| I think it's important to figure out why you found some piece of work fulfilling. I think a lot of people don't have a good understanding of why they like doing the things they do. I know a lot of people who say, "I do this job that I hate, and I have this other hobby that I truly love, but if I were to make my hobby my job, I think I'd learn to hate my hobby." I used to say it about a number of things. I love to cook, or I love to paint, or whatever, but I work as a programmer because it's what I can stand to do for work. And then one day I had gotten so sick of working for terrible companies that I thought I couldn't be a programmer anymore. Then I spent about a year kicking around a bunch of bullshit ideas, trying to find work that wasn't programming, that was "more fulfilling". And ultimately ended up doing a lot of programming in that time, because I had falsely concluded that my terrible work experiences were just "the nature" of working as a programmer. I didn't hate programming. I hated working for consulting companies ran by MBAs. What I eventually realized was that I love programming. If I had been a graphic designer in those same situations, it would have made life even worse. Programming itself was the thing that I was enjoying that mollified my discontent with my employment situation. Any other job would not have been as satisfying as programming, which is where the concept that I'd "learn to hate" photography or music or teaching or whatever. Some people I know do the work because they love solving problems for their users. Some people do it because they love learning new things all the time. But I don't think they really know that about themselves. I think they have a surface understanding that, somewhere around this area of this job that I'm doing, there is something here that I like. But they don't have their thumb on what part, exactly, that they like. I think it's very important to pin it down because I also think it's very important to be able to recognize if it is no longer the thing you love. It's perfectly valid to change your mind about what you love. You might start out on your career loving the intellectual challenge of programming, and you might learn over time that you love interfacing with users even more. But if you haven't taken the time to deeply introspect on what particular aspect of the work it is that you are enjoying, you'll lump it all together as "I love software development", and then wonder why things have gotten bad when you're still a software developer but are now working on database schemas rather than requirements gathering. You can't know how to fix a thing if you don't know how it's broken. And you can't know it's broken if you don't know what it should look like when its fixed. |