Growing Passion

It’s often said that you should do what you love. But in my career I’ve sometimes ended up working on things that didn’t (initially) seem all that exciting, and weren’t exactly (to begin with) “what I loved”. And yet…

I’ve found that I can grow passion for things that I wasn’t initially interested in, by loving what I do. I don’t mean that I necessarily love the task itself. Not at the outset, anyway. But I love the doing, and the one thing I’m always passionate about is doing the job well.

By being passionate about doing a thing (whatever that thing is) as well as I can, I find that I get interested in details that I might otherwise consider boring. And by asking questions (of myself or others) with the goal of getting better at the task, I feed my curiosity. I find myself wanting to know more, and more, about whatever I’m working on. Seeing myself get better at something, or producing something that others find useful, creates a feedback cycle that encourages me to be even more interested in what I’m doing.

• Shovelling dirt into wheelbarrows? How can I change my shovel technique to get dirt loaded faster? How can I better coordinate with my team-mates to get loads to their destination faster?
• Documenting boring engineering data? Can I automate the documentation or make it easier to gather? Can I automate the analysis? To do either of those things, I need to have a deeper understanding of what I’m documenting. So what does this data actually mean? Better find a textbook or a tutorial…
• Writing requirements? Is there a better way to write requirements? What have I disliked about requirements I’ve read in the past? How can I avoid those mistakes? As a developer, what would I want the requirements to look like? How have other people written requirements that are actually useful? Better find a textbook or tutorial on those techniques…
• Teaching something I don’t find all that exciting? How can I explain this topic in a way that makes it exciting? Or at least makes it comprehensible? How is the topic similar to things I do find interesting? Does that relationship make the topic easier to explain or understand? (it turns out that you can use dinosaurs to explain various principles of software engineering if you’re sufficiently creative)

Over the years, by applying this approach to whatever tasks I’m handed, I’ve found myself developing a passion for all sorts of things that I never expected to be passionate about (IEC62304 medical device software processes? I didn’t see that coming).

So, next time you find yourself stuck on a project that seems boring or uninteresting, try asking yourself how you can do the job better or faster. If nothing else, at least there’s a good chance you’ll get the job out of the way sooner by finding a way to be more efficient. And, who knows, just maybe you’ll find yourself actually getting passionate about the work itself.