Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?

Not sure it will "solve it"... yet following Adam's (Douglas?) suggestion to become top-25% in three fields. Then merge those fields.

That has worked awesome for me. I merged technolgy (software dev/sys adm) with motor sports and with management. Love it so far. Good luck and Merry Christmas!!

First, be wary of general advice.

That said, do you find yourself spending most your time making or consuming? At some point I just started making stuff for the majority of my time and this was a tipping point for starting to improve my skills in particular areas and narrow my focus.

After 15 years as a freelance developer I’ve started a rural wireless ISP. It hasn’t entirely displaced my freelance work, but allows me to help people in a way that being a developer didn’t (tangibly, at least).

Now I install internet access for people, on infrastructure I have built, and I see how happy they are when they go from 2 to 100mbps (this is often in a field in the middle of nowhere). This means they can talk to their families, actually do the work that pays their bills, and just generally entertain themselves.

It is very rewarding. And I know all these people as they are essentially my neighbours.

It’s very hard to answer for you because it’s likely about personal growth and realisation more than anything else. But I can tell you what I did, or rather what happened to me.

I started as a developer, because I was good, I gradually became the lead enterprise architect (I’ve never hated anything more than TOGAF by the way), and eventually “fell” into management. While doing this I rode locally fame ladder in Danish public sector digitalisation which means I’ve had a massive impact on our overall national strategy for IT architecture but like 5 people know who I am. I’m not sure I ever actually liked that work, but it was thrilling to be part of something “important”, so I felt like I liked it. Eventually I had my first child, and 9 months later I had a depression caused by stress so severe I spent a night in a psychward. Long story short I was diagnosed with ADHD at almost 40, and told that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live my life.

Turns out I like problem solving and that I hate project management. So I quit the public sector and found a job in a company where I could be a programmer again, I made sure to find a company where I wouldn’t have to deal with a whole lot of the Atlassian sort bureaucracies surrounding programming and it’s frankly been a bliss.

I’ve gone from not thinking I could ever work more than 30 hours a week until my children left our house to back to full time.

So chances are you probably already know what kind of work you like, but it’s just really hard to figure it out. One thing that I thought I would miss was feeling “important” but the truth is that I was never actually “important”. If it hadn’t been me someone else would’ve done it.

(For reference I’m Danish, having a break down here gets you 6 months sick leave with pay and costs you basically nothing out of your own pocket. This made things easier to say the least.)

Love to do? No. But I’ve found some things I’m good at that are useful and I don’t seem to get sick of, and after that what seems to matter more is the people you work with.

Ultimately even if you like a job it’s still a job, and the widely promoted notion of passion rarely holds up.

What do you do for fun? Any hobbies?

I'm a corporate design manager (happily so), so my industry is slightly different than yours, but I see this question pop up enough in my circles it felt relevant to say the below ...

One of the greatest mistakes I see fellow designers do is try to make their 'passion' into their job - expecting their moonshot webcomic idea to be the bread+butter income, artisanal print hobby to pay the same as a corporate career without a sizeable investment or insane time sunk into marketing, you get the picture.

Early on I made a point to do short contract/internship stints to find our what I "didn't" like to do corporate-wise (packaging, digital design, print design), and narrow down to the parts that left me vaguely looking forward to the next day (experiential design, a team that's enjoyable to work with, autonomy, management). Note that the happy bits are almost as much team dynamics is it is the work itself, if not moreso.

For me, I started computers at around age 13. Didn't know at the time that most computer jobs were highly specialized, so I absorbed knowledge and developed skills in a wide variety of areas. Ended up as a SysAdmin simply because that was the majority of my responsibilities at my first computer related job. But I also program, design/architect solutions, do low level hardware, etc. That means I can have a job in one area, and use the other skills to make me more valuable in that role than I otherwise would be. So that is my passion, impressing others and being a highly prized asset due to bringing in multiple other skills into my primary role.

The other passion I have (that really is very similar to my primary skill) is woodworking. Anytime I need a particular furniture piece, I design it, buy the materials, cut it up / drill holes, and make my own flat-pack kits for final assembly. This hobby got a lot more fun when I finally realized that I could actually make straight cuts if I properly squared off the saw blade, and started using higher quality wood (instead of standard-grade construction lumber).

I love building Web products. Being a Product Owner.

How: By quitting every company after doing my maximum. I’m deeply sour, because many people around me succeeded younger at being recognized, generally because of ethnic or gender reason, but I had to walk away and I have succeeded in establishing my company and I’m the PO. I’m also the laundry guy, the accountant and the principal engineer with my 2-5 employees, but I’m still making half a million dollars, so it does seem that I was discriminated in companies compared to my abilities.

I wish I hadn’t a million dollars a year and I had a sense of belonging instead, and wasn’t sour, but such is life. I feel like Donald Duck.

I did, when I was younger. It was from the environment (lived in Anchorage, lots of bush planes, got into model airplanes). I spent about 8+ years doing it... in 2008 or so would get lost in it. At that time I was in high school, didn't have much money but I built all my planes from scratch with foam. Those were times I felt truly happy/in the moment just being in the sun alone flying. I can do it now sure, have money now but I lost it that drive/happiness to do it. Finding real passion can be hard vs. external factors eg. money. It's like you could say you want to figure out GAI but if you're doing it for money/fame vs. truly pursing it out of personal passion, I don't know if it'll happen (aside from being hard).

I like writing code now, it's like a tool, can build things in that space. Don't think it's a passion though. I didn't come from it, I barely used a computer when I was younger. I say I want to pursue robotics but I'm not pouring myself into it either. Been spending a lot of time consuming as someone else mentioned (tv/social media). Anyway I hope I get it back, true drive vs. drive from sharing/points online. Generally I like creation though, solving things.

Part of the younger days probably just because no responsibility other than doing homework/passing tests.

I fell in love with developing measurement equipment. It started in grad school, realizing that I really wasn't cut out for a basic research career (in a massively overcrowded academic job market), but that I got a lot of satisfaction from being able to solve hard technical problems.

Today, measurement systems combine many of my hobbies, including electronics and programming. I would get bored with becoming a specialist in a narrow tech field. This is also an area where I feel that I can genuinely help people, not just with immediate business problems, but also where I can credibly justify a socially redeeming purpose.

I like the fact that the ultimate judge of my success is mother nature, who doesn't tolerate bullshit.

Advice: Can you work on something that you actually believe in? I read a lot of comments (HN and elsewhere) from people for whom "work" is just an empty cash transaction, and who respect no distinction between good and bad work. (For instance threads on doing little or no actual work without getting caught).

Or, can you completely detach yourself from your day job, satisfy yourself with the empty cash transaction, and get your personal satisfaction in some other way?

I enjoy working on and solving technical problems, but the “core” thing that I’ve found I really love is working with other people to figure things out together (even though I’m fairly introverted). Once I realized that it shaped my perspective on a lot of work tasks and hobbies.

For example - a good friend and I regularly play battle royale and co-op games together after work in the evenings. The joy of those games, for me, is that we are communicating and working together to achieve something or win. I don’t get the same kind of enjoyment from single player games or games where I’m just grinding alone.

I think looking at “core values” and trying to extrapolate from there might be a good approach (or at least it has been for me). If you don’t have a sense of what those are, maybe take some time to reflect and see if you can find or create them.

Have you managed to find decent employment in al of those areas? If so, why worry?

Why not try to accept you are who you are, and apparently this is part of who you are currently. It seems to work out fine (if it does), so no need to worry.

You can't find what you are passionate about, it's not something that gets discovered. You pick it and hone it. Getting experienced, acknowledged by peers, and executing from knowledge all come with time and dedication and you become passionate as you want to drive that thing forward. I've struggled with this myself, and learned over time that I'm passionate about delivering software - I love it. Now I look for the next harder/larger project and see if I can make a difference for that business.

I have one thing that gives me a deep sense of fulfillment and a feeling that I was not living those few hours of my life in vain. That is writing fiction.

paradoxically (or maybe not) it is not as rewarding process-wise as writing software, which has the strongest instant gratification loop after, maybe, video games.

You can’t really be a writer, however, unless you want to die in poverty, etc.

For me, what helped was paying attention to what I liked about my work and leaning in a direction that emphasized those kinds of tasks - though it was kind of just luck that I found a job that let me do that.

I got my start in web development because I had picked it up as a hobby and (at least at the time) it was a good way to get reasonable money without a degree. But my favorite parts were learning new techniques/technologies (I started out without a team to steer me toward best practices so I did a lot of experimentation, self-teaching, and reinventing the wheel - probably made my projects take longer but meant I learned a lot more) and then using that expertise to help my colleagues (once I did have a team, my deeper understanding meant that I was the one to go to when something didn't work right in IE6 or something).

At one point, I was having dinner with a friend at his startup and happened to meet one of their product support engineers. She explained that the role involved becoming an expert in their highly-technical, fast-growing product and then using that expertise to help customers (internal and external ones). I realized that was an entire job made of my favorite parts of my previous job. I applied to join her team and I've happily worked in product support for tech startups ever since. Before this point I never would have considered product support, because I just had a stereotypical vision of it as sitting in a phone center reading from a script. The ideal field for you might be out there without you realizing it exists.

I still try to identify the things I like doing and spend more time doing those things. Sometimes that means spending time working with folks on other teams - not all companies are flexible enough to allow this, but I think healthy ones will because the added perspective usually will make you more valuable to the company as well. Making sure to have these varied experiences and keep learning new things has been a great way to keep up my engagement over time.

Maybe look outside of work?

People who are truly passionate about their work are lucky.

But IMHO it's more realistic to find a job that isn't stressful & that one enjoys a bit (if one still needs to pay the bills).

There's a ton of happiness and fulfillment to be found outside of your career.

But you need to have the time and mental capacity to get there.

Works sucks up all of those resources for a lot of people.

Lots of good advice here about paying attention to the patterns of what you like versus dislike.

For me, I love being able to sit down and concentrate for 5 hours and make progress on a coding activity. (Advent of Code is almost catnip for me; I’ll save up a week’s worth of them and blow a half a Saturday on them.) Other people thrive on social aspects of team/project work.

Naturally, I picked a job that gives me virtually none of that focused coding time, so there’s that…

Treat life like a gradient descent algorithm. Analyze your current landscape, adjacencies, possibilities and try different things. See what happens. You will get disinterested or fail 99% of the time. But that 1% will lead you to the next iteration down the gradient. Rinse and repeat.

You might find benefit to writing down your thoughts about each one of the previous occupations and see if there are any recognizable patterns that you can identify and address.

I love to write code, I love to ship products and I love to build businesses.

But what I really love, what drives me, is solving interesting problems. That's my entire career. Solve interesting problems.

    "We're building a web2.0 exercise tracking..." No!
    "We're putting health records on the block..." Nein!
    "We're improving how people buy insuran..." Non!
    "We're creating a mobile app to submit expens..." Nee!
    "We're building a SaaS to improve cable modem analy..." Nie!


    "We're using computer vision to identify fossilized cat shit." Oh hell yes!

I've built websites and CRUD apps and mobile apps, out of necessity, but they are universally boring endeavours with little to give them any merit beyond a tiny sliver of an interesting problem. Most of the work that is out there is just grunt work that should be farmed out and then extensively code reviewed.

At meetups people ask me, "what do you do?"

And I respond, "Whatever the !@#$ I want to, it makes money, and everyone goes home happy."

I haven't worked a day in my life. I play, every day. And any time I've come close to discovering "it's just another job" I go and find something else to do.

My response on LinkedIn or AngelList when approached by business people and recruiters with their dreadful job opening is usually along the lines of "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."

    Thank you for making me aware of this opportunity. Before I waste your time, I have a few quick questions that I'd like answered:

    Is this fully remote? Or on-site?

    And most importantly, what is the compensation range for this position?

    "Don't be showing up on the Ferrari dealership forecourt with a Honda budget in your pocket."

I built a fairly simple browser extension that users love to use. Heck, people even paid for it (it's freemium but an open-source project). Now and then, I get an appreciation email from a user, a notification from the chrome web store that someone rated it 5-star, or a new purchase notification from Stripe. Random doses of serotonin make my day. In a nutshell, I love working on it because people find it helpful and value it.

https://gourav.io/notion-boost

The problem, as far as I can make it, is that the thing(s) you love will probably not look like a corporate job.

It's my strong feeling that people don't actually love jobs, they love kinds of work, but only as long as they have agency. Once the work becomes a job it tends to get subordinated to profit motives, instead of your own creative drives.

My best bet is that if you want to do something you love you have to somehow end up working for yourself.

I work as a manager of a Developer Relations team, but I'm also a software engineer and writer. I've identified two things I "love" to do in my life: writing software (usually automation-type things that make my life or someone else's life easier), and writing (articles, books, etc.).

I discovered that I love writing software when I was a kid (maybe 12 years old?) by writing automation bots for video games: it was so incredibly fun to write a bot that would play the game, level up your characters, and do things that would otherwise take thousands of hours of human grinding to achieve. This passion never left me, and now, more than 20 years later, I still spend a good chunk of time building little scripts/tools/utilities/apps that help me in various ways.

The writing was something that I also got started on early. I discovered my love of writing through IRC where I'd routinely answer people's programming questions and eventually write blog posts explaining answers in more depth than I could fit into a short IRC conversation.

I don't blog as much today (life gets busy), but I do spend a lot of time writing at work, working on the occasional long-form blog post, and ... journaling.

In this regard, you might want to read "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport.

I know. The title is cheesy and melodramatic. But this book was really helpful in shaping some of my worldview.

This book goes vehemently against the "discovery" of "passion", and instead provides some practical insights on how to do work that you will love. Or how to reach there.