Find Passion by Doing: Run 4-Week Sprints to Discover Fit
Find Passion by Doing: Run 4-Week Sprints to Discover Fit
When You Find Passion by Doing
Follow your passion? It might find you first.
When I was a kid, I dreamed—honestly, obsessed—about baseball. It was the plan, the future, the thing I told everyone I’d do. Spoiler: I wasn’t great, and I didn’t have the grit to improve. That was my first real taste of self-awareness.
In high school and college, I worked hard to pursue architecture. There was sincere effort and years invested. Only to realize… it wasn’t for me.
By my late 20s, I’d learned that you often find passion by doing after racking up a couple of promising starts and closed doors. Eventually, I picked up coding as a side hustle—nothing serious, just to help pay rent. I didn’t expect it to stick. Definitely didn’t expect it to spark anything. The thing is, stepping away from a path you’ve put years into feels like relief mixed with regret, and a little embarrassment if we’re being honest. But when you’re experimenting, sometimes you trip into something that fits better than anything you could have predicted. That casual dabbling with programming started to pull me in like nothing else had—a slow, stubborn opening, not a lightning bolt realization.
What started as a hobby turned into something I truly loved. If you’re stuck second-guessing the perfect career niche, I get it. Paralysis is real. But here’s the truth. Passion isn’t a plan, it’s the outcome. You earn it by doing, not by deciding.
Goals Aren’t Destiny—Your Experiments Build Direction
If you’re holding your breath waiting to pick the perfect niche, you’re fighting the wrong battle. The idea that passion springs fully formed from one big right choice? That never matched my reality, or anyone I know who actually found things they love. You discover passion through practice—repeated, curious work—not a pre-decision. When perceived support and the quality of how you learn both go up, subject interest climbs right alongside them—passion doesn’t start fixed, it grows in the doing. You don’t need a grand plan to start. You just need to move.
For the engineers and ML folks in the mix, think of it as career experiments—a multi-armed bandit problem. Instead of treating your career like a one-shot decision, you run experiments. Let curiosity guide you toward payoff. A multi-armed bandit is basically A/B testing on steroids—a way to balance curiosity with output using ML (link). There’s no shame in trying a few levers before doubling down.
This urge for certainty—the plan, the identity, the forever-title up front—is seductive. I used to get stuck chasing the “right” answer, sketching out elaborate career blueprints, hoping I’d wake up sure. But get tangled up in too many choices and you’re hit with decision fatigue, unhappiness, and that classic “just pick nothing at all” loop. Act to overcome career analysis paralysis, or you’ll stay stuck and no closer to what fits. And if you’ve already felt that misfit, you know how draining it is to play by someone else’s rules.
Here’s what actually matters when you run these short experimentation sprints. Measure your energy—how you feel while actually doing the work—and fit (whether the market or your team is genuinely pulling for the thing you’re building). Don’t just track what sounds interesting. Ask yourself if you lose track of time, if you want to go deeper, or if the work feels more like play than grind. And watch for those subtle signals: does someone actually want the thing you made? Did it spark real feedback or open a new door? These signals, not titles or wishlists, are what point you toward something worth investing in.
So, instead of freezing up over a perfect decision, you’ll trade paralysis for progress. Next? I’ll walk you through a concrete 4-week exploration sprint—a way to actually ship something small, get real signals, and keep momentum rolling. Let’s make this easy on yourself.
The 4-Week Sprint: Ship Small, Gather Signals, Decide Next Moves
Let’s nail down what an exploration sprint actually looks like. No theory, no hand-waving. You pick one niche or project idea, set a hard four-week clock, and lock your goal to shipping a small artifact at the end. The entire point is visible progress and a concrete decision, not thinking about options. By the finish line, you’ll have something real you made (demo, app, notebook—whatever fits) and the data to decide if this is worth the next sprint. You aren’t locking your path. You’re just choosing to run career experiments with momentum instead of anxiety.
Week one is pure scope. Pick a narrow slice that feels doable and interesting, not intimidating. Don’t try to build a product, just make one tangible thing—something you can show, even if it’s tiny.
Could be a toy web demo, a machine learning notebook, a working microservice, a thoughtful blog post, or even a pull request fixing an actual bug. The guardrails here are critical. Too big and you’ll stall out, too vague and you’ll lose the thread. If you want specifics—a Flask app that exposes one endpoint, a Jupyter notebook that plots interesting data from a public API, a writeup that explains “Why LLMs struggle with counting”—make it tight, start small. Define “done” up front, so there’s no scope creep. I’ve learned from experience. Ambition is great, but in week one, clarity keeps you moving.
In week two, you jump straight into building the core. Here’s the trick: cut the scope even further if you’re stuck, and don’t wait until it’s beautiful to ask for feedback. Timebox your effort—maybe ten hours, tops—then share a sketch, a screenshot, a GitHub gist. It’s awkward showing work that’s unfinished (I still hate it!), but early input beats last-minute panic every time.
Week three is where you ship your V1—warts and all. Hand it over to whoever will look: teammates, Reddit, a local meetup, or just your group chat. Your job isn’t just to get comments, but to notice which parts spark real interest and what’s skimmed over. Ask direct questions: “Did anything here actually help you?” “Is this useful or just noise?” The feedback, even if blunt, gives you honest signals on what pulls people in and what just sits there flat.
Here’s a small tangent—I once spent half a day trying to debug a stylesheet that was only broken on one old version of Firefox. I was convinced it was something profound, but it turned out to be a stray comma. Ridiculous. Sometimes I think back to how I used to hunt for the perfect batting gloves back in my baseball days, swearing a new pair would fix my swing. Coding has its own rabbit holes. If you’re not careful, you end up massaging side issues while the main project waits. I still fall for this sometimes; it’s the kind of habit that’s hard to completely kick.
By week four, you pause and take stock. Use a simple rubric: did you feel energized pulling late nights or was it a slog? Did what you made get any traction or actual use, or was it dead-on-arrival? Did you learn quickly, or was it endless wheel-spinning? Be honest. This is where you assess real fit (market pull, team adoption), energy (did you want to keep going?), and learning velocity (are you better at this now?).
At this stage, it’s normal to worry you “wasted time” or look scattered, especially if you pivot or park the project—confession, I’ve bailed mid-sprint more times than I can count. But the signals you gather beat perfect plans. Decide simply: deepen (go for another round), pivot (try another niche), or park (archive it and move on, guilt-free).
Don’t just let your sprint fade into memory. Document the process. Toss everything into a repo. Draft a README with a clear “goal, steps, what worked, next.” Record a rough demo screencast, even if it’s clunky. Finish up with five bullets summarizing what you learned, what felt good, and what didn’t. That way, your momentum isn’t just private—it’s a visible trail you (and maybe future employers) can follow to see real growth.
Running these sprints is how you flip career anxiety into motion. Instead of guessing what fits, you build, ship, and decide—deliberately. That’s where passion actually shows up. And after enough reps, you end up somewhere better than you could have ever plotted on day one.
Tactics for Turning Anxiety Into Actual Traction
Let’s start with the classic fear: “Did I just waste a month?” I know that feeling. Four weeks spent on a niche that doesn’t stick, and the panic creeps in. But here’s the math people forget. Even if you park the project, you still compound new skills, expand your network, and sharpen your story for next time. The skills and contacts stack up in ways you can’t see up front—a good sprint never leaves you empty-handed.
Worried about looking scattered? You control the story. Craft a unifying thread (“I’m exploring applied ML for product impact”) and use every shipped artifact to anchor that narrative. People remember what you make—and the story you tell around it.
Momentum’s fragile, but you can protect it. Set hard constraints: four weeks, five to seven hours per week. Keep your baseline performance steady so your core job isn’t at risk. If you work with a manager, pitch your sprint as a precise experiment—low risk, clear goals, time-boxed. I’ve had to admit these plans out loud to bosses. Most are more supportive than you expect if you keep it tight.
Don’t let your progress vanish into private folders. This week, share one concrete lesson or artifact—demo, notebook, anything—to signal motion. Regular updates show you’re gaining ground, not drifting. Consistency beats fitfulness every time.
Ship your sprint artifacts faster with AI—draft a README, demo post, or progress update in minutes, so you can gather feedback sooner, keep momentum, and spend more time building instead of staring at a blank page.
Compound Your Passion: Build the Habit, Not the Plan
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. You’ve run your sprint, gathered signals, and now you have a choice. Deepen your bet where energy and fit overlap, or pivot if things fell flat. These aren’t just gut checks—they’re your new compass. Each quarter, stack up these four-week sprints into a line of small, well-scoped bets. This quarterly cadence is more than a productivity hack; it compounds real progress. What you’re doing is setting flexible career goals that let momentum, not perfectionism, set your direction. You steer each time based on what actually energizes you or shows promise in the real world—not a five-year plan you outgrow in six months.
And I want to bring it back to where I started. Coding didn’t grab me because I picked it out of a lineup or because I was told “This is your passion now.” It happened because I put in reps—side gigs, late nights, solving annoying bugs for clients, even when I felt out of my depth. The real turning point wasn’t a grand decision, but doing the work until I started to care. Only to realize… it wasn’t for me—that original plan, I mean. The stuff I thought I should love (baseball, architecture) faded, and this new thing took root because I actually showed up for it, week after week.
Six months ago, I promised myself I’d finally finish a sprint idea I’d been dodging for ages. Still haven’t wrapped it completely, if I’m honest. Some projects have a half-life, I guess.
So here’s the ask. Pick your next area. Give it a real shot with a focused four-week sprint. Ship something—even if it’s tiny. Reflect on the energy and the signals you get back, then make your next move. The passion follows.
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