Passion projects are the way to go, but I think this post oversimplify passion. Even though you are passionate about a project, it still requires a fair amount of motivation to stick to it over time. Passion involves a fair amount of grit, to not give up your long time goal just because you hit a rough patch.
This post states "Embed this passion (which some might call procrastination) into a practical development project". Procrastination is giving up long time goals for short time gratification, so you cannot really turn procrastination activities into a development project. When creating an app for surfing pictures of rescued dogs, you are likely to procrastinate by surfing pictures of dogs rather than creating the app itself.
I totally agree with the overall statement of the post, but in reality it is not that simple, and people need to realize this and be prepared for it to overcome the challenges in a passion project.
I'm the CTO of international video agency Wooshii and I run an educational media brand called Skill Pathway. I also occasionally chat to people on my podcast, The Learning Developers Podcast.
Really appreciate this comment Nicolai, thank you so much for posting.
You’re right in that this does oversimplify things a lot - there’s going to be so many variables as to how determined and driven you are, not to mention your own mental state that affects these things too.
Self-awareness is key here really - you need to be able to work on something you’re passionate about and equally know all the things you’re getting yourself into.
For us, it was so clear as every project before we had before this ended up in the “unfinished” pile, but working on this has been completely self driven (for 2+ years now mind you)
We also want to mention that we understand oversimplification isn’t completely helpful, we try and pull in both directions with these sorts of things because there’s always 2 sides to the coin - check our other post 3 Actionable Tips To Avoid Abandoned, Unfinished Projects to see what we would consider that flip side.
Thanks again for the balanced perspective Nicolai! Always appreciated
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Passion projects are the way to go, but I think this post oversimplify passion. Even though you are passionate about a project, it still requires a fair amount of motivation to stick to it over time. Passion involves a fair amount of grit, to not give up your long time goal just because you hit a rough patch.
This post states "Embed this passion (which some might call procrastination) into a practical development project". Procrastination is giving up long time goals for short time gratification, so you cannot really turn procrastination activities into a development project. When creating an app for surfing pictures of rescued dogs, you are likely to procrastinate by surfing pictures of dogs rather than creating the app itself.
I totally agree with the overall statement of the post, but in reality it is not that simple, and people need to realize this and be prepared for it to overcome the challenges in a passion project.
Really appreciate this comment Nicolai, thank you so much for posting.
You’re right in that this does oversimplify things a lot - there’s going to be so many variables as to how determined and driven you are, not to mention your own mental state that affects these things too.
Self-awareness is key here really - you need to be able to work on something you’re passionate about and equally know all the things you’re getting yourself into.
For us, it was so clear as every project before we had before this ended up in the “unfinished” pile, but working on this has been completely self driven (for 2+ years now mind you)
We also want to mention that we understand oversimplification isn’t completely helpful, we try and pull in both directions with these sorts of things because there’s always 2 sides to the coin - check our other post 3 Actionable Tips To Avoid Abandoned, Unfinished Projects to see what we would consider that flip side.
Thanks again for the balanced perspective Nicolai! Always appreciated