We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own (hugotunius.se)

When I was a college grad and in my 20s, I would constantly work on side projects, building a startup and consuming as much knowledge as I could find about new tech. I remembered when the iPhone came out, I would spend every minute of my commute learning about how to build an app.

Now that I have a family and am a bit older, I feel much less ambitious. I no longer feel the desire to build a business, or hack on side projects. Granted, a lot of this is because I have less time, but even at work, i feel absolutely no desire to learn new things, or get a promotion.

Is there any way I can revive that ambition again?

Comments (6)

cc101 · 1h ago

As one grows older, one is responsible for building one's own motivation. This is relatively easy to do.

To build motivation I spend time actually day-dreaming about success. I am trying to get an emotional involvement with an exact vision of what success would be like. I want to emotionally experience success and develop a yearning for it.

That is what I need to get started on a project. Once I'm started, I find that it is often easy to get so involved in what I'm doing that it becomes hard to stop. Remember those all-nighters when you just couldn't bare to stop. You were in the grove. You were hot!

That's it. Get emotionally involved with success and get in the grove to get it done.

hannieliu · 2h ago

Sometimes, you hit the big milestones early, and afterwards, it's a year (or more) of figuring out what you really want next. I’m grateful I didn’t have family/kids yet, it gave me space. But I see friends with families still searching for their next vision and mission. It’s never easy to recapture the hunger we had in our early 20s.

What helped me is that treat “finding your vision” less like a high-pressure quest, more like playing a game—keep asking yourself honest questions (no pressure), make a bucket list, and use first principles to understand what really matters to you. For me, it took 18 months... This process is a lot like starting a company from scratch.

Keep exploring, stay curious, and don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t have big desires right now. That’s okay too.

throwmeaway222 · 2h ago

You're not the same person. Life has its way of automatically adjusting priorities in your life for you. It's part of the journey.

bix6 · 2h ago

What gets you fired up?

Sounds like your job is boring, maybe take a risk?

You won’t be hungry unless you’re hungry which you likely can’t do without putting your family at risk. So maybe focus on the ambition aspect and find something that lights your fire. What’s a challenge or stretch goal you would have fun working towards? Maybe start small and then scale up as you rebuild the muscle.

rTX5CMRXIfFG · 1h ago

Our experiences seem similar so if we're the same age---I've wrestled with this question a considerable amount of time and what seems to work for me is to find a way to broaden my life experience, so that I can find a new thrilling problem to solve. Break out of your isolation if you've been in a bubble, and try out a totally different business domain (without establishing a reputation as a brash idiot), make new friends who matter to you so that their (business) problems or causes matter to you. In any case, you won't find that ambition by keeping things the same.

Oh and manage your expectations. You might no longer have the wild burning distracted passion as you did when you were younger, but you might have the measured, genuine curiosity of an experienced adult, and you should own that.

sexyman48 · 2h ago

Add a mistress to your payroll.