This is what I've come to believe, through experience:
Not everything I do starts with passion. But I've learned, and kept learning, to find meaning in the things I have to do anyway. That's what has made me a better engineer, and a better person.
I didn't always think this way.
At one point in my career, a close friend of mine, someone I regularly exchanged ideas with and met outside of work, came to me with a proposition. He laid out the challenges his company was facing, the unsolved technical problems, the business hurdles. It wasn't a domain I'd ever thought about, but something about tackling those problems with him sounded like a genuinely exciting challenge. So I joined.
The domain was unfamiliar and complex, and the obstacles kept piling up. But so did the people beside me. Bit by bit, tackling each challenge together, something shifted. That strange domain I never cared about became genuinely interesting. It became one of the most fulfilling periods of my career.
Later, I hit a different kind of wall. The scope of what I could influence as a developer started to feel limited. The excitement faded. So I tried other things in my spare time, different projects, different pursuits. They were fun at first, then not. I even came back to coding on the side, and enjoyed it again, but somehow, the work itself still felt dull.
That's when it clicked: everything feels fun as a hobby and draining as a job. The problem wasn't the work. It was that I was waiting to be handed meaning instead of finding it myself.
So I made a decision. To stop waiting for the "right" project or the "right" conditions. To build the habit of extracting meaning from obligation, especially when a project is assigned, not chosen. That mindset has changed how I approach my work more than any framework or tool ever has.
Andrew Ng and Laurence Moroney at Stanford share brutally honest career advice for engineers navigating the AI era. The part about choosing your team over a company's brand, and finding meaning in what you build, stuck with me.