Live data from Hacker News

Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

shant.nu

11–20 of 193 posts

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#12
I think people who have never run a business believe that running say, a bakery, involves baking all day. Anyone who has ever run a business should know that is false. Running a business involves doing all the stuff around the main task (marketing! accounts! infrastructure! customer support!) so that the people doing the main task can get on and do it.

If you understand this you won't turn your hobby into a business and be disappointed.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#13
post #3

This 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.

I find my job as a software engineer and programming for fun to be extremely different, to the point where my job hasn't damaged my passion for fun programming on whatever I want.

It's like if you had a passion for painting and got a job that consisted of 50% deciding what solid colour to paint walls and 50% painting walls solid colours.

This varies a lot. I could imagine a game dev whose hobby resembles their passion a lot more.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#15
post #4

Advice from a friend: Never do your PhD in a subject you love, because afterwards you'll hate it.

Did PhD in a topic. Still like the topic. My advice: people over generalize from their n=1 experience of doing a PhD. There are so many differences between fields, universities, supervisors...

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#16
post #4

Advice from a friend: Never do your PhD in a subject you love, because afterwards you'll hate it.

I actually enjoyed my PhD studies (in Algebra). "Love" would be a strong word, but discovering new interesting mathematical facts was a cool activity.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#18
post #3

This 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.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#19

My hobby is board gaming. I often see people on board game forums asking questions about wanting to open up a board game store/cafe. My thought is always, "Do you want to hate board games? Because that is the path to hating board games."

When I was in Pigeon Forge, TN, they had a puzzle store. I thought it was the coolest thing. Tons of different puzzles. Niche. I couldn’t see having one in every town though

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Never do a PhD, because afterwards you'll hate it"?

How about "Never do, because afterwards you'll hate it"?

This is unfortunately true more often than not at least in my experience.
Post reply on HN