> in four decades of living on this planet I don't think I've ever come across anything that fits that bill.

Keep looking! But also, it's possible at 40+ that you may have already found it. Perhaps you've not given that thing the chance it needed for you to fall in love with it — the days and weeks of exploration and the obsessive iteration mentioned in the GQ article that it takes to grok something and absorb it until it feels like it's yours.

I'm almost your age and now rewinding my career path. I kept chasing different tech career paths hoping to find something that “fit the bill”, which only showed me that nothing was as interesting to me than what I started my career doing (game design/animation). It took a couple of changes to realise that:

- Reflecting on how I spend my free time and time on social media, and the speakers and personalities I'm fascinated by and naturally drawn to. (They are mostly game designers and devs.)

- Looking back at the work in the past that has made me happiest and most fulfilled.

From there it was a case of having the discipline to commit to it — I spend most mornings and evenings skilling up and having fun with game design and development, although my day job is still in front-end right now.

On the motivation side of things you mentioned, I don't think it's a case of “find the right thing and you'll find your motivation.” It's more a case of discipline, projecting your self now to your future self, and knowing a few psychological techniques. A couple of things have helped me with that, and they're at opposite ends of the “mind trick” spectrum:

1. Jonathan Blow (designer of Braid, The Witness, owner of Thekla, Inc) has several videos about dealing with lack of motivation that are worth watching:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7kh8pNRWOo

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECwHZlvvVH4

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryB_VQ__KeE

The pace is slow because it was delivered as a live stream and not a rehearsed talk, but stick with it — he has some great tips about becoming self-aware in order to recognise and reverse the more moderate feelings of malaise that are commonly experienced with any creative work.

2. Jocko Willink (retired Navy SEAL) has a good podcast dealing with motivation, discipline, and committing to your thing:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEv5PxrDvs (a compilation of “best of” clips from his podcast).

With Jocko, I had to fight the urge to close the tab — it can be hard to stomach “just do it” pep-talks that feel like an audio embodiment of those motivational posters at first. But several things kept me listening to that, and I became hooked on his other podcasts:

- The idea that motivation can be summoned by cultivating the discipline to commit to a thing; motivation is not some external thing that you have to seek out and capture.

- The concept of procrastinating your procrastination — you might not feel like doing something from your routine today (be it exercise or hacking on a project or learning a language), but do it anyway; you can always not do it tomorrow if you feel the same.

- This was pretty hard-hitting for me: “That second that just went by. That counted. And so did that second. And in those precious seconds, you are either building, or you are decaying. You are either gaining ground or you are losing ground. In that second. And in every second.”

The interesting thing about the Valley Forged article for me was that Eric seemed to fall into it — he didn't set out on a path to find something to dedicate 5+ years of his life to, like those game developers in Indie Game The Movie who wanted to make games since childhood. He wanted to make a game to get better at programming, and that evolved into an obsession almost out of happenstance. I think there's a lesson there that throwing yourself into things that seem fun wholeheartedly and with discipline can yield better results than skimming topics at a shallower depth.