Ask HN: How did you find your passion?

maintaining passion over a longer period of time (turning the hobby/passion into a career) is much harder than finding it. it requires a routine with a rule to restrict/timebox the joyous activity as much as one timeboxes the chores.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/

A few examples of how I came across them:

- Photography -

Started working at a company where photography is front and center in everything I do. Started there with no real skills or gear, am currently several years in, have a DSLR, several lenses, am comfortable with Lightroom and Photoshop, understand photography technique, and am actually proud of some of my work. With the responsibilities of life eating up my time, these days I focus more on mobile device photography, and on taking fewer, better photos.

- Espresso -

Was introduced to this by someone at work who helped train me and guide me through getting gear. Got a home machine thinking it would be an easy way to get my espresso fix at home and realized how deep and nuanced the world of espresso is. Turns out, it tends to be a good match for data nerds who spend their day optimizing things. I've now built several spreadsheets modeling things like my savings over time, brew ratios, etc.

- Role-playing Games -

Lucked into randomly discovering where the Gygax family would meet to play D&D with their friends, and started playing every weekend with them in high school. Something about being with people who are at the "top of the game" (no pun intended), deeply passionate about it, and welcoming to newcomers likely made it easier for me to get immersed.

- Cooking -

Got sick of microwaved meals in college by week two. Discovered asian super markets a few blocks away, got some cookbooks and some gear, and started learning how to cook authentic asian cuisines. Then started reading up through Julia Childs "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," lived with a couple other passionate foodies, and never looked back.

If I had to pick out a few common threads between these, it would probably be that they had mechanisms for giving direct, and fairly immediate feedback, room to optimize so I could see tangible gains from my efforts, and that I was exposed to others who were similarly passionate, and often more experienced. This last bit is critical I think as it let my passion continue growing without being dampened by others around me not having as much interest in them. Ie. when you start geeking out about something and someone is clearly getting bored, that lessens my excitement. On the flip side, when they start geeking out too, we start building on each other's excitement, and it reinforces the enjoyment I get from the passion.

In terms of discovering new passions, it tends to be somewhat random, but now I'm actively on the lookout having discovered a few so far. Shockingly, Reddit has been useful for helping gauge where I'm mildly interested, or potentially on the verge of finding a passion. When something catches my interest, I browse the main subreddit for it, and if I find I'm losing hours of time consuming everything there, that's a fairly good indicator.

Another thing that is somewhat obvious only in hindsight, is to ask others about their passions. There's so many random things to discover in the world, and when someone shares their passion, you get a glimpse beyond "the thing" into what gets them to geek out over it. Often times it may not be the thing itself, but a trait of the thing (ie. process optimization coupled with caffeine addiction for espresso).

Hope that helps!

Also, check out the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat if you haven't already. It's not a cookbook per se, more of a technique and cooking theory book, but it really changed the way I approach cooking most dishes.

I have passion for software development. I am good at it but somehow I never managed to do it in an environment that doesn't kill my passion for it. I have done my own thing but failed at the business side like selling.

I really wish I had passion for something I am good at and that also allows me to do it for a living instead of feeling like I am wasting my life sitting in a cubicle. People who have managed to make their passion into a career should be envied.

I think of my life like a series of lit candles. I actually visualize it as such.

Each candle represents a project, a way to make money. When a candle dies or the flame goes out, it means I got bored of that project, it didn't make money, it failed, whatever.

The goal of my life is to have several lit candles at once, and not only that, but a better and better FALLBACK.

A fallback in my terms is basically "if EVERYTHING else fails, you will have THAT thing as something that makes you happy/will carry you the rest of your life". It's basically something you have already achieved, or have, or ONE HUNDRED percent certain you can get it if you don't currently have it.

The point of a fallback is that it lets you focus on something, giving it your 100%, without that nagging feeling like you're "wasting time" or FOMO. You can fully commit to it, and just enjoy it for what it is, without a fear of failure (because why should you care if it fails, you can always do X, your fallback)

When I was 22, my fallback was "I can at least learn real estate, which isn't that fun, but I can make money and I can backpack around the world on a shoestring budget"

insert more projects, more success, more freelancing... all driven by the limitless energy stemming from the fact that the 'worst case scenario' wasn't actually so bad.

When I was 25, dozens more lit candles, dozens more burn out, my fallback was "at least I can do freelancing for $20/hr for the rest of my life and have true freedom to do whatever I want"

When I was 28-29, my fallback was "at least I can make $230K+/year coding, working for someone else, but still making an awesome living and traveling"

When I was 30, my fallback was "at least I can make companies in a weekend and just make money from all my side projects, and potentially try to hit a winner to retire, and if I don't hit it soon I can always go back to working"

When I was 33, my fallback was "at least I have the relationships with my network that I aggressively spent time building to build at least one 50-100 million dollar business... at least I have about 20 very successful people wanting me to build stuff/start companies with me and any one of them could be a winner.. and if EVERY ONE ELSE FAILS I can always get a job and travel"

That's where I'm at right now. Each fallback increases over time, just keep replacing candles with more candles and let others burn out.

I probably have gone through 500 candles... some burn for years before they go out, others burn for a day. I have over 100 private repos on my GitHub of (fully-written) projects, 90% of them bombed. I've met an insane amount of awesome people in the process, and have learned a lot. The companies I built that are successful are now are doing well, including one in the alexa top 50.

All of this came from a boy sitting in a room of my friend who graduated from harvard saying "you should learn programming" and me thinking "Im just an art student, I'm way too dumb for that"

So programming / business / companies is one passion.

For my other passions, guitar, drawing, painting, biking... those don't come EXTREMELY naturally to me, except drawing, but I have drawn since I was a kid and it just 'makes sense'. Just because I'm really good at it (fairly early on) however doesn't mean I don't struggle with the resistance to doing it every day. Sometimes I look at people who are obsessed on instagram and can just paint or draw for 10 hours a day... and wish I had that. I suppose in that sense coding is my most crazed obsession, I can program for 15 hours a day fairly effortlessly. But other hobbies I have to work for it.