

Is Passion Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed? - NewWorldOrder
http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/11/24/are-passions-serendipitously-discovered-or-painstakingly-constructed/

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Everest
I find it hardest to be passionate about my work when I'm doing mundane,
uninteresting work. No job involves doing something interesting and
challenging at all times. If I was 10x better at my job, it wouldn't improve
how I felt about doing mundane work. In fact, I might detest it more because I
would feel like my time could be spent doing higher-level work.

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jeremyw
Resonates nicely with something Cormac McCarthy said in a recent interview.

 _Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was
good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something
it's very hard not to do it._

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sutro
I prefer this gem: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that
doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth
doing."

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457620457452...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html)

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angelbob
You could rephrase the whole article, "Just do anything enough to get good at
it. It doesn't matter what you want or like."

My response: "yes, it really does."

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presidentender
My response to your response: "no, it doesn't."

You have to progress beyond the initial period of total incompetence, where
nothing is fun. Your guitar strings buzz mutely, you keep dropping your hand
and your opponent punches you in the face, and javac keeps yelling at you
about "array index out of bounds." After that, though, the increasing success
in the activity becomes a positive feedback loop, increasing your desire to
practice it. The end result is what any reasonable person would call passion.

~~~
ams6110
With regards to being a passionate about hacking though, there's another
problem: the pace of technological change. Take the guitar example: you invest
a couple of years learning to play the guitar and perhaps develop a passion
for it. That's something you can continue to nurture for a lifetime.

On the other hand, take the example from the article: the bored web developer
spends "a few years" mastering Ruby on Rails. Oops, by then RoR is yesterday's
news, now it's Clouds and Hadoop and Clojure and [insert
technology/language/architecture du jour here]. So I think what you need to
work on is not mastering something like "Ruby on Rails" but something at a
higher level of abstraction... skills and habits that let you remain
proficient and passionate about your craft even as the technological sands
shift under you. I'm not sure how to really articulate what these are.

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jerf
Yes and no. There are underlying truths to programming that you can and should
carry with you from environment to environment. Some are very difficult to put
into words, but some are not. One example that is now considered trivial and
well-known is "shun global variables"... but then, just today I was fighting
with code that's hard to work with because it uses global variables. This
stuff is always news to somebody....

Another more recent example that may pass into that peculiar state of
"everybody agrees its common sense but by golly I sure see an awful lot of
violations of it every week" is being suspicious of mutable state. I'm not
quite 100% sold on the "never use mutable state" idea (getting closer every
month, though...), but I sure am 100% sold on being _suspicious_ of it.
Doesn't matter what your environment is, that carries over. A lot of stuff
does.

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Psyonic
In a sense, global variables and mutable state are much the same. Even if the
scope of the mutable variable is local, if it maintains state beyond any
specific call, it has a global lifespan. I think using mutable variables
within a function that don't live beyond the function is generally fine (for
loops, etc).

