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Ask HN: How/When did you find your calling in life?
How/When did you finally find a field you were interested in, and decide to pursue it for the rest of your life?
Was it ever too late to revert a decision you made about your career?
Supposing you were a kid, and really didn't know what you would be doing When you would be however old you are right now. What would you do in that case?
- surprisetalk 3y agoI highly recommend reading the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". A perfect career is very rarely something you can will into existence. It's more like a series of very small stepping stones. Certain stones will move you towards autonomy, flexibility, etc. I generally recommend thinking about your day-to-day dream life (how much expendable income? living in nature? vacations? etc.) and then strategizing some paths to get there.
- newbei 3y agoThank you for the recommendation! I'll definitely check it out.
- h2odragon 3y agoI was 13, I had a computer with BASIC, a printer, and a manual for the printer that described all sorts of neat things it could do. So I wrote a program that sent codes to the printer to demonstrate some of those things. Showed it to someone who had a use for it and was willing to pay me for it; and that was the experience that opened my eyes to the fact that I could find an excuse to play with computers even more. I wanted to fully comprehend computing from the plug to the outputs. I can't say that I've got there completely yet, but it's been a great deal of fun so far. Doesn't look like I'll run out of new thing to learn anytime soon, either.
- newbei 3y agoWow. So, you choose to get a degree in computers or something like that?
- h2odragon 3y agoactually i dropped out of high school a bit later and became full time sysadmin / programmer. destroyed my health working insane schedules and work loads for nonprofits, wound up in debt and disabled. Left that to start a family and been hobbyist since. I still can't seriously contemplate the though of being responsible for someone else's systems without physical pain. But I can write software that does things I want, and share that to others for any use they can make of it, without worrying about it.
- newbei 3y agoThat was a really brave decision!
- jzombie 3y agoI'm 92. I received my first phone call when I was a kid. There's still time.
- newbei 3y agoI'm sorry, I didn't really understand what you mean.
- devdude1337 3y agoChristmas 1992 - my parents gifted me the Nintendo Gameboy. One hour after playing Tetris I told my dad: that’s what I want to do when I’m grown up. And now I’m a grown up L block. Mostly useful but often leaving gaps
- thrwwycbr 3y agoI found my calling when I watched Person of Interest. I still think that the series was ahead of its time, and predicted a lot of scenarios that happened afterwards in reality before anybody thought of that being even remotely possible. I also have the theory that every child that owned a C64 or Amiga went on to automatically be drawn to IT security, pentesting or similar areas.