I would like to obtain more power in my career. Starting a business seems like it could do the trick.
The unfortunate truth is that I have no ideas. Or maybe I have ideas but I don’t come up with new ones fast enough.
Either way, I think both issues can be solved by getting out of the house. Doing something else than what I do on a daily basis.
But man, is it hard.
What’s hard about it is that I have to learn a whole new thing that I am not good at. I normally don’t mind this. I suspect that I don’t mind it because I usually choose something that’s very close to my existing expertise.
The way it usually goes is that there is something I want to learn (e.g. K3s on ProxMox or WordPress deployment), I sit down to do it, feel resistance and I simply push through. The feelings I have are those of “I can do it but I don’t wanna”.
I liked the idea of learning a scientific field. I looked up some research groups and their publications. I found a paper1 that made me go “oh this looks cool!”. So I opened it and guess what. “Oh please no, I don’t want to do this.”
Based on this, one could reasonably assume that the singular bottleneck in getting new ideas is, for me, the willingness to learn a new domain.
But I suspect that this would be wrong. I have tried to learn a new domain in the past, with much enthusiasm. I tried to create a plugin for Shopify. So where did that go wrong?
The last thing I want is more stuff. Stuff is neat but how do you get rid of stuff? Marie Kondo sure has some thoughts but what if you buy the wrong stuff? What about the climate change? I could rant on and on about this but you get my point. Me -> Stuff = Bad.
I didn’t really stick around with the Shopify project. I didn’t want to run my own store and I didn’t care that about merchants. They got some neat things but it’s just not for me.
So what is for me?
I have two very close friends. They are really into Warhammer 40k. I am not. Don’t get me wrong, the whole thing is very cool. War = bad but WAAAGH!? Hell yeah, brother, cheers from Iraq. However, I have so many reservations. First of all, it’s more stuff. And even worse, it’s bulky stuff. You could convince me to go back to Magic: The Gathering. Magic decks easily fit in a backpack. A combat patrol not so much. Moreover, there’s painting. I seriously dislike arts and crafts.
And yet, here I am, considering whether I should get into W40k or not. I have to really restrain myself from buying the starter pack. After all, my friends are into it and I like my friends. And I might enjoy it for a long time. That’s what happened with Magic and D&D.
What if I applied this mindset to learning a new domain? Forget learning the thing directly, learn the people first. I always load up on knowledge by reading, I enjoy it but it’s clearly not productive. It doesn’t ignite the spark.
What if I forced myself to avoid reading broadly about the domain and instead interviewed the experts? Scott Hanselman has a podcast2. He says that inviting people on it is easy because the act of podcasting itself makes it something more than just a chat, even if the end-product isn’t consumed by many. How does Scott find the cool people? Maybe I should just ask him.3
To get out of the house, I commit to 10 interviews with experts from a domain that I find interesting.
It doesn’t matter what the domain is. I find accounting, insurance and re-insurance cool. Let’s start there.
- Genetic Algorithm-based Control of a Two-Wheeled Self-Balancing Robot –https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10846-025-02236-1 ↩︎
- https://www.hanselminutes.com/ ↩︎
- I remember when “google it” was a common retort in tech space. I have a big anxiety about asking other people for advice. Have I been traumatised? ↩︎
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