Winning, at the cost of fun

I trained myself to only do things with a clear outcome. It turned me into a tool.

I reached the monthly revenue I couldn’t imagine myself making. But the price for that was losing something that turned out to be really, really valuable.

I lost the joy of building things just for fun, without any purpose.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, I was building a database engine. I didn’t plan to capitalize on it. I didn’t even talk about it much. It was for me and only for me. Later, an SQL parser I open-sourced from the engine was used in production by a company. But it wasn’t the goal, just a side effect. It was so much fun. So much! I was literally drawing on paper how to store a B+ tree in a file and covering all that with tests. I didn’t care about the outcome; I was obsessed with just making it work.

But these days, I calculate ROI on everything I want to create.

Around a month ago, I sat down to build a game, and it felt like wasting time. Why not build a new feature or a marketing page for my current product instead? Why spread focus?

Building a side project? It should be around my product, to at least drive some traffic or promote it laterally.

Even one of my most sacred and protected activities—reading books—has become utilitarian. I read to learn marketing or get better at the business game.

This trait annoys and often paralyzes me now. It is clearly the price I paid for tuning myself into complete focus mode and obsession. And I am lucky and grateful. That sacrifice gave me financial freedom, at least for now, and time to do things I want.

But ironically, what I want has been transformed while I was achieving that dream. Is it a win?

I don’t know how to solve it yet, and should I? But I wanted to put this feeling on “paper” and get it out of my head.