Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?

Time spent working does NOT necessarily = amount of work completed. It's easy to get discouraged when you "sense" you're not spending enough time on something. Two days ago, for example, I came here 827 times (well maybe not that many). But it was a very productive day! By the end of the day, I figured something out and the flood gates opened. That's just how it works for hackers sometimes. If you don't care anymore, that's one thing. But being frustrated about time spent is a signal something else is wrong, not your commitment.

Some experts think we are either preprogrammed with "moving toward" or "moving away" internal metaprograms. OK, whatever. I'm a very positive optimistic person, so I just assumed I was a "moving toward" person. Wrong! I am HIGHLY motivated by that which I do not like, but I never realized it. If I see something I like, I think, "that's cool". But if I see something I don't like, I think, "That sucks. I can do way better than that." So I do. It may be one of the 7 deadly sins, but jealousy is a great motivator for "moving away" people. I'm older than every speaker at Startup Weekend, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and possibly our next president. But I'm just as smart as any of them, and I haven't got mine yet. That just pisses me off! (See, it works, I'm ready to hack right now.) What about you? How are you programmed? What can you do to stoke yourself (or piss yourself off)?

"When do you know its time to call it quits?" Never. I realize most people will disagree with me. Walt Disney and Colonel Saunders went to a thousand banks before getting a loan. How soon would you have given up? When do you quit trying to teach you child how to walk because it's not going as well as you'd like? Jerry Seinfield jokes that it took him 20 years to become an overnight success. I've seen the same thing with many hackers I know. If you know deep down inside that your project is a winner, you must do whatever it takes to get it to "walk". If you're not sure, then maybe you shouldn't have started it in the first place. Only you can answer that one.

Hate to be like Oprah, but if things aren't going as quickly as you would have liked, maybe you oughta read this:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Secret-Getting-Absolutely-Eve...

It's amazing what you can make happen if you follow the simple advice of this book.

Collect data from everyone. Then go with your gut. Best advice I ever got.

If after a week I still can't face it... well I'm probably screwed. The idea may be fine but I've lost it. I generally soldier on for a month, take another week off and repeat. If the cycle lasts a few months and I still can't get past the pain. I think (for me at least) it's time to move on.

I can't really answer the specific questions you pose because, well if I could answer them, I'd be VC boss dude with a suit and a very fast car.

Time away from most problems seems to make them less of a problem in my experience.

good luck

Changing strategy does not equal giving up.

Giving up prematurely is the single biggest impediment to failure in any field. How do you know if it's premature? You don't. So you keep going.

FWIW, I hope my competitors think like you do. I'd be the only one left standing.

Let's say that after 1 year, given changing competitive dynamics, it is the rational conclusion of the team's leader that continuing to build that product is no longer worth the opportunity cost of those 5 people's time based on an up-to-date risk/reward calculation (perhaps Wrigley's has just produced a prototype of their own Gubmarine that is 1.4 times better than yours and will be ready for market 5 months sooner than you can hope to be, and they already have a major advantage when it comes to distribution, which makes puts you at a considerable disadvantage). Is it then not plausible that ceasing work on your project is a good idea?

This stuff happens in big companies all the time -- they try something new, and it doesn't work, so they cease efforts and try something else. That's a "change in strategy," not "quitting," because the company as a whole continues. But in a startup, it sometimes is called "quitting," because you often only have one product, and your team is specially designed just for that one product (and incidentally, that what made you so efficient)... but it also means that you can't just shuffle those people around to different positions in the company; instead, sometimes, unfortunately, you quit. You die.

Same people, same product, same/similar change in capital allocation -- but for the big-company it's a "change in strategy," while for a startup, it's "quitting."

Isn't this how startups work? What's wrong with condemning projects that aren't earning their keep?

I am fully cognizant of the importance of having strong motivation and not giving up when it's too soon, and how difficult it is to know when it's ready to quit. And as long as I'm leading a project that's been decided to continue, I'll have my eyes facing forward and I'll raise all the hell I can muster to make things work, let me tell you. But the idea that it is never good to quit is, in my mind, still worth of the word "ridiculous," even if using that word makes me sound impolite or foolish.

FWIW, I won't particularly mind if all my contemporaries think like you do -- that way many of them will never become my competitors, as they'll be too busy working on that great idea they had 3 years ago to notice that the world changed in the meantime, and that they'd be better off giving up and starting something different.

(Or maybe I hope they think like I do, but they'll misjudge and quit too early. That's also a possibility. We're dealing in grays here, not B&W).

-- Update --

Important to note, belatedly, that my talk about "giving up" etc. was in response to the comment I replied to, not the original questioner (who doesn't seem to be in such dire straits as someone who needs to hear what I've written).

These are really tough decisions. You can look at every successful company and, thanks to the hindsight bias, see that success is almost always born through persistence through difficulty. But there are plenty of examples where fighting a losing battle wasn't worth it. Or of people who tried, failed, quit at the right time, tried something else, and then succeeded.