Funnily enough this can work - but you have to be careful you don't burn yourself even more.

If you find something that just captures your imagination then go with the flow.

By coincidence it was a video linked to here on HackerNews that gave me the impetus for the tech project on my last career break. It was the video of the guy who fixed a ten year old bug in Guitar Hero without the source code. It turned out to be a memory allocation failure. I found that so interesting I spent quite a bit of my 6 month career break investigating memory allocators, memory debug tools, and even wrote a couple of my own experimental allocators - absolutely fascinating stuff. Really miss those days!