Passion Lost
Keep talking about how passionate you are about your startup. I’ll be on the couch, playing GTA in my undies.
For the last decade or so, I’ve had an active interest in startups, freelancing, programming and all things geek, and have read plenty above my pay grade on those topics — especially essays and articles written by geeks, hackers, and self-styled productivity experts. Or, about half the writers on Medium.
And then late last year, that kind of became my job. I (mostly) gave up freelancing for a steady paycheck as a tech journalist, at a company small and nice enough to persuade me to do so.
But an unintended consequence of this line of work is constantly reading about and meeting people who are full of Passion! and Inspiration!, doing Awesome! things and launching Mind-blowing! and Disruptive! products.
Sometimes it’s exhausting.
Especially when you find that somehow, in the past year or so, you’ve lost your own passion to make any of those Awesome! and Disruptive! things you once wanted to make.
The experts say that surrounding yourself with successful people will inspire you to take chances and follow your dreams. I have inadvertently, literally done that. I now go to tech conferences on a regular basis. Some of my new friends are the most inspirational and ambitious people this side of Silicon Valley (not to mention those that are in SV right now, changing the world and all that).
It’s not helping. I’m starting to think it’s making it worse.
I remember when I used to have stacks of ideas, some of which I’d write down, and a few of which I actually implemented. I still have those ideas, but the motivation to follow through has evaporated. And I have no clue why or where it went.
These days, I don’t have passion. Sometimes I have uppers, and that’s about as close as I get.
It’s just enough to get me through the day, through another interview with someone else about to launch a Game-changing! and Revolutionary! product.
Oh, you made an app that just closed a $1m funding round? That’s awesome. I’d love to do that too, but instead I’m going to play GTA in my PJs for five hours straight.
And then I’m going to hate myself for it, and write this long blog post in the hopes that getting whatever I’m feeling down in pixels will somehow help.
The most perplexing part of all of this is that I don’t hate on Silicon Valley. Far from it. I watched the WWDC Keynote live last week in all of its choppy glory. I’m still very much a fangirl of Revolutionary! startups, especially those coming from my corner of the world and making it big globally. I get teary-eyed when I see Polish companies launched by my peers written up by TechCrunch, for fuck’s sake.
It’s just when it comes down to doing something on my own, I lose steam. Or I can’t even get the fire going in the first place anymore.
I just sit there frozen, thinking what’s the use of making yet another app when we’ll all be dead in a century anyway? And will creating another way to share cat pictures make the world any better? And what is this constant bombardment of innovation and information doing to my mental health?
One of the hottest topics in startup camps these days is failure. Failing is a badge of honor; if you’ve started and failed with a dozen companies, you’re nearly as big of a hero as someone who’s started and succeeded with one or two.
Failure is at least supposed to teach you something. Sitting on the couch, on the other hand, is mostly teaching me that day after day can pass by without me doing anything worth writing about, and on some level I know that’s not where I want my life to be heading.
Most of the motivational articles pushing you to Launch Now! talk about getting over your fears of failure and delivering — about how Real Artists Ship! and conquer their fears or crippling perfectionism. None of the articles talk about what to do if you just can’t make yourself care anymore.
How does the 80/20 principle apply to not giving a fuck?
How am I supposed to Launch! when I can’t make myself sit down and do something I actually enjoy, like learning a new programming language, not to mention then have enough motivation and drive left over to do something I hate but that’s necessary, like marketing?
How am I supposed to make something that inspires others? I can’t inspire myself to turn off the Xbox. Hell, I can’t even inspire my cat to not piss in our flowerpots.
True story.
If you’re expecting some grand wrap-up or lesson to be learned now, I’ve got nothing. As you can probably tell by now, this isn’t meant to be another motivational article about getting over fears or accepting failure, and I can’t pretend to be an authority on anything other than my specific situation.
All I can say is, that’s how it is right now.
