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

Yeah - no worries. Except for E-myth Manganager - I didn't either until a couple of years ago my younger brother was going to open up a clinic and was talking about "E-myth for Doctors" or some such. Now I think he has one for all walks of life (like the "One minute Manager" or something). To me, it dilutes the message. My opinion is not the one that counts! :-)

I still think it (the original) is a great book.

I'll offer a bit of critical advice and say that, even though you think you've done a lot of great stuff, having an overly high opinion of oneself can be a barrier to progress. Try having a little more humility. For example, it's not likely you've actually written 4 million lines of code in 16 years of programming. For that to be true, you'd have to have written roughly 685 lines of code a day. That's a tall order for even the most productive software developers. So consider whether or not you inflated that number and ask yourself why you felt the need to do so. Also, comparing your code to the Bible is self-aggrandizing. Egoism can be a pretty big turn off to some people.

I'd also suggest placing less importance on your individual background. No one in my family understands a thing about software programming. I found it on my own and had no one to "support" my interest in the subject in the sense that you're talking about. If you love technology and software, then that's the most important thing. Be thankful that you've found enough of the right situation to develop some skill in something you enjoy. Also be thankful you live in a world that values those skills. Even if your immediate world doesn't seem to place much value on programming, I can assure you that the world at large does.

Don't think that the point of being a developer is to score a job at a big, famous company. There are so many random factors that go into the interview process at a large corporation that you can't feel too bad when they don't pan out in your favor. Also, it's even true that the lives of corporate employees are not always that enviable. There's often a lot of dumb organizational crap that you have to deal with and it can be hard to stand out and develop your career when you're just an ant in the army.

Bottom line, if you're a smart, creative, productive person, you can find a way to make a contribution to the world that people will value. Just keep trying. As a young man, you've still got some time and you shouldn't feel overly pressured to attain immediate success.

There's lots of positive data eschewing the benefits of pursuing discipline as the master skill, because once you learn that you can learn to be disciplined at any skill you need, you can more effectively learn and do anything that needs to be done and get to the task of being successful towards your goals.

Discipline to do what needs to be done will always beat constantly seeking motivation, because motivation implies a lack of it to begin with and staying that way.

Discipline for me is like making sure one takes a regular bath. Motivation is a temporary mental bath that constantly needs renewing. Discipline ingrains habits that bypass a lot of that.

Discipline makes sure to keep you in a position to perform and remain productive. In any hard task, great, aspirational, much of the things that need to be done are heavy lifting, mundane, critical and a lot of drudgery, not tasks anyone would be motivated to complete, and often the winner are those who can be disciplined to do what needs to be done.

They say time and learning from experience is the best teacher, I'm slowly beginning to realize this is true. In our case, talking about swimming, reading swimming, and watching swimming doesn't make up for jumping in the pool and realizing you don't need motivation to stay afloat in the water, only discipline to do what needs to be done to survive before picking a direction in which to thrive.

Some interesting reads that shouldn't be examined internally by an open mind and not one seeking social or external validation for a belief in something:

- A few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557335

- https://www.hotjar.com/blog/the-passion-fallacy

- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/opinion/sunday/learning-se...

- IQ isn't as valuable as self-discipline: http://time.com/12086/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter-10-steps...

- http://time.com/4175356/habits-routines/

Please don't do this.

I am 26 and I gotta say I agree. I only just got my first real programming job. It took me knowing the right person, and they spoke to someone who got me hired before I knew it. So take your dads job, meet new people, network. People are fascinated by technology, and software development touches many many fields from law enforcement (forensics), to medical, all the way to farming, and many more. Your dad could even use a bit of sprucing up for his business maybe?

You could change his business to be modernized and sneak in some software development into it at some point? :) Just be wise about it, don't just break his company for yours haha, you might even learn a lot for your own business from and he could fund you once he sees how genuine your work is. Worse case you go back to programming with new business knowledge. Who knows you might even meet business minded people your age who could benefit your startups? Take a leap and if you don't like it after sometime, just plan to leave or reasses.