How to come up with a passion project<br>“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

I can’t argue that Elizabeth Gilbert knows a thing or two about passion projects, after all she has written quite a few books, including her well-known memoir “Eat, pray, love”. But what I will argue with is where ideas come from.<br>She describes ideas as disembodied energy forms that are floating around in the search for a human partner that would bring them to life. As romantic as it is, I think it’s about time we, humans, took accountability for our own ideas instead of claiming that some mythical creatures hit us with them.<br>The way I see it - an idea is a result of creative thinking. Our senses supply us with enourmous amount of information all the time and our brains are trying to catch up and make sense of it all. We try and match new information with the patterns we already know and get quite stressed when we are met with something entirely new.<br>And we get quite pleased when we encounter something that matches one of our favourite patterns. So pleased, that we dedicate our time generously to whoever or whatever keeps matching these patterns and call them passion projects.<br>How to come up with an idea for a passion project<br>Based on the interviews I’ve had with software creators who successfully kept their passion projects alive for years and my own experience, the secret recipe to coming up with a creative idea includes only two ingredients:<br>Deep personal connection to a problem or a domain (a.k.a. passion)<br>Intentional limitations<br>Find where your passion lies<br>A common advice is to look around you, but I find it much more effective to search for ideas in the past experiences first. Find a quite place and ask yourself:<br>When was the last time I felt alive and excited?<br>What was I doing then? Where and with whom?<br>Can I think of any other time when I was in a similar situation and was just as excited?<br>It is very important to not judge any ideas you’ll get just yet. Nothing is too silly or too ambitious at this point. Just take note of what comes and keep an open mind. The goal here is to narrow the problem and domain space for your passion project, not to get all the answers.<br>When you have a potential candidate - something you were excited about in the past, imagine yourself doing it again. Do you still feel excited about it?<br>Spend as much time as you need, explore different scenarios and try them on. And when you notice that you’re circling the same space over and over again - then you know you’re close.<br>Here’s an example:<br>Let’s say you were thinking about all the places you visited in your travels; and those memories filled you with joy and excitement. You remembered the people you met, the places you saw, the food you tasted or the adventures you had. And the thought of dropping it all and going on a year long trip around the world makes you happy.<br>Or, like it would be in my case, you would be coming back to the feeling of flow when you were building a software project and the feeling of joy of solving problems with it. Or that time when the server crashed and someone complained about it (because that meant that they were using it!). As opposed to the thought of travelling - that would make me slightly bored and annoyed - the thought of spending my vacation in front of a laptop creating tiny digital worlds fills me with joy.<br>It can be anything really. As Robert C. Martin wrote in his manifesto “We, the Unoffended”:<br>(We) Believe that, in order for the best ideas to rise to the top, all ideas must be heard and evaluated on their merits…(and) Believe that ideas are not harmful, so long as they do not specifically incite harmful actions.

So explore, dream and let yourself call all the shots.<br>Distill into an idea<br>Knowing what you are passionate about is the most important prerequisite for a passion project, but it still isn’t an actionable idea yet. So far it’s just a vague area and a feeling. And one that is quite disconnected from reality still.<br>So, when you’ve settled onto an area you’re passionate about, start intentionally limiting the scope and grounding the project. Ask yourself:<br>What am I already good at that could help me in this area?<br>What would I enjoy learning?<br>What would I absolutely hate doing?<br>Feel free to go into as many details as you’d like: think about tooling, colors, concepts and anything else. The goal is to make the project idea a little bit more concrete, layer by layer.<br>You can, of course keep it theoretical, if you prefer, but I find it most efficient to jump into something tiny and try it out. No commitment yet, just a quick one evening or weekend experiment that you’re ready to throw away.<br>There’s no saying how much time the whole “coming up with a passion project” process would take: you might loose interest or discover something that would prevent you from continuing working on the project...