An occasional newsletter where I share thoughts on web development, design, productivity and being a good human.
Learn to enjoy the things you do
This quote is paraphrased from Ali Abdaal’s video on Long-Lasting Productivity.
I was reminded about it while listening to the latest episode of The Side Hustle Show, where Nick and his guest Alan Donegan talk about How to Start a Business You Care About.
One of the points Alan makes is about starting a business around a passion or something that excites you. His point is that running a business you’re passionate about sets you apart from the competition and makes the process so much easier.
This sounds great. We all want to do what we love and ideally get paid to do it.
But what if your passion doesn’t have a clear path to becoming a business or a career for you? Not everyone is in a position to give up their day job to pursue a passion project which may or may not work.
—
So what is the alternative?
As Cal Newport says in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You,
What Cal means here is rather than trying to find something you’re passionate about to turn into a business or career, focus instead on becoming excellent at what you’re already doing (or are able to easily start doing) to the point where you become passionate about the thing.
Paul Millerd shares a similar sentiment in his book The Pathless Path. The book is about doing what you enjoy and learning when to say NO so that you can continue to do what you love.
Paul is saying here that money is essential, but it should not be the driver. Instead, a vital aspect of the pathless path is learning when to say NO to allow you to focus on the work that’s worth doing.
—
Thinking about my own career, I can confidently say that I hated programming while studying Computer Science at university. I was passionate about music and design and I wanted to make a career out of combining the two. It just never happened and I ended up becoming a web developer.
It was only until I gained enough experience and properly understood programming paradigms that I really started to enjoy the work and develop a passion for it.
So, focus on becoming excellent at your craft, see your hard work pay off and you’ll find that you truly do love what you do.
Ajay
Frontend Mind
An occasional newsletter where I share thoughts on web development, design, productivity and being a good human.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Syed, author of the Sunday Times No.1 bestseller "Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently". Matthew was the guest speaker at our company’s annual kickoff meeting where we were looking back on the successes and failures of 2023 and laid out the plans for the year ahead. During his talk, Matthew spoke about the differences of a fixed mindset vs a growth mindset, innovation, echo chambers, and a little about table tennis 🏓. — A...
Before we get started... You may have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet on the newsletter for the past couple of weeks. Sometimes life gets in the way and priorities need to be shifted around but hopefully I’ll return to a more regular schedule going forward. I might just switch the newsletter from being ‘weekly’ to a more irregular schedule. — This week I’d like to talk about forming habits, and the 7 steps you can take to make them last. I first came across this idea on an old episode of...
Software development is about solving problems. But what if the solution to the problem is only making things worse? This is something I’ve encountered recently. Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on an update to one of the features of our application. The updates added a lot more complexity to the feature but the core functionality remained unchanged While developing, code was being added and more and more edge cases were being tackled until we finally ended up with a hugely...