Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?

Making music. It is a life long project. Learning to play instruments (guitar first then drums, piano and bass) Then understanding what ‘my’ music is and developing that relationship. Meeting my soul-sister and making ‘our’ music and understanding how creative magic is. Becoming a producer and all the tech parts of recording, engineering etc

Going through the phases of life and music with regards to ego/success and just standing back and just feeling complete love towards this amazing thing we have been blessed to be part of the human experience.

Interesting problems have interesting solutions. In my mind, it's rare that an interesting problem would have a run-of-the-mill solution, because if it did, you could hire a freelancer off Craigslist for $30 an hour. Interesting problems are rarely ones that can be solved with a Wordpress install, a few plugins, and a downloaded theme derived from Bootstrap.

Boring problems don't usually have interesting solutions. I mean, you could make the solution interesting, you could over-engineer it, or choose to solve it in a novel and unique way, but it is not often that you'll be given that opportunity. Un-interesting problems with un-interesting solutions usually get given to the lowest bidder.

I built a cat toy, it's a 42" LCD screen with a touch interface overlaid on top, and then wrote a "bot" that exhibits prey response and can be "caught" by the cat. Fun project, had to figure out how to do multiple toe bean rejection. And a whole bunch of other tech too.

Built a cat toy, it's a home built 3D printed robot arm, that has a plastic rod as the end effector, with a feather on it, that is radio controlled, and can be controlled via a 3D application running in a web browser.

I built a semi-autonomous, self-driving radio control car that can race a human controlled radio control car, and can also give the human operator a first person view, like a racing drone. It used various solutions from computer vision, low-latency video streaming, low-latency, long-range WiFi, and so forth.

I built a human controlled robot to clean the litter box, which then farms out the job to people on Mechanical Turk.

I built an app that helps you find the jigsaw puzzle piece you want when solving a jigsaw.

I built an app that can scan your Scrabble tiles and the Scrabble board, and tell you which word to play for the most value.

I built a number of bots and assist bots that play a popular MMORPG.

I built a dashboard for my home that tells me what the weather is like, where my cats are, where the family wallets are located, where I left my phone.

I built a resume website with a space invaders game embedded in it.

Plus there are hundreds of other projects. Each one interesting in their own way. But what I studiously do is avoid the CRUD apps that are solved problems.

Currently I am tinkering with a Star Trek Picard-like, flight deck transparent "holographic", curved display with head/eye tracking and touch interface. I am also building, as my day job, a computer vision solution that will do full body and face tracking for a new VR HMD.

But yeah, the cat shit was kinda interesting.

Does it also offer frequent name-dropping of the author's celebrity friends and personal stories which can be best explained by 'survivorship bias'?

You’ll probably “love doing” anything where you have autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

I love problem solving and mentoring people.

I would be happy doing this in any context. My career is in software development but if I worked at a bakery, restaurant, or any other job or company I can think of I’d probably find ways to build teams, mentor people, and solve the hard problems.

For the first few years of my career I tried to build things that I was interested in and would obsess about the thing but was in love with the process itself. Later in my career I would look for companies with a mission and a purpose that I loved and a founding team and leaders I aligned with.

I don’t think loving what you do day to day is important or even loving the mission or end goal. A job can just be a job and you can use maximize for free time and/or compensation and use them as the autonomy part for how to spend your free time to master something for a given purpose. That purpose can be something bigger than yourself or just your own personal fulfillment which is also worthwhile.

I plan to retire from tech in a few years and do something else, not because I no longer love it but because I want to try new aspects of problem solving etc. would love to sell physical goods like a cafe or plant store or something.

It sounds like maybe you’re framing the problem wrong. Instead of looking for a magical feeling from the day to day tasks of a specific role or field, try to think about society, how you want to fit into it and what you want your contribution to be (purpose), find a company or non profit or whatever that is trying to move the needle on that topic and have that impact, and then look for roles where you can develop mastery and have autonomy.

Alternatively try different hobbies and interest and try to find one that inspires you. Founder, musician, scientist, philosopher, etc. who inspires you or looks cool. In awe of the guitarist from led zeppelin and then pick up a guitar and work at it every day to develop mastery. Once you reach some level of mastery in some thing you can better reason about other things you might be interested in in a personal or professional context.

What a beautiful and realistic reply.