In the talk, he discusses a few things, but one thing he discusses in the importance in doing things periodically for which we are beginners. If you are getting paid to do something, you're probably not a beginner. One way to practice not making money is take up a hobby in which you are a beginner. I don't mean like: I'm a programmer by day, and I YouTube about programming by night (that's still about programming). Find something completely unrelated to what you're doing.
It must be nice for Kent to just trot off and investigate whether or not his work "matters". For the rest of us, this is a non starter because that effort can't be captured in a story or a task attached to a story on the Jira board. Us mortals might be able to convince our boss that our investigation is worthy of a spike but it'd be bounded to a couple of hours. For us dark matter engineers we need to tell ourselves that, because we're paid, our work "matters".
Putting a YouTube video together is something I'm a beginner at. The content might be programming (Something I'm an expert in), but there is a lot about video production that I do not know. Of course after a short time of doing those YouTube videos I'm no longer a beginner and now I need to find something different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA
In the talk, he discusses a few things, but one thing he discusses in the importance in doing things periodically for which we are beginners. If you are getting paid to do something, you're probably not a beginner. One way to practice not making money is take up a hobby in which you are a beginner. I don't mean like: I'm a programmer by day, and I YouTube about programming by night (that's still about programming). Find something completely unrelated to what you're doing.