Ask HN: How do you stay disciplined in the long run?

For exercise: I've found riding a bicycle to work to be my least hated form of exercise. I force myself to start every Monday riding to work. If I don't ride on Monday, the rest of the week is shot. When I do ride, I try to make it as enjoyable as possible. If I'm feeling unmotivated, I'll glide to work without breathing heavy at all. I just have to lower the bar so much that I'll at least do it. Often, I get motivated half way to work and pedal harder anyway.

For side projects: I've been tying this in with other habits. I get up at 5 every morning and drink coffee, read for a bit, and make at least 1 small contribution to a side project. Maybe it's a meaningless refactor or fixing a typo. At least I see the green activity in Github and continue building a habit of at least looking at and thinking about the projects I'm working on. The end result is that some weeks are vastly productive while others hardly mean anything.

What I've noticed is that motivation and productivity are a cycle and when I enjoy my daily habits enough (with no particular outcome in mind), I stick with things long enough to see compounding results.

TLDR;

Focusing on outcomes makes you aware of how you're not meeting them -> Demotivation

Building daily habits with vague goals and enjoying the ride -> Compounding results and satisfaction in hindsight

What about users/clients, or partners/co-founders?

If you try to ship a super simple prototype very quickly and get a few users, you would feel accountable to them, and that would give you the motivation to keep building until you make a great service.

Alternatively, you could team up with someone. Have a chat every day to share your progress, get some new ideas together, and stay excited about the project.

Counter-intuitively, I stick with them more when I am less fired up about them. Passion fades, but a habit of spending a few hours a week on something doesn't burn you out, and you make small improvements over time, resulting in a product. I spent years on one side project, coding it in a weekend, then being very patient as it grew, adding features when asked (and they made sense), never in a rush. Eventually it made some money, and eventually I sold it, but it was a long, slow, small weekly effort for about 5 years.

This is the most true thing I've read in a while. It takes a lot of thoughts I've been having lately and wraps them in a concise package. Thank you! This is gonna stick with me for a while.