Written by Nick Sawinyh
The standard career advice is to find the thing you love and build a career around it. I’ve now worked across mining infrastructure, lending protocols, market data, financial tooling, and public transit data, and I think that advice has the direction of causation backwards.
In every one of those areas I ended up genuinely absorbed by the work. In none of them did I arrive already caring. The caring showed up second, roughly six months in, and it showed up because I’d gotten good enough at something to see where the interesting problems were. Before that point each field looked flat and slightly boring, the way every field looks from outside.
So passion is real. It’s just an output, and treating it as an input means waiting for a feeling that only arrives after the work.
What actually transferred
The more useful question is what carries across a switch, because I’ve made several and none of my enthusiasm came with me.
From 2017 to 2019 I worked on mining pools that ran in the global top five by hashrate across several algorithms. Nothing about that domain resembles transit data. What transferred was one narrow habit: measuring what users actually experience rather than what’s convenient to measure. In mining that meant effective payout rather than raw hashrate, because the number that mattered to a miner and the number that looked good on our dashboard weren’t the same number, and the gap between them was where trust was won or lost.
That habit is the most portable thing I own. At a lending protocol I ran marketing and product through exploit events, where the temptation is to report system health while users are reporting something else entirely. Later, running a market data company, I watched us hit 100,000 daily users at peak and over $1B in cumulative volume. Most recently, auditing transit data quality, the convenient measure is whether an agency publishes a feed and the real one is whether a rider’s app shows the correct arrival time.
Same habit, five unrelated industries. It’s a way of looking at a problem rather than a feeling about the subject, and it took years to sharpen in a field I initially found dull.
The version of this I got wrong
A clean story here would be dishonest, so here’s the counterexample.
At that market data company I read market heat as product demand. The attention was real, the growth charts were genuinely flattering, and I kept funding product depth against a curve that turned out to describe interest rather than dependence. I was passionate at that point. I’d been in the domain for years and cared enormously. The passion made it harder, not easier, because it supplied a reason to believe the numbers I already wanted to believe.
That’s the part career advice usually leaves out. Loving the work doesn’t improve your judgment about the work, and occasionally it gets in the way of it.
More recently I caught a smaller version of the same failure. Reviewing code an AI had written, I approved something I would have questioned coming from a person, because it was fluent and arrived with nobody attached to push back on. Fluency reads as competence when you’re already inclined to be convinced. That was six months ago and it changed how I review.
What I’d actually tell someone
Optimize for a steep learning gradient rather than a subject you already like. The subject matters much less than whether you’re near people better than you and whether feedback arrives quickly. Interest follows competence fairly reliably. Competence doesn’t follow interest.
Collect habits rather than credentials. Ask what you’re getting better at that would survive your industry disappearing. If the answer is only domain knowledge, you’re accumulating something with a short half-life. If it’s a way of looking at problems, it will still be worth something two pivots from now.
And give it about six months before deciding you don’t care. That’s roughly how long it took me, every time, to get far enough in to find the real problems. It isn’t a law, just a consistent enough pattern in my own case that I no longer trust my month-two opinion of anything.
Where this doesn’t apply
None of it justifies staying somewhere genuinely bad. There’s a real difference between “this is boring because I’m not competent yet” and “this is boring because the work is meaningless or the people are unserious,” and six months is enough to tell those apart. The gradient test does the work: if you aren’t getting better at anything, waiting won’t help.
I also had a technical education and the freedom to switch industries in my twenties, which isn’t a universal position. Someone supporting a family on a single income is running a different calculation, and I’m not going to pretend the advice transfers unchanged.
But the core of it is cheap to test. Pick the thing that will make you better fastest, not the thing you already like. In my experience the liking arrives on its own, slightly later, and it arrives more reliably than the competence would have if you’d chosen the other way around.
Author Bio:
Nick Sawinyh is Head of Product and GTM at Veodyn, where he works on transportation data infrastructure for public agencies. He has led product, marketing, and business development across mining infrastructure, DeFi protocols, and financial tooling, including co-founding a venture-backed platform with a globally distributed team.
