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Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#51
lots of answers for how to find something to do, few addressing an important choice of word from OP, "worthwhile". imo, adding this requirement in the beginning of a process is quite destructive, because at each new idea you will be asking, "is this worthwhile?" and inevitably it won't be, because no idea starts that way, and you start the loop again.

i am an artist, which has led me to try to understand creativity and idea-generation closely, and i have stumbled on two concepts that helped me to get going on stuff:

“I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.” - Akira Kurosawa

basically: do something else to trigger your creativity, get more inputs into your brain.

and the second is that great ideas are not born, they are created. you start with something small, an inkling of something. it's dirty, unpolished, stupid even, but then you start to make something of it over time. it grows and you get feedback on it until one day it's become "worthwhile" - or not. then you cut your losses and try again, with more knowledge.

anyway - i think you will find more great ideas if you get started and think less on whether it's worth your time.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#52
> Am I just hard-wired to be mediocre?

"Work with what you love, and you will never love anything ever again".

Software development is your profession. By your account, you keep up to date to new tools and languages - and that is a good practice to keep yourself employable.

Find a hobby outside of programming. Maybe try your hand at creative writing. Maybe learn how to play an instrument. Or maybe try sports, I have a friend that in his late life decided to train to run marathons. Hell, find a group to play tabletop RPGs or Magic the Gathering.

Don't internalize that bullshit hustle culture that tells you that you have to be passionate about your job. Your have to be competent at your job, and that is all. Focus your passions elsewhere.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#54
You say "programming related". Have you considered writing documentation or tutorials for an open source project or explaining some new technology that others may want to use (in the form of a YouTube video or a blog)?

> I keep myself busy playing with new tools and languages when I can be bothered but if I really think about it, I just don't have any problems to solve with these tools.

If you learn about a new tool and write about it/make a video about it for others, you might help them to solve their problems. Or you'll free up the developers to spend more of their time improving the tool further.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#55
What worked for me recently was working on an extremely new technology outside of work. I needed an app for tracking some medical information, and I wanted it to be a web app but didn't know or was willing to learn JS. I work with and love Kotlin, and saw that efforts were being made to run it on the web through WASM. I started building using that, and so far it has been very fun. It kind of returned me to that state I had in my college days where I just wrote code for fun. There's next to no documentation, and one day I spent 3 hours just trying to make a network call. It should be frustrating, but since I don't have any obligations, it's actually just fun. Oh and I also play a bunch of video games, which is nice.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#56

Write personal software. I just wrote a home proxy to facilitate my home services via vanity domains and allow custom tool creation accessed via web pages. This is software that solves problems I have. I don’t care if anyone else sees it. I don’t need the admiration of others.

I absolutely agree. I write little apps for myself that I know no one will probably ever use, but these are arguably the most fun. I also keep coming back to add features that I needed, and feel more productive than my work when I'm doing that.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can we stop diagnosing unknown people based on a 2 paragraph post on HN? the obsession with finding a label for all sorts of mental states is crazy. I agree with the rest of your post though

we should also stop treating depression as the ultimate disease,

Depression is definitely real, and fairly easy to diagnose for.

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#58
It sounds like you think you should do some programming outside of work - that if you don't, there's something wrong with you. But I think you don't have to have something programming to do out of work. You can have a wonderful, full life without it.

I mean, you need something to do outside of work, but it doesn't have to be programming. Go hiking. Play ultimate frisbee. Join a band or a choir. Become a Big Brother or Sister. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Teach some disadvantaged youth how to code. Get involved at a church or a homeless shelter.

Find your thing and do it. It doesn't have to be programming. (And, if you haven't found the programming thing yet, I think that's telling you that programming isn't the thing you're looking for.)

Re: Ask HN: How can I find something worthwhile to do?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we should also stop treating depression as the ultimate disease,

Depression is definitely real, and fairly easy to diagnose for.

Absolutely real. So real that every human being will be depressed sometime in their life. It is just one of multiple mental states we have in our framework.
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