You Must Find a Passion Project - AKA How to Avoid Being a Boring Human
I'm absolutely off topic today. Like if being on topic was a road in downtown Seattle, I'd be hiking up Rattlesnake Ledge today. Which, if you don't know, is far away.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!
My standard article is about how to succeed at tech careers. Because I feel that it’s at a sweet spot between the things I’m good at, and the things people will pay money to learn about.
Today will be a little different. So follow along if you’d like. Because I just didn’t feel like writing on topic today.
I started writing articles while I was working at Amazon. Except they weren’t really articles at the time, so much as whitepapers, or emails which I’d posted on the internet.
I really enjoyed my time at Amazon. I felt like I’d had career blinders suddenly removed by moving from a Midwest B2B company to a big tech company on the West coast. Everything from my career growth to income to learning to fun skyrocketed because I’d joined Amazon.
So when I talked to friends / family / cousins of friends / strangers on the street, I was likely to recommend that they consider joining Amazon too. “Oh dude, you do marketing for a dog food company? You should consider doing marketing stuff at Amazon! I totally know we do that!”
Then I’d pass them an email I’d been repeatedly editing and modifying and mostly adding onto, until it had reached a length which meant that most people probably didn’t read it, and in fact were slightly weirded out that I sent them a 23 page email when they weren’t even considering working at Amazon, but I had been pressuring them, so they’d said they would consider it just to get me off their back.
One day (it was a Saturday I remember), for some reason my family was not taking my spare time. Perhaps my wife had gone out with her friends. Who knows. But the point is that I was sitting there on a Saturday, procrastinating. I bet I knew I should go on a run, or lift some weights, or perhaps mow the lawn.
But then I realized that I had this super long email, and I could make it even longer, and then post it on the internet. Because I bet that even more people on the internet would appreciate having advice on how to interview at Amazon.
I remember it was a Saturday, because a few hours later I was wrapping up this really long post, and I remember thinking that it was funny that I enjoyed this Saturday so much, when all I did was sit in my office and type out a long internet post.
That article got posted on LinkedIn (since moved to my newsletter), and a funny thing happened. It blew up. It totally exploded on the work social scene. I ended up with many thousands of shares, millions of views, hundreds of messages, etc.
But, to get back on topic for this article, another thing happened. I really had a fun time writing. It was a reminder that not only did I enjoy writing, but it was particularly fun to write something useful for other people. This was a hobby of mine, and it was a pretty good hobby.
Every 6 months or so while working at Amazon, I would write another article on a relevant work topic. And my articles continued to get attention.
Over the next few years, I’d repeatedly run into someone at Amazon who claimed they were hired in large part because they’d read my article(s), which was a great feeling.
And then, as I’ve explained in the past, when I decided to take a break from working, I decided to write as a hobby. And here we are. Thousands of paid subscribers (thanks folks!), and tens of thousands of free casual readers.
In large part, this gig started because I wrote an article while I was still working at Amazon.
That was my passion project. It was my thing I did for fun, while still working. And my advice / argument is that you should all find your passion project(s), long before you end your careers. Why? Let me tell ya. After this pretty photo.