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What also isn't talked about:

__Burnout and Passions__

Here's a comparison: I once build a computer graphics engine in 2 weeks and a few years prior I played WoW for 2 weeks.

In both cases I spent between 16 to 20 hours per day on it. I got ill, had an angry girlfriend (in the computer graphics timeline), and I did everything I wanted to do (it was done).

__Passions and Interests__

I have a genuine interest in security. Once every year I become super passionate about hacking/red teaming for 2 months. I'm like a cat in heat or something, but then with security. I play hackthebox, I follow security courses and clock 12 to 16 hours per day on it, 7 days per week. Converted to working days, that is around 5 months of working days.

Yet, people mistake this as me having a passion for it. I can assure you, if the article is technical and I'm in the other 10 months, I'd need to apply quite some self-control and discipline to be able to read it.

__It's not always the subject__

I have this weird trait. Whatever my friends are interested in, can become a passion of mine. One requirement: I need to do it with them. If I do and I'm having a positive interaction with my friend, then I'm passionate about it. However, I know it's not the subject, it's simply being with that friend. I figured it out by first noticing this in video games. It turns out I don't care about video games, I simply care playing them with friends. It turns out, it's true for all activities I have an interest in.

__Passions and linking to other topics__

I love imagining music. It's a compulsion I had since I was 4. Because of this, I quite like making music as well. However, I also like not being poor. I've seen quite a few poor musicians, so I've never focused too much on my music creation and I think that's quite a sad fact about my life.

But! It turns out, that (web) app development for things that I find cool or useful scratches exactly the same itch. So that means that passions are wider than your interest alone. It turns out that passions might be able to transfer to other passions if they have the same properties.

Unfortunately, I don't feel passionate about (web) app development for corporations. This is mostly because a lot of the creative freedom isn't there, but when you make your own stuff it is there.

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My 2 cents.



I found your introspection valuable. I work as a presales engineer. When a customer has a problem and is stuck on something I become obsessed with it. But as soon as we have a fix or a workaround I lose interest in the area. This makes it hard to generalize the solution or publish it as a blog post.




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