Ask HN: How to be ambitious/hungry again? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to be ambitious/hungry again?

12 pointsPoomba14 comments

When I was a college grad and in my 20s, I would constantly work on side projects, building a startup and consuming as much knowledge as I could find about new tech. I remembered when the iPhone came out, I would spend every minute of my commute learning about how to build an app.

Now that I have a family and am a bit older, I feel much less ambitious. I no longer feel the desire to build a business, or hack on side projects. Granted, a lot of this is because I have less time, but even at work, i feel absolutely no desire to learn new things, or get a promotion.

Is there any way I can revive that ambition again?

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This is the epitome of the type of "How do I..." question that really needs to first answer "Why would I..."

What change will ambition bring to your life? Are you not feeling fulfilled? Need more income? What is the actual problem in your life that you are trying to solve?

Answering those questions not only will help HN give you deeper insights... the answers in and of themselves might solidify your goals and thereby put your ambition on-track to where it needs to be.

As one grows older, one is responsible for building one's own motivation. This is relatively easy to do.

To build motivation I spend time actually day-dreaming about success. I am trying to get an emotional involvement with an exact vision of what success would be like. I want to emotionally experience success and develop a yearning for it.

That is what I need to get started on a project. Once I'm started, I find that it is often easy to get so involved in what I'm doing that it becomes hard to stop. Remember those all-nighters when you just couldn't bare to stop. You were in the grove. You were hot!

That's it. Get emotionally involved with success and get in the grove to get it done.

At 51, out of all the things I care about, spending time on my computer outside of work is the last thing I want to do.

The list of things I consider more important at this point in my life outside of work are spending time with my wife, travel (working remotely we do a lot of it), flying down to see my parents for a week a few times a year, getting better at Spanish in prep for our two or three months a year we plan to spend in Costa Rica, exercise, hanging out with friends, etc.

As far as starting a business, why would I want the headache? Money appears in my account whether I’m sick or on vacation. If the company folds, I get another job like I have done now 10x in my career.

I have worked full time for cloud consulting companies (well the department at AWS until 2023) for five years. I have the network, reputation and skill set to make a lot more money if I went independent or work somewhere else that would force me to work harder.

I learn new things at work not on the side because I never want to be in a position where I feel stuck because my skills are outdated and never want to be scrambling for a job.

Sometimes, you hit the big milestones early, and afterwards, it's a year (or more) of figuring out what you really want next. I’m grateful I didn’t have family/kids yet, it gave me space. But I see friends with families still searching for their next vision and mission. It’s never easy to recapture the hunger we had in our early 20s.

What helped me is that treat “finding your vision” less like a high-pressure quest, more like playing a game—keep asking yourself honest questions (no pressure), make a bucket list, and use first principles to understand what really matters to you. For me, it took 18 months... This process is a lot like starting a company from scratch.

Keep exploring, stay curious, and don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t have big desires right now. That’s okay too.

You're not the same person. Life has its way of automatically adjusting priorities in your life for you. It's part of the journey.

I'd also add that the industry is not the same as when the iphone came out. When I was younger I wanted to do shareware games like iD and Apogee, and I'd still be down to do that if it was a thing any more. But you have to meet the market where it's at if you want an actual viable business. I don't have a ton of hunger for starting an b2b SaaS, and I'd bet the OP doesn't either.

What gets you fired up?

Sounds like your job is boring, maybe take a risk?

You won’t be hungry unless you’re hungry which you likely can’t do without putting your family at risk. So maybe focus on the ambition aspect and find something that lights your fire. What’s a challenge or stretch goal you would have fun working towards? Maybe start small and then scale up as you rebuild the muscle.

Ive lost my technolust multiple times over the years.It happens, yes family gets in the way. I'd rather get beat at monopoly jr then spend my time building a new raspberry pi project.

Each time for me it's something new; bleeding edge.

Right now, it's literally AI. I'm in so much love with AI. If you dont know AI, go learn that ASAP.

Maybe you don't have it in programming anymore, but could get it back in other stuffs. Try hiking, camping, prepping, etc, and THEN figure out software projects that help those new hobbies.

Do it for yourself. I find the world is full of whiners who first look out of their own emotional comfort. Ignore them and build new solutions that are revolutionary.

Curiosity is key at least to me if you can find something that sparks your curiosity ambition will always follow.

Maybe try being ambitious for REAL problems, like :

- ecology - climate - protecting our societies from fascism

Raising kids.

Our experiences seem similar so if we're the same age---I've wrestled with this question a considerable amount of time and what seems to work for me is to find a way to broaden my life experience, so that I can find a new thrilling problem to solve. Break out of your isolation if you've been in a bubble, and try out a totally different business domain (without establishing a reputation as a brash idiot), make new friends who matter to you so that their (business) problems or causes matter to you. In any case, you won't find that ambition by keeping things the same.

Oh and manage your expectations. You might no longer have the wild burning distracted passion as you did when you were younger, but you might have the measured, genuine curiosity of an experienced adult, and you should own that.

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