Treat life like a gradient descent algorithm. Analyze your current landscape, adjacencies, possibilities and try different things. See what happens. You will get disinterested or fail 99% of the time. But that 1% will lead you to the next iteration down the gradient. Rinse and repeat.
Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
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Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#32You might find benefit to writing down your thoughts about each one of the previous occupations and see if there are any recognizable patterns that you can identify and address.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#33I love to write code, I love to ship products and I love to build businesses.
But what I really love, what drives me, is solving interesting problems. That's my entire career. Solve interesting problems.
"We're building a web2.0 exercise tracking..." No!
"We're putting health records on the block..." Nein!
"We're improving how people buy insuran..." Non!
"We're creating a mobile app to submit expens..." Nee!
"We're building a SaaS to improve cable modem analy..." Nie!
"We're using computer vision to identify fossilized cat shit." Oh hell yes!
At meetups people ask me, "what do you do?"
And I respond, "Whatever the !@#$ I want to, it makes money, and everyone goes home happy."
I haven't worked a day in my life. I play, every day. And any time I've come close to discovering "it's just another job" I go and find something else to do.
My response on LinkedIn or AngelList when approached by business people and recruiters with their dreadful job opening is usually along the lines of "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#34I built a fairly simple browser extension that users love to use. Heck, people even paid for it (it's freemium but an open-source project). Now and then, I get an appreciation email from a user, a notification from the chrome web store that someone rated it 5-star, or a new purchase notification from Stripe.
Random doses of serotonin make my day. In a nutshell, I love working on it because people find it helpful and value it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#35The problem, as far as I can make it, is that the thing(s) you love will probably not look like a corporate job.
It's my strong feeling that people don't actually love jobs, they love kinds of work, but only as long as they have agency. Once the work becomes a job it tends to get subordinated to profit motives, instead of your own creative drives.
My best bet is that if you want to do something you love you have to somehow end up working for yourself.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#36I work as a manager of a Developer Relations team, but I'm also a software engineer and writer. I've identified two things I "love" to do in my life: writing software (usually automation-type things that make my life or someone else's life easier), and writing (articles, books, etc.).
I discovered that I love writing software when I was a kid (maybe 12 years old?) by writing automation bots for video games: it was so incredibly fun to write a bot that would play the game, level up your characters, and do things that would otherwise take thousands of hours of human grinding to achieve. This passion never left me, and now, more than 20 years later, I still spend a good chunk of time building little scripts/tools/utilities/apps that help me in various ways.
The writing was something that I also got started on early. I discovered my love of writing through IRC where I'd routinely answer people's programming questions and eventually write blog posts explaining answers in more depth than I could fit into a short IRC conversation.
I don't blog as much today (life gets busy), but I do spend a lot of time writing at work, working on the occasional long-form blog post, and ... journaling.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#37I fell in love with developing measurement equipment. It started in grad school, realizing that I really wasn't cut out for a basic research career (in a massively overcrowded academic job market), but that I got a lot of satisfaction from being able to solve hard technical problems. Today, measurement systems combine many of my hobbies, including electronics and programming. I would get bored with becoming a special…
Those last two paragraphs feel like the trick to me. Either work on something you're invested in, and if you can't, pick something outside of work.
I personally like D&D. Spending time with good friends wroting stories together is one of my favorite ways to spend time, and the excitement for it has gotten me through more than one hard week.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#38I have one thing that gives me a deep sense of fulfillment and a feeling that I was not living those few hours of my life in vain. That is writing fiction. paradoxically (or maybe not) it is not as rewarding process-wise as writing software, which has the strongest instant gratification loop after, maybe, video games. You can’t really be a writer, however, unless you want to die in poverty, etc.
You can make a living as a writer but you need to crank out 4-5 novels a year, which is more than I can do!
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#39The problem, as far as I can make it, is that the thing(s) you love will probably not look like a corporate job. It's my strong feeling that people don't actually love jobs, they love kinds of work, but only as long as they have agency. Once the work becomes a job it tends to get subordinated to profit motives, instead of your own creative drives. My best bet is that if you want to do something you love you have to s…
My problem is I get bored and lose motivation when working alone. I’m thinking a job would be a good way to keep me moving forward?
I’ve tried teaming up with people on projects but it seems like if it’s not tied to a paycheck they flake out pretty quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
#40I love to write code, I love to ship products and I love to build businesses. But what I really love, what drives me, is solving interesting problems. That's my entire career. Solve interesting problems. "We're building a web2.0 exercise tracking..." No! "We're putting health records on the block..." Nein! "We're improving how people buy insuran..." Non! "We're creating a mobile app to submit expens..." Nee! "We're b…
I’m sold. How do I achieve this?