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Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#111

Post by zzguy »

BlackjackCF wrote: post #83
fiveoak wrote: post #30

I'm a 27 year old programmer that was in a similar situation as you when I was 25 (although with much less lines of code written). I still struggle a bit with motivation for working on personal projects, but I did eventually get a job as a software developer at a non-tech oriented company. I noticed you applied to several highly selective companies like Google, Facebook, Uber but have you tried looking at less select…

You'd also be surprised at the number of companies out there that aren't the Big Five and are tackling a bunch of interesting problems using different technologies.

This. And what everyone else is pretty much saying. If you only read tech blogs you'd probably think the only companies in existence are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc. The world is big and you can have an impact in places that will probably never get press, because they aren't sexy enough. Take healthcare, Google keeps trying to break into that industry, and kinda failing miserably. Partially because the problems in that industry are more related to regulations and people, stuff that machine learning isn't going to solve anytime soon.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#112

Post by Cymen »

kalmi10 wrote: post #110
daveguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

The author's name is right there in the comment.

Oddly, that doesn't help much as the same author wrote multiple books with very similar titles.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#113

Post by snoonan »

Some of what you say here reminds me of how a friend described his ADHD hyperfocus and extreme avoidance behaviors. Two sides of executive function issues. It may be worth doing an online ADHD assessment to see if there is a big easy solution you may be able to follow up on.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#114

Post by radley »

kalmi10 wrote: post #110
daveguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

The author's name is right there in the comment.

The author has written 20 books in the "E-Myth" series dating back to 1990.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#115

Post by eropple »

dietrichepp wrote: post #24
mrcabada wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, remove a 0 to that 40. Did the maths wrong. Fixed.

4M is still high. In order to maintain 680 lines per day on average, you have to sacrifice a lot. Remember that code is not intrinsically valuable. The highest I've hit is 3,500 over a three-day weekend, and the experience was awful. I spent a week recovering.

Yup. My estimate of my own, over the last twenty-one years, is somewhere in the neighborhood of a million. And that's in delivering projects for a lot of customers.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#116

Post by praveenster »

daveguy wrote: post #108
Denzel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The E-myth" by Michael Gerber is the single most helpful book I've ever read on transitioning your thinking from engineering-focused to business-minded. Specifically, the difference between the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur. I read it on the recommendation of an ex-Google engineer turned failed-entrepreneur, here on HN. He said that a The E-myth described all the failures he had encountered trying to…

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

I suspect it is this one based on the summary at Amazon "Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited should be required listening for anyone thinking about starting a business or for those who have already taken that fateful step. The title refers to the author's belief that entrepreneurs--typically brimming with good but distracting ideas--make poor businesspeople."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0887307280

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#117

Post by rublev »

projektir wrote: post #33
rublev wrote: post #21

I'm motivated by ideologies and idols that serve as role models to me, they keep me company even after death. My support comes from philosophy largely.

What ideology and idols are your role models right now?

Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Bach, Nikolai Lugansky, Sviatoslav Richter, Evgeny Kissin, Orson Welles, Ilya Repin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ennio Morricone, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Albert Camus, Kafka, and most of all Heinrich Neuhaus amongst many others. Those are my lifes main influences. Mainly music, some authors, couple of pianists, few painters.

Glenn Gould especially. Check my previous comments for his mentions.

I feel closer to them and their art (especially music) than any friends or family. I hope one day I'll break into that 'sphere' of people but it's going to take a couple of lonely decades and that's ok, and they've made me feel okay with it. I respect the amount of time that goes into works of divinity. With respect to philosophy, I mean in the loosest sense, peoples personal systems of thought, especially those of idols have helped me. PG's essays, Stoicism, and Eudaemonia come to mind.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#118

Post by ci5er »

kalmi10 wrote: post #110
daveguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

The author's name is right there in the comment.

Well, yeah. Since then the author has kind of Tom Clancy'd the joint up with a whole lotta more titles.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#119

Post by ci5er »

daveguy wrote: post #108
Denzel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The E-myth" by Michael Gerber is the single most helpful book I've ever read on transitioning your thinking from engineering-focused to business-minded. Specifically, the difference between the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur. I read it on the recommendation of an ex-Google engineer turned failed-entrepreneur, here on HN. He said that a The E-myth described all the failures he had encountered trying to…

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

This is the 2nd (or later, somewhat re-written) edition of the book referenced: - https://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abo...

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

#120

Post by Denzel »

ci5er wrote: post #119
daveguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 20 e-myth books. Is there a specific title?

This is the 2nd (or later, somewhat re-written) edition of the book referenced: - https://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abo...

Yes, this is the book I read and was referencing. My apologies, I did not realize he released so many similar versions.
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