Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?

Most weeks I expend about 40 hours (mostly remote) working as a software developer in order to pay the bills. At the same time I'm spending between 10 and 40 hours working on my own startup as I don't want to be an employee forever. I also have a young family and I really do my best to fulfil my obligations as a parent, as is fair and right.

A day for me does not stop from the moment I wake up (7am) to the moment I get into bed (11pm) and weekends are no different. Sometimes I feel like the entire world is crushing in around me, sometimes I wonder if it's all too much, but then I get back to it and I keep moving forward.

I've been doing this for about two years now. There are definite ups and downs, where my energy and ability to produce (code, or business related output) is greater, and lesser. Sometimes I feel really shitty for not doing more than a few hours side work in a week. Sometimes, when I have taken a weekend off, I have felt guilt.

It's tough. You find you are doing essentially 2 full time jobs, 7 days a week, almost 52 weeks a year, but I was raised to work and to work hard, while I am young, while I can.

I think if you want to do something like this, you have to have a solid reason. If you have a family, even more so, you have to make sure it's fair to them too.

I wish I knew why I feel the urge to work 24/7, why I feel guilt if I don't work, and whether this is actually a problem?

Alas, it's time for me to get back to it.

> I'm blogging one a week about dev stuff and it takes 2-4 hours depending on the topic.

I'm so jealous! :)

I publish a new post once every couple of months. Some posts take really long to prepare, like 40 hours (and more) of work long. The biggest problem is that it doesn't really show - for that much time my posts should be each as long as "Steve Yegge's Best Of" anthology.

I'm not even sure it's worth it as a learning experience, but at least it's still fun. I'm being told that my writing quality improves, too, so it's not that bad overall. It's still irritating that every time I try to write a post in a short amount of time it somehow spirals out of control and becomes 3 full days of work...

Don't contribute out of guilt. You'll never make anything good that way.

At certain points in your life, you'll be inspired to build something for its own sake. THAT will be something worthwhile to contribute. Until then, chill out.

Want to increase your odds of that happening? Train your creativity. How do you do that? Play!

Play with things. Fuck around. Use it in ways it's not meant to be used. Break it! Have you ever seen kids keep themselves occupied by using things in weird, wrong, and probably useless ways? Do that!

Do things that nobody else is doing, not for what riches it might hold (because it probably won't), but for the pure joy of play and exploration, not caring about the judgments of everyone who will inevitably shake their head.

Randomness breeds novelty.

Oh no, we have big problems with coolness in tech.

Can you cite any credible source other than subjective reasoning for creativity being a limited resource that we spend during a dayjob and have almost none left to build something at home?