Of course it did.
Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
91–100 of 193 posts
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#92The person who said this article should have been titled "Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing" is right on. I've met musicians who were totally uninterested in going to see anyone who wasn't "happening." You can't blame them, since they're trying to make a living. I always thought about programming: "I like it OK. Sometimes I like it a lot, but it's a living. I don't do it at…
Funny, I bet many of us actually do do programming at home for fun! Also the day job. However I wouldn’t do the day job type of programming at home for fun, so I guess it is a similar concept.
A lot of people do. Nothing wrong with it.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#93Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…
> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it.
If you want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business.
I'm a professional software developer and a hobbyist software developer and while I could have sold some of my hobby software I explicitly choose not to. The reason is that selling something immediately creates responsibilities that, for my hobby, I just don't want to have. A business is something of it's own beast.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part do you disagree with? Money is a way to control the masses and it has always been used that way. The technology currently exists to do away with all wealth disparities and achieve a true meritocracy wherein individual talents are developed to benefit everyone collectively but most people can not conceive of what such a world would look like so they chase money and end up miserable. In the grand scheme of t…
> The technology currently exists to do away with all wealth disparities and achieve a true meritocracy Can you name that technology?
Give every child a library and see what happens. It could be electronic or otherwise.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#95This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.
This is exactly why I'm pursuing programming. I hate it with a passion. I'm an artist at heart, so programming is a great fit because, not only does it pay much more than art, it's completely artless, so it won't ruin my desire for making art at the end of the day.
> programming is completely artless
Strong disagree - although it depends on how you define art
Is adding form to function artless? Is architecture artless?
If you use a highly choreographed engineered process for creating a piece of art - does that make the outcome artless? One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875
i also think art is defined by the perception of the viewer (and has far less to do with the creator than is usually presumed!)
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#96This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.
Yep, I loved programming when I was introduced to it in 6th grade or so. There was an after-school program where we could go to the high school and use their TRS-80 computers. I was instantly hooked.
Fast forward through a career of doing it, and I am sick of it. When I retire I want to de-tech my life as much as I can. I'll probably keep a smartphone but I don't think I'll have a computer in the house.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you prioritize your time? I see a lot of similarities in us. I feel the same way about my main job, though at a smaller firm. I also consult with small businesses on the side and have had very similar experience. What I don't have are any for-profit ventures (of my own or with friends), and I've almost totally stopped coding for myself. I used to write code for fun all the time, and would wonder that many of m…
> How do you prioritize your time? When I worked in an office this was difficult. I had to assign values to certain activities, sometimes subliminally. For instance, being that my personal coding was a lot more creative it sometimes taught me concrete enough patterns that I could take to work. That made it a higher order of value. I was making enough money at my day job that consulting wasn't needed , but I took less…
Ha, I started a little kombucha brewery as well, and ended up ditching it because it was too much work to "always have kombucha". The supplies instead now sit in my cabinet and mock me. Thanks for letting me peek into your routines a little. I think I see a couple things here I can implement myself without totally upending my life.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're an outlier. Studies have shown repeatedly that monetary compensation undermines intrinsic motivation: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv > The authors synthesized the results from 128 controlled experiments. The results highlighted consistent negative effects of incentives — from marshmallows to dollars — on intrinsic motivation. These effects were particularly strong when the tasks were in…
Yes but no. It's always with disappointing rewards tgat those studies are done. Pay people considerable amount and then compare.
That's a different question. People like money. People may like the activity and the money combined more than just the activity. But the studies show that they like it less than the activity and the money not tied to one another.
If Bezos wrote me a large enough check to never participate in specific hobbies again, I would take him up on it. I would be happier than before I took the offer. But I would clearly be even happier with a check that wasn't tied to ruining a hobby.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#99Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…
> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business. I'm a professional software developer and a hobbyis…
I dont really think you are disagreeing with each other. The first poster is saying find a niche where you can stand out. I'd agree with that - never fight a superior adversary on ther own turf. But it doesn't mean totally throwing market concerns to the wind.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#100many years ago, i wanted to turn my passion in photography to my career. I did a few professional gigs and found out that it was turning out to be a job; and i was enjoying less of what i loved. in fact, it was making me hate it. I was wise enough at that time to stop it.