Ask HN: How do you figure out what you're passionate about?

Take a vacation, and after a few days, think about what your mind naturally drifts to when there's nothing that you have to do in particular, and no special obligation. Maybe that will help point you in the right direction.

Talk to people. Find out what interests them. You might pick up a really enjoyable hobby or two, or latch on to an exciting project. I can't imagine Jobs without Woz.

I didn't find my complement, but didn't mingle widely until later on, when jobs put me in contact with many.

A friend I met after changing coasts liked trains, but it was a good excuse to carpool to fishing locations near those lines. I couldn't fish worth a damn, but those were beautiful locations, and they revived my photographic bug.

Things do connect, but not in isolation. Hobbies, either by association, or just getting out, create opportunities.

For me, my goal is to be useful, to make the world better. I think I 'become' passionate about the things I do well. I know I'm doing something well when it helps others, when I see results. It's all a chain: try to solve problems -> sometimes it really helps -> I want to do more and I am more and more passionate about it.

My focus isn't "me": what am I passionate about. My focus is the "other": how can I help a few people a lot, or a lot of people a little.

So, for me I do not try to find my passion first. I try to pick something small that helps someone. Energy will follow.

Passion can be misleading; the literal definition of passion is something you'd suffer for. You can be passionate, productive, and deeply unhappy.

The nature of work also combines passionate with non-passionate stuff. We may love writing high quality code, but most of the day requires hacky low quality code, meetings, or digging through documentation. Or part of a pipeline of gathering, cleaning, and selling data to a financial institution that uses it for medium interest loans.

The better measurement is find out what work energizes you. You might not feel any flow or fun. You might not feel any emotion whatsoever. But you get out of it like a good workout - both tired and energized.

I think part of it is that many programmers genuinely enjoy their work, so work and hobbies blend together. After 15+ years of constant new frameworks, models and updates, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement. Spending time outdoors and maintaining real-life friendships helps keep things in perspective.

just pray about it

Appreciation comes from understanding. Most things are interesting if you learn how they work.

For instance I didn't really care about football until someone explained all sorts of details about the game to me.

You can also develop that appreciation by doing things. The more art I make, the more art I like. I had a brief and unsuccessful woodworking phase that makes me stop when I see nice joinery or beautiful furniture. Years of reading about plants and smelling flowers made my forest walks slower and much richer.

So I guess be curious? Seek a deeper understanding of many different things.

It's worth noting that a lot of research heavily supports the idea that passion is a trailing indicator, it is something you develop over time as you build mastery and competence, rather than an innate trait you find fully formed.

Do with that information what you will, but it might be that you are looking at passion wrongly, expecting to 'find' something you are magically passionate about.

Beyond that, take care of your health, rest and play around with things to increase your surface area of finding something that works.

I have 4.5 years of experience, but I am in the same situation as you. To be honest, I think I am in an even worse position. I do not sleep properly. Day in and day out, I keep asking myself What is the frontier work I want to do? What is the one field I truly want to enter and say, “This is where I want to work for the next 30 years of my life,” and fully commit to it?

Thinking about this has become an endless source of misery for me. Still, every day I take on some challenging work and start working on it, whether it interests me or not. If it does not, I switch. If the next thing does not work, I try harder again.

I have also started talking to more people and trying to find a group of highly ambitious people. One thing I have noticed about people who have succeeded is that they nailed two things. First, they found a direction. Second, they found an ambitious group that acted as an engine for them.

Time does not matter as much as direction does.

I'm in a similar situation. At my previous job, I burned out, and it led to some serious health problems. Now I don't even know what I want to do anymore. I was a software engineer for 20 years.

First, look for more fundamental reasons why you're so tired. Are you sick? Are you depressed? (Though finding something you're passionate about may help with depression.)

Then, are you looking for something that you are already passionate about, but are unaware that you are? Or are you looking to discover something to become passionate about?

Either way, talk to people - people at work, neighbors, people at church or the bar or the gym or the park. What were you talking about when you suddenly realized that you'd been talking for 45 minutes? You're pretty interested in that. Or, what was the other person talking about for 45 minutes, and you weren't searching for some kind of graceful way to get out of the conversation? You're pretty interested in that, too.

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