Lately , my mind has become really fuzzy about this three subjects. So fuzzy that i dont know what are the questions i should pursue for a solution. Everything gets so complicated when your only personal interest & hobby in your life overlaps with your career. Why it gets complicated? To answer this question i should first express the priority of subjects in my point of view.I think Career has the highest priority , because it’s how you are going to make your life.Second is Education because it is deeply connected with the Career and… Personal Interests , even though it is last prior of all , it doesnt mean it is least important. Actually all this subjects are equally important because they all depend on each other. Personal Interests are important because it feeds our motivation and happiness… without motivation or happiness you cant succeed a thing in your life.
So it is , Career the first, Education the second and Personal Interests the third
Most people think it’s great thing to have a career over your personal interest. Yeah , why not right? You are doing what you did in the past just for fun except this time you are getting paid for it. The truth is suprisingly different , at least for me so far…
So the Task = Career + Personal Interest. But the thing is when there is something with an higher priority in equation it shadows all the other. You still know you did something that was once your personal interest but there is something wrong… you dont feel as much happy or succeed. Then you start postponing your personal interests thinking you did enough of it , with that task you did. You keep doing this , after a while… when you try to do that personal interests of yours -lets say a personal tech. project- you start thinking how much profitable is this project etc. that is… my friend… is the point where you lost your one of your personal interest. You cant have fun with it anymore.
For this reason , i made a decision that i wont do electronics & physical computing as profession every in my life. So i can still have something techy to do and dont care about profits etc. There was one other reason that led me to this decision. It is that i think i have been too generalist and i should scale down my expertise & interest area and become more specialist so i can be more productive. I turned this reasoning into a key prenciple in life. Now i think twice when i switch from working on one technology to other. For example i have been working on PHP & Javascript for over 2 years now. I developed a very complicated web application implementing many features of both php and javascript. I learnt a lot… there is a lot more to learn but i feel my learning curve has become more steep and i become very productive in web app. development. But now i have a very big interest in android app. development… and i am still considering if i’m breaking the rule i mentioned earlier about being generalist versus specialist. But considering my earlier span of interest , i have improved a lot in this manner. I have narrowed down my professional interests a lot.
And besides all this, there is balancing problem between your work & your education. I’m studying Computer Engineering in University of Sakarya. I had very bad marks last term. The truth is i didnt attend most of the classes regularly, i was really busy with personal & freelance works. I came to realize something that doing programming bussiness wont help you much in CS exams. Because what they teach & ask is not much about what you use in real-life programming. They ask you about bigO notations of sorting algorithms , ricatti equations , karnaugh maps etc. I hate impractical information. So i’m wondering should i slow down working on personal & freelance projects.
My intention in writing this article is not only to express myself but also to get your suggestions.I’m sure there are others who had this hobby to career transition. If you know a book , an article or something that you think might be helpful , please comment.
that’s all for now, thanks for reading…
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