I was severely burned out two years ago after I left the last startup I cofounded. I had a good bit of cash saved up, so I traveled around the world to get better at rock climbing. I could barely write more than a few lines of code before closing my laptop. I would rather sit on the beach and stare at the waves than do anything productive back then.

When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state. Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was hardly worth solving.

I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product to address them.

My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.