In every video game I played as a kid, there were two kinds of missions.
The main quest. Save the princess. Kill the dragon. Stop the evil emperor. Big, clear, important. That's what the game was about.
The side quests. Help a farmer find his missing chickens. Carry a letter to somebody's grandma. Run a weird errand for a guy in a hut. Small. Optional. Mostly, you skipped them.
The funny thing is, if you actually did the side quests, they often turned out to be the best part of the game. The story got weirder and more interesting. The world got bigger. You got items the main quest never gave you. You ran into characters you never would have met. By the end, the side quests felt like the real game, and the main quest felt like the boring backbone everything else hung from.
Real life works exactly the same way.
The main quest is your job. Your degree. Your career path. Your title. The thing you're "supposed" to be doing.
The side quests are the weird projects. The hobbies. The random Tuesday night experiment. The skill you picked up for no reason. The friend group you fell into by accident. The thing you started doing because you were bored.
People treat the main quest like it's the point. They squeeze the side quests in around the edges, when they have time. If they ever have time.
This post is about why that's exactly backwards.
The biggest things in most people's lives didn't come from their main quest. They came from their side quests. The main quest paid the rent. The side quests made the life.
Let me show you what I mean.
Where the famous stuff actually came from
You'd think the things people are famous for were the things they spent their whole life chasing. The main thing. The big plan. The mission.
Almost never.
Twitter started as a side project at a podcasting company called Odeo. The podcasting company was failing. A few employees, on a weekend hackathon, built a little messaging tool for fun. The main quest died. The side quest is now a piece of global infrastructure.
Slack started as a chat tool that game developers built for themselves while they were trying to make a video game. The video game flopped. The chat tool was an accident, made to scratch their own itch. They turned it into a company. The game is forgotten. The accident is worth tens of billions.
YouTube was supposed to be a video dating site. Nobody used it for dating. People started posting cat videos and concert clips. The founders shrugged, dropped the dating part, and let the side use become the main thing.
Post-it Notes came from a 3M scientist who failed to invent a strong adhesive. The weak adhesive sat in a drawer for years. Then another 3M employee, fooling around with the leftover weak glue, used it to keep bookmarks from falling out of his hymnal at church. The failed invention became a billion-dollar product, by way of a side quest at a church choir.
Penicillin came from a moldy petri dish that Alexander Fleming was about to throw away. The real experiment had failed. The mold growing in the failed dish became the most important medical discovery of the twentieth century.
The pattern repeats so often it almost has to be a law.
The thing you set out to do is rarely the thing that matters most. The thing that matters most almost always comes from the work you did on the side, while doing the other thing.
Why this is true
I think there are three reasons.
First, side quests have no pressure. When you're working on the main quest, the stakes are high. You're trying to get promoted. You're trying to make the rent. You're trying to prove something to somebody. That pressure narrows your thinking. You play it safe. You stay close to what's already worked.
A side quest has no pressure because nobody is watching and nothing depends on it. You can try weird things. You can throw out the rules. You can be a beginner again. Your brain works differently when there's no audience. It explores. It plays. It finds.
Almost all genuine novelty comes out of low-pressure exploration. High-pressure environments produce optimization, which is great for refining things that already exist and terrible for finding things that don't.
Second, side quests pick you, not the other way around. The main quest is usually picked for you by the world. Your parents, your school, your industry, your social class, all conspire to tell you what your main quest should be. You absorbed those instructions before you were old enough to argue.
A side quest comes from the inside. Nobody told you to start it. You started it because something in your gut said "what if?" That kind of signal is rare and important. It's a signal from the part of you that actually has taste. The part of you that knows what you, specifically, are wired for.
When you follow the side-quest signal, you're using a much better compass than the one your culture handed you.
Third, side quests teach you what nothing else can. The main quest builds the skills your industry already recognizes. The side quest builds skills nobody has put a name on yet. Strange combinations of skills. Crossovers. Unexpected pairings.
You spent your day job becoming a competent X. On the side, for fun, you became a decent Y. Now you can do X plus Y, which almost nobody else can do, because almost nobody bothers to learn things they don't have to.
Most career-changing moments happen at the intersection of X and Y. The X-and-Y people invent new categories. The pure-X people compete in old ones with everybody else.
What gets in the way
If side quests are so important, why does almost everyone neglect them?
Because the world is built to discourage them.
Your time is full. The main quest fills your calendar. There's barely room left over. Side quests demand time you don't have. You squeeze them in late at night, in stolen moments, on weekends. After a while you give up.
They look like a waste. You can't put a side quest on your resume. You can't explain it to your in-laws. You can't justify it on a cost-benefit basis, because the benefits don't exist yet. From the outside, it looks like you're playing while everyone else is working.
They're scary. Side quests are usually outside your skill set. You're a beginner again. You're bad at the thing. You produce embarrassing first attempts. Adults aren't supposed to be beginners. The whole culture trains you to perform competence, all the time, in everything you do. Side quests force you to suck in public, which most people would rather die than do.
They don't pay. Not at first. Not for a long time. The main quest pays today. The side quest pays in some unknown amount, at some unknown time, in some unknown form, maybe. The math seems crazy. Why would anybody spend hours on something that might not pay anything?
The answer is that the math is wrong.
The math everybody uses calculates the direct return on the side quest. Hours in, dollars out, divided by the probability of working. By that math, no side quest is worth doing.
But the side quest has indirect returns nobody is counting. The skills you build. The people you meet doing it. The ideas it sparks for your main quest. The version of you that gets formed by doing weird stuff. The mental flexibility. The connections to fields you'd never touch otherwise.
When you count all of that, the math flips. The side quest is one of the highest-return uses of your time, if you can survive the part where it looks like it's paying nothing.
How to pick a good one
Not all side quests are equal. Some are time sinks. Some are seeds.
A few questions that separate them:
Does it bug me even when I'm not working on it? A good side quest has a hook in your brain. You think about it in the shower. You jot down notes on napkins. You wake up with new ideas about it. Bad side quests don't pull at you. They sit there waiting for you to remember them.
Does it teach me a skill that compounds? Some side quests just consume time. Watching shows. Playing games. Scrolling. They're fine. They're not what I mean. A good side quest builds something in you. A skill, a craft, a body of work, a network of people, a piece of knowledge. Even if the side quest itself doesn't pan out, the thing it built in you stays.
Does it intersect with what I already do? The best side quests are in a field that's adjacent to your day job. Not the same field. Adjacent. Far enough away to be different. Close enough to cross-pollinate. A coder learning to draw. A musician learning business. An engineer writing fiction. The combination creates the magic.
Could I keep doing this for years if nobody paid me? The side quests that pay off are the ones you'd do for free anyway. If you can imagine yourself doing it for ten years with nothing to show for it and being fine, that's a strong signal. The side quests you do for some imagined future payoff usually die when the payoff is slow to arrive.
Does it scare me a little? The best side quests have a tiny bit of risk. Not financial risk. Identity risk. They make you a beginner. They put you in rooms where you don't know the language. They force you to be bad at something publicly. That discomfort is the cost. It's also the proof that the side quest is real.
How to actually do this
If you're convinced and you want to start, here's what works.
Block one specific recurring hour. Not "I'll do it when I have time." You will never have time. Pick a real hour on a real day. Tuesday night, 8 to 9 PM. Sunday morning, 7 to 8 AM. Lunch break on Thursdays. Whatever it is, put it on the calendar like it's a meeting with a doctor. Treat it the same way. Show up.
Tell nobody at first. Most side quests die because somebody at a dinner party makes a sarcastic comment and you stop. Protect the project until it's strong enough to defend itself. That takes months, not days. Keep it small and yours.
Make something, don't just learn something. Reading about a thing is not doing the thing. Watching videos about a thing is not doing the thing. Producing output is the only practice that counts. Start before you're ready. The first thing you make will be bad. That's correct. That's the price.
Show one trusted person at three months. Not the world. One person. The right person. Somebody who will be honest but not crushing. Their reaction tells you a lot. The side quest is starting to become real when you can show it to one person and survive.
Don't quit when it gets boring. Every side quest hits a boring middle. The new-shiny feeling wears off. You're not good enough yet for it to feel like flow. This is where most people quit. Push through. The other side of the boring middle is where the side quest starts to actually do something for you.
Notice the unexpected gifts. The point of the side quest is not the side quest. It's what the side quest gives you on the way. A skill that suddenly applies to your job. A friend who introduces you to your next chapter. An idea that becomes the seed of something bigger. Watch for those side effects. They are usually the actual payoff, arriving sideways.
The thing to take with you
Most people will spend their whole life on the main quest somebody else handed them.
They will become very competent at it.
They will reach the end of it, look around, and realize the main quest was never the point. The point was the side quests they kept meaning to start.
You can avoid this.
You can start one side quest this week. A small one. Something nobody would understand if you told them about it. Something just for you.
You don't need permission. You don't need a plan. You don't need a payoff. You just need to start, in the time you have, with the tools you can get, on the thing that's already pulling at you.
The big stuff in your life is going to come from a side quest. That's just the pattern. The main quest will pay your bills and look respectable. The side quest will be where the actual magic happens.
The princess is fine. She doesn't need you that bad.
Go find the farmer with the missing chickens.
