> How do you sustain your passion for the work you do? This may be a cliche, but, passion comes automatically and sustains indefinitely if you are doing what y

> How do you sustain your passion for the work you do? This may be a cliche, but, passion comes automatically and sustains indefinitely if you are doing what you really like to do as opposed what you have to do because its your job. That's all there is to it. I have been lucky in that I found jobs that excited me, and I would be self employed soon, so I have no advice wrt finding passion in a forced marriage. > How do you know when it's time to be okay with retooling and trying something radically different? This feeds off the previous point. Retooling must be an organic development and not forced. If you are trying to learn something new simply to get a higher paying job with a cooler image, then you are doing it wrong, and are bound to revisit the feeling of being disengaged. However, if the need arises out of having to move on to the next stage because the current stage is lacking and the new stage will be a better replacement or better augments the current stage, you'll know it without needing to ask. Take me as an example. I was a C++ developer focusing on desktop products all my career, which is more than a decade. I quit my well paying job in order to pursue some product ideas. A few months into the hiatus I realized that my products are better served and used on the web platform as opposed to being the traditional desktop products. Reasons included upgrade cycles and platform specific building and testing headaches. I had never gone beyond basic HTML and had to learn everything - DOM, JavaScript, databases, server side scripting and the whole gamut - from scratch. This was quite drastic a change. However, I was thoroughly immersed in the learning and experimenting process because that was an absolute necessity. It was imperative to my future plans. As painful as front end JS development is, I completely enjoyed (still enjoying) the experience. The backend development is even more fun. Had I shifted to web development only to get a "better and more challenging" job, I would not have survived three weeks.