mrusme

I've been struggling with this for a very long time and I'm looking for actual, practical suggestions here.

What has been your secret ingredient for finding someone to team-up/work with, be it on either open source projects, small side-gigs/-ideas or maybe even actual startups -- especially when money won't be the number one motivating factor and a full-time gig might be taking a big chunk of time off your days.

Over the past few years I've been meeting people who work in similar areas as I do and who share similar interest. I sometimes worked alongside them for significant periods of time on paid gigs and, most of the time, team-work went very well. Yet, only a few opportunities presented, where it was able to team-up with them, in order to pursue an idea either of us came up with. And in most cases, the undertakings dried up very quickly due to various reason -- most of the time this being the lack of the commitment that would have been needed to actually make something happen.

A significant discrepancy for me has also been the work-life-balance. The people I worked with usually valued personal time differently than I did for myself, leading to a disproportionate amount of invested time and hence commitment. I'm far from being someone who'd enjoy a 100hr work week (thinking of a submission by someone that I recently saw here), yet I do believe investing less than 16hr/week into a side-gig might not be enough to actually pull something off in a reasonable amount of time. And even short "sprints" of increased commitment usually ended up in dissatisfaction over a the work-life-balance on someone's end, eventually leading to frustration on all ends.

What are your experiences and how did you end up finding your team mate/business partner/co-founder, who you shared a vision with and where everyone was committed to walk the path at a similar pace in order to successfully realize the idea you both/all pursued?

Thank you.