekh for working at a bunch of startups simultaneously. Founders called him a scammer. VCs made memes. Reid Hoffman cracked jokes.
What they all missed: Soham was beta-testing our future.
Juggling multiple codebases, context-switching between companies, producing enough to avoid getting fired … is exactly what AI is currently and furiously being trained to do.
While top brass call for less jiggly mouse jigglers and background checks, they’re missing the point.
AI will be doing millions of jobs and pushing code to thousands of companies and we won’t call it fraud. We’ll call it efficiency.
The question then becomes: When AI can out-Soham Soham, what's left for Soham? What’s left for the rest of us? Luckily, we’ve been here before.
The Ancient Technology of Side Quests
Every civilization that’s succeeded at scale has grappled with this in some way. The Greeks created philosophy. The Romans tended to their gardens. Victorians had competitive fern collecting aka “fern fever”.
For us in 2025 it’s the same, but different.
Embarking on a side quest today isn't procrastination, it’s preparation.
It's your psyche's way of diversifying its portfolio of meaning. A long-term investment in your mental health index.
I’m feeling particularly smart about this personal finance metaphor right now because, like investing in the stock market, the earlier you start the better 😎
When everyone's stressing about "finding their purpose", you'll already have a decade of medieval blacksmithing under your belt. Or competitive dog grooming. Or building miniature cities out of RAM chips. Whatever!
You won't be prompt-engineered away because you’ll be too weird to be in the training data.
You'll have a community that appreciates you for something other than transferring Linear tickets from “Triage” to “Backlog”, respectfully.
We’ve been exploring side quests as a species since forever, so you can definitely do it. There’s nothing stopping you, historically speaking.
The Physics of Side Quests
When I say you need a side quest, you might think I mean a side-hustle. "Oh, like Soham but legal?" No. God no. That's Work 2.0, and AI is coming for that too.
A true side quest operates under different laws of physics:
You'd do it even if it never made money
Progress is measured in mastery, not metrics
The community is as important as the craft
It's weirdly specific to your personal obsessions
Starting badly is the entire point
It’s not just a backup plan, it’s a parallel universe where a different version of you gets to exist.
You can literally be anything you want, if you just start. Crazy. 🤯
The Pointless Paradox
When choosing a side quest, it’s important to not dismiss any option too quickly. This is because of what I call the Pointless Paradox.
The more pointless your side quest seems today, the more crucial it becomes when the AI revolution hits.
I’ll break this down more along with specific types of side quests in my next post.
Make your side thing the main thing!