I'm a good programmer but I'm really crap at coming up with ideas.
I have had this feeling of angst and emptiness for about a decade. You see, I don't love what I do. In fact until recently I didn't even really like it. If you consider the Japanese concept of Ikigai, I'm firmly stuck at that "Comfortable, but feeling of emptiness" state, and I have been for a long time.
It doesn't take much of a perusal of my resume to see that I am all over the place with regards to career paths. Military, software, entrepreneur, IT, law enforcement, back to Software… entrepreneur again... back to law enforcement... back to software again... It's kind of crazy. It's very much a bipolar obsessive compulsive career path if there ever was one.
I think this stems from my deep seeded desire to do something that I enjoy, that I'm good at, that is fulfilling, and is important enough that people want/need it, and that I can actually make some kind of livable wage doing.
I have the desire... but not the idea.
I'm pretty sure if I could come up with some product idea that I could create from the ground up that was my own "baby", for the lack of a better term, I'd land in that Ikigai bullseye. But as it stands right now I'm close, but also very far away from that goal.
The irony is people come up with ideas all the time, I'm just not one of those people. I can implement, but I don't want to implement someone else's idea. For me to truly get that angsty feeling out of the center of my chest I need to not only be good at something, find fulfillment because it's something people will use and get paid for it.. but it needs to be MINE.
I hope one day I can figure it out. And I'm always open to ideas, but as it stands now I'm just not sure how to get there.