I tried it out, the boss have to pay to read the message. Kind of smart way to get some income but from the bosses' point of view, having to pay money to get a bitter message will just make the day for them...
It's true that nothing really stops you from just doing it, but in my opinion without anyone there to anticipate your accomplishment it's hard to motivate your self. Sure if you have natural talent, meaning you can naturally generate motivation without anyone's positive feedback. But without any positive external feedback your natural motivation will probably die out.
I can relate to the author in many ways, but I didn't take that lesson away from my time in school. In my view, I was born with a natural motivation to invent and analyze things, and my struggle was to find the right environment, with the right people and tools that could grow this motivation rather than killing it with indifference. It's all about meeting the right people who gives you that push.
The author said he didn't need any professor to get started, it's true, but he did need a friend to give him that push, that showed him that at least someone wanted to see him "do it".
I agree, as some agile guru said, a plan is useless but planning is essential. An important thing along with avoiding making useless features is also to avoid building a design that is hostile against features we do need to add. Building a good design without having any anticipation of what will come is in my point of view impossible. The tricky part is to keep the anticipations and assumptions to a reasonable level.
So in agile terms, besides splitting down the work by user stories it can also be split down by function (make it work), design (make it beautiful) and last performance (make it fast). Quite a natural approach to prioritize that order depending on what stage the project is, early, mid or late. It requires a continuous refactoring but in the business man's point of view it's rework. But the end result will probably look more like a second generation product rather than a first gen with mediocre function, design and performance.