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Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

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11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#11
It gets everyone who's really passionate from time to time. I'd recommend Richard Feynman, who (as a Nobel Laureate) also completely lost interest in physics at a time - here's an abstract about the subject, but the whole book is gold and funny as hell on top: http://loooongway.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/my-english-is-ver...

For me, it's about composing and IT. When I studied musicology, I couldn't compose anymore and just wasn't creative. Then I changed to studying physics and soon burned my interest in the same way. Both of them definitely came back, and by now, I try to keep my interests more balanced!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#13
TL:DR - Stop, be ok with taking a break. Give yourself chance to discover what's left.

The thing to remember is that it's ok to have changes in interests. If our interests never changed we wouldn't make progress.

It sounds like you've got to a point where you are super comfortable with what you know.

Personally after I finished my CS degree I took a big break (2 years) from technology, building things and fixing things. Actually I felt like I hated all of it and that worried me a lot. I wanted to let all the learning settle & see what interest in the field I was left with - if at all.

After two years I made the decison to go into the applications support side of things as I realised I still loved the people part of it. Being the bridge between customers & developers, fixing things & I'm still doing that now. Even my interest in development has come back and I'm building things in my spare time again.

Also my partner & I have transitioned from taking photographs as a hobby, to professionally. I find that each time we get a photography job there's a little 2 month cycle where it goes from being great fun to just being 'done' with it. At that point we take fewer personal photos.

After a little time, the interest comes back we start photographing for fun again and then we get another job and it goes full circle.

I think you can only force creativity so long before it becomes work with obligations etc - that's when the interest fades.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#14
Find a hobby. Something that is completely mindless, and won't use any of the centers of your brain that you use for programming. If you do love programming, you may just be burnt out; if you are like me, you spend long stretches coding for most waking hours. Eventually you'll run risk of burning out.

Me, I build plastic robot models. It's no brain power at all, just precise physical motions. It's mindless and enjoyable, and at the end of the day you have something to show for it.

There's a lot of posts here saying take a break, but you really have to make sure that you are truly taking a break, and not just substituting programming with something else that uses the same parts of your brain.

edit: Here's one of the first models I built. Unpainted just to see what it looks like. http://www.flickr.com/photos/37553996@N07/sets/7215762298535...

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#15
Another angle unfortunately without a solid solution.

If I told people to associate me with one word (a subject), pretty much anyone who knows me would say the same word. I've spent over 10 years learning about it but I've become jaded because just like any subject, you can study about it and you can do it. It's the doing it that has made me jaded and that has effected my will to study it as well.

My best theory is that I simply never defined it for what it is and has been: a goal. In effect, I summited and now I just feel like I'm at the top looking at the view. The solution, it seems, will inevitably be to search out another mountain to summit.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#16

I went through this a lot later in life, and what worked for me was "going academic". I hit Lambda the Ultimate and started challenging myself to learn a lot of really advanced stuff. I'd pick out papers that were hard to understand and go through them step by step, as many times as necessary. I'd also recommend learning to do something complicated in your personal life, like flying, or diving, or fixing cars. Comple…

ugh, if only it were that simple. I've been in technology for almost 20 years, I build cabinets, fix cars (currently swapping engines in an RX-7), garden, etc. I'm just burned out - I'd love to take a 6 week break, but need the money (5 kids, a wife, a mortgage, a car-payment).

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#17
I'm a programmer, 15+ years, and I took up beekeeping. It's nice to do something so completely the opposite of what I do at work. Bees are captivating because they are such complex creatures, but they are almost completely driven by instinct, so they are somewhat predictable. They drive what I need to do to help them succeed, but I still need to use my brain to figure out what help they need. It's a nice balance from writing code and being completely in my head all day.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#18
post #4

I think every developer faces the same problem at one point. What helped me personally was actually working less and find new hobbies (that don't involve computers), and one thing in particular: running. It's hard to keep your enthusiasm at a high level if all you see is work - despite the fact that you might enjoy it. Go out, meet your friends, eat well and excersize. EDIT: Recently I was attending a startup meeting…

+1 for running. It can do wonders for you. Before I started exercising regularly, I used to get stressed out just trying to get through my office work everyday. But since I started running, I don't feel any mental stress anymore. I now have a lot of free time available, in spite of spending an hour or so exercising everyday, and I have managed to design and develop a few iOS apps in my 'spare' time.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#19
Been through the same too, it was about your age at the time too - wonder if that's a common theme.

I fixed it with a change of direction. I'd been tackling a bunch of stuff that my heart wasn't in, figured out what i did still like (turns out i wasnt doing any of it day to day), engineered a change of circumstances at work and popped out the other end feeling happy again.

End to end about 4 months. Did involve a fair amount of persuasion - what i wanted to do didn't fit with the organisation at the time.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with losing interest in your passion?

#20
Having worked in software engineering for 17+ years, I've learned a few things (and gone through at least two-bouts of serious burnout). One was at the end of the first dot-com boom when getting engineering jobs was nearly impossible, so it was a forced long-term vacation. I went to Europe for a bit.

1) In my 20s, I worked all the time. Didn't live a very balanced life, this lead to burnout, especially if you're working in a startup environment where you think you'll retire at 30.

2) I quit engineering twice (but after 6+ months off, new developments in technology that stimulated my imagination eventually brought me back)

3) I've learned to manage not working the burn-out dream, that likely in the long run, your 80 hours weeks aren't going to pay out. It's proven to me that there's plenty of successful people and companies who work realistic hours.

4) Hobbies. I prefer those where I get excercise (like cylcing). Gives me time to clear my mind and keep my body fit and invigorated. I also enjoy gourmet cooking.

5) Managing workload, prioritizing things that are important and recognizing things that you think are work but really procrastinating.

6) Learn other professional skills than typing text into your favorite editor/ide. Speaking at conferences/local user groups, managing project budget, managing teams, managing bigger teams. Doing these other things makes you appreciate the few hours of coding you have left in the week.

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