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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly disagree with this article...

I firmly believe that if you're passionate at something, it's extremely easy to become extremely knowledgeable and/or highly skilled at it to a point that it's valuable to the world. Then it's just a case of applying your ingenuity to figuring out how to make your passion relevant. Once you make it relevant in today's ever changing market, it's then just a case of positioning it effectively to make it profitable.

I refuse to believe otherwise... every passion is worth something and makes a difference. If it didn't, then why are we genetically predisposed to them? What would be the purpose in this? Why aren't we all just worker bees, all genetically predisposed to doing the same few tasks?

Of course, the article is just one person's opinion and I suppose in many ways as relevant and valid as my own...

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I feel it's too idealistic to think that every passion can be profitable. College students can't all major in Netflix and video games. I've had a number of skilled hobbies over the years, but software engineering is the first one that's actually a viable career choice.

A good alternative might be to look at where the demand is and where your interests lie, and try to find the best intersection of the two.

Was software engineering really the first one as a viable career choice or was it just the first one you could easily see how to monetize it?

As a software engineer growing up in England, you make bugger all. The software market is incredibly um... well, let's just say the pay for a software engineer in the UK sucks... but I enjoy software engineering, so I did a whole bunch of research to figure out where it was most lucrative, did some shit jobs to save up for a plane ticket and get my visa and flew to where software engineers had a higher quality of life. I could've stuck it out in the UK and limited my horizons but honestly, that's just not who I am.

If my passion had been something else, I would've figured out where/how to make a market viable enough to make it lucrative and I'd have gone there and done that.

I was raised to believe that if you have a passion for something, the only thing standing in your way is you. You were gifted with a brain, a brain to figure shit out. If you don't understand how to leverage that, then I posit that you didn't pay enough attention to those teaching you along the way, showing you how to use your brain to hop from one stepping stone to the next to make your passions lucrative.

Admittedly sometimes you have to think outside the box and sometimes it takes a few tries of looking at things from different perspectives before you can put together a viable solution, but you have a passion for a reason - it's just up to you to monetize it.

Seconded.

As you find your "passion", and that might just be a set of skills you care about, or a process, means, method, value, etc... you maximize it, sell it, trade on it, share it, build it and keep moving from there.

Things link together. And seeing those links and where the value is can really pay off and over a number of years doing this you can look back and know you made a difference and probably got paid well doing it.

Rather than expect to find that perfect job, you do the job, and find out a little of who you are and what you really care about. The minute you know, max that out and don't look back.

And when you do another job? Maybe that connects with what you did before. Bonus points for making sure that is true. Again, you find out a little of who you are and what you really care about.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

I'm in a weird place. I've always been passion driven, to an extreme. Now I'm running out of desire and suddenly things become insufferably painful. Beside passion I think it's good to know how to 'work' and be productive passionlessly.

From my experience, people usually go through phases of being more and less motivated. Sometimes, especially if you have been driven by passion to get where you are, you burn out a bit and can't push yourself any farther.

I think it's OK to allow yourself a break. You don't have to be achieving, or particularly productive (from your own perspective). Sometimes I imagine a life where I wake up, dawdle around and make breakfast, wander into work and do my 9-5 with my colleagues and then wander home to cook dinner and enjoy some mindless movie on TV. You can think of it as "passionless", but I think of it as "vacation".

It's a nice idea. You don't strive for anything, or fight for anything. You don't argue with your colleagues, or push to "get it right" or to "be successful". You just hang out and enjoy everyone's company and the small challenges that your job provides for you every day.

This is much better than dropping everything because when you drop everything, it's easy to drop into depression. It's easy to see everything that you've given up and see this temporary lack of energy as a "failure". It's much better to give yourself permission to enjoy merely existing and doing the simple things that get by. This is not "working without passion", this is just spending your time enjoyably with your colleagues. Like, I said, it's 100x better than locking yourself up and playing video games all day, or drinking yourself into oblivion, or even travelling the world to "find yourself".

For people who are really driven by passion, it's not like you will end up staying in that simple world. Slowly your passion will well up and take over again. Take your time and learn to enjoy it.

I quite understand what you're saying. I used to be dogmatic, perfectionist. But some events in life do realign your mind and suddenly you start to have a larger view on life and satisfying one's idealistic view on world fades away.

The issue is not taking passion for granted and ending up being bipolar, ability to actually enjoy mundane casual work is good. But it's also tough to balance with marketplace demands, sometimes you can't have unproductive days even if you're out of attraction (say a large contract badly built on fragile tech with no design and no care). Your paycheck depends on it.

Obviously you have some things in mind, which I won't be able to understand entirely, but for the sake of argument let's look at your example. If you have a large contract built on fragile tech with no design and no care, then in order to save the project (from a technical perspective) my experience is that you often have to step on some toes. Code doesn't get that way by accident. Somebody (very likely everybody) thought that they were doing the right thing. Explaining that they were wrong is a horrible job (I hope you get paid a lot ;-) ).

But if you think back, how many times did people thank you (before the end of the project) for doing what was necessary to get the project back on track? How many times did you use super human effort to claw a monstrocity from the brink of disaster and have half the dev team pissed off at you because of it.

I don't want to get into a large discourse, but your posting stood out a bit, in a "I know that pain" kind of way. I don't know you so this may be totally wrong, but my experience has been that there are many roads to success. Even that word "success" is arbitrary (as we have seen so frequently when managers redefine it after the fact). You are allowed to choose your definition.

Sometimes you just aren't up for the gunslinging heroics that are required save the project. But you might be up for spending some quality time with the other developers and helping them improve themselves. The project may tank, but everybody might end up thanking you because of it. Even better, you may inspire someone else to do the necessary heroics now that they have someone to cheer them on.

The one (somewhat disturbing) reality that I have learned in this job is that neither my pay check, nor the way people feel about me seems particularly related to the success of any particular project. Sometimes giving people what they should value (success) over what they actually value (support) is a form of hubris in itself.

Anyway, I hope that is interesting even if it doesn't seem useful ;-)

Have you found that doing less things helps? Basically significantly reducing the demands on your time, and the overall number of things you have to tend to in any given day.

I've found that as I've gotten a little older, my tolerance for unnecessary complexity, unnecessary time demands, and doing pointless things, has plunged. I have also found that I'm much happier and more productive after stripping away as much of that as possible. There are various costs to doing so, but it has been worth it so far. When I was 20, I felt like I could juggle anything and everything (and no doubt reducing how effective I was in the process).

It's not doing less, it's actually doing anything, and yes it's very related to age and view on life. As You, in my twenties I would burn into flow to swallow a lot of things. Now I don't. The irony is that I was quite stupid younger, and have a much much broader and stronger understanding of abstraction, geometry, holism etc, all things life teaches you with time. But .. unnecessary complexity and other goals have taken hold of my `libido` if I may say so. My comment wasn't much about finding drive again but also accepting that passion isn't always there but life requires you to be able to work. I find that people that weren't passion driven at first thus spent a lot of time working on things that were tough or unrelated to their dream and are more stable in the long run.

I'll second that... pointless complexity in your life is an unnecessary drain on your energy. It just adds to your burnout.

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