Life is too short to chase for money. Enough is good, more is better. Live within your means. I don't crave for a luxurious life. Money is an item to allow us (the company) to keep doing what we love doing. Valuation is a measure of how much the company has grown but I'm not obsessed with it. I rather spend my time being happy. Building a company with good culture, values and worthy mission makes me happy. If you're interested, our culture code can be found here: https://www.techinasia.com/culture/ :)
Meanwhile, I am passionate about being my best self. I get great satisfaction when I know I've done my best at something. In that regard work, whatever it is, definitely gives me tasks to accomplish, and be my best at. Outside of video games (and maybe religion?), its the only place in life that gives you both a task to do and motivation(money) to actually complete it.
I also know what I hate, I hate doing the same thing over and over. I definitely avoid that. I am very fortunate though. My job doesn't involve a lot of repetitive tasks. I think that would get on my nerves. I don't think I'm psychologically built for that.
There often is a big difference between doing what you love, and doing what must be done in society, like calculating mortgages for some stupid bank with corporate policies and everyone wearing the same boring blue-ish shirt. I do it to, have an excellent paycheck, which gives me freedom to do things I like in my own time.
Most creative persons need a day job. It is very rare that customers are willing to pay for precisely the thing you like to create. Even Van Gogh goodn't make a living from his paintings...
I just can't stand corporate environment with way to much untalented people in to expensive suits acting being busy and important :)
I work crazy long hours because the work is so much fun, and because I care about getting a bunch of things done even when there isn't enough time in the workday.
Yep, call me in love.
The analogy that comes to mind is a pro race car driver who is forced to only drive on an obstacle course, never exceeding 20 mph. The driver has skills that enable him to drive successfully on the obstacle course, but he yearns to do what he loves, opening up on a proper racetrack. In the same way, I have the skills to do tedious debugging of a large, absurdly complex system with tons of technical debt, only making minimal changes to avoid the whole pile of spaghetti collapsing. But I wish every day that I was designing and implementing systems instead, and I'm good at that, too.
Ironically, it was early in my career that I had the most autonomy to implement new features and write a lot of code, even if it was on obscure products. In the latter part of my career, I guess my mistake was allowing myself to be lured into working on "famous" things at big companies, even though it amounted to being mostly a maintenance programmer on sprawling, spaghettified legacy software.
I guess that next time, I should be more diligent about trying to find out what the day-to-day work will be like (which I find very hard to get an accurate idea of in the interview process. obviously the interviewer is going to paint a rosy picture), and at this point I would rather work on something totally obscure, if it meant I got to do more design and coding.
There are other times where, as they say, "that's why they call it work" where I have to visualize that paycheck to get me through the day. Hell, today I had to reboot like ten servers and change bios settings by hand. Oh my god, it's like the attention deficit disorder tests the shrink gives you. "Press Delete or F12 when the screen tells you to press delete or F12, but not before it tells you, or else you have to start over and wait an additional 180 seconds." - and ten is so few that it didn't justify busting out expect and writing a script. (I mean, if I was feeling my oats, that's what I would have done, and it would have been really fun, but I haven't touched expect in years and it would have taken rather longer to come back up to speed than to just do it.)
Now, obviously, if I have too much of the latter, I start thinking about changing things, but I think it's not realistic to think that you'll love your job all the time.
In general, I think how much I enjoy it has as much to do with me and how I think about it as it has to do with the work. - Certainly, I'm not saying it's got nothing to do with the work, the work is part of it; but how you approach that work, how long you've been doing that work, and what your perceived alternatives are all have a big part to play in your level of satisfaction, in my experience.
You can mostly ignore the people who crow too much about "passion" - Most of the time, if the job ad talks more about passion than about qualifications, that actually means they want to pay you intern salary and just don't want to tell you up front. If that's your thing, go for it... but the big corporate jobs that actually let you operate at scale and/or actually pay decently are going to be more concerned with qualifications than with "passion"
I'll show up and do the job. And yes, sometimes I will enjoy it. but I'm not in sales; I don't have to pretend like I'm always happy- and if that's what you want out of your employees? I thank you for letting me know ahead of time so that we don't waste oneanother's time.
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion
It's not roses and rainbows every day but I'm moving in the right direction, I feel, and I'm happy about that. Makes it easier to bear the drudgy aspects of the job. =)
Good luck!
EDIT: While I was working full-time at my regular job, having a side project kept me inspired and energized.
I also find I'm more interested in my job when I take a little time each day (15-30 minutes) to read a programming book about a technology I'm working on. Learning is something that I value highly and it makes me more interested in the work when I learn something new that I can apply or know that I'm getting a little bit better.
And even if you're doing what you love, you won't necessarily love every moment. Nothing has the potential to rob something of its enjoyability quite like a bad boss or soulless company.
Further, "passion" isn't really applicable to wide swaths of jobs. And many people's passions have no chance to be profitable.
I think more practical advice is to do work that makes you happy.
I'm working remote so besides meetings there isn't much difference between coding for fun and coding for work. So it's easy money. I wouldn't say I love the specific job I'm doing right now (I just like it), but I love being a developer :)
As an aside, I do love my current job. When you can get both hang on to it!
I recently made a switch from a non-technical role to a technical role and couldn't be happier. I keep waiting for someone to come over and tell me to knock it off and come do some actual work.