Ask HN: Why is nearing completion so demotivating?

You're a diamond in the rough, my friend. So true that most the time people are nicer than you'd expect. The unfair criticisms can be seen as a flaw with that person, if they are indeed unfair. The fair criticisms were probably known about anyway, and it says that someone actually cares about the product. Yes. I think when I get more communication with customers it might even be motivating.

So, lately my definition of depression has come to this: Someone who screwed up a high resolution thing, like forgetting to pass the salt, which they cascade up the pyramid into 'well I guess that makes me a bad dinner guest, which makes me a bad friend, which makes me a bad person'.

I find this fairly accurate for people with depression, and I try not to let actions cascade into my identity, but I try to make my identity drive my actions. If one of my actions doesn't symbolize my identity, I don't change my identity, I just try harder to make my actions truer to my values. I think if a person does this, they are still subjects to bouts of sadness and normal grief of life, but not so much as to invalidate themselves as a person and then fall into depression. `yourActions.onfail = function(e) { e.stopPropagation(); }`

This is probably the story you are thinking of: "Draw Dragon Dot Eyes" https://www.wattpad.com/178269525-fables-of-the-past-draw-dr...

The story is acted out by elementary school students in this video -- showing things don't always have to be perfect or polished to be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krptm4-mTDM

I've found this entire discussion enlightening. I especially liked the comment about the story of a baker who starts a bakery and soon finds out that being the owner/manager of a successful bakery actually has little in common with baking skills (even as baking is obviously important to a bakery).

For me, as with some other posters here, a big issue for programming projects I start is that while you are working on a project -- as a programmer who likes to program (working person-to-machine) -- the programming is usually fun. And also you can also imagine anything about the potential value of the results while things are under development. But when a project is "done", then getting others to try a project and dealing with support questions or major design feedback and such involves a whole different set of skills (working person-to-person). And those tasks -- especially promotion and support -- are probably are not fun things for a typical programmer. And also you might have guessed wrong about the need if you did not have users lined up before you started or got incremental feedback. If you couple all that with a perceived need to make money from the project when it is released, putting software out there can be a big source of looming stress -- especially if you begin to realize you are someone who loves to bake software and not someone who loves to run a software bakery.

My latest FOSS project took about a month of spare time -- porting to the web a CYOA-style interactive fiction Delphi app I co-wrote twenty years ago. And while I enjoyed working on it, I did drag the end out a bit and also consider even just not releasing the result just because I did not want to have a support burden from unpaid users. Luckily on that score it sank like a stone. :-) Thankfully I didn't need to make money from it. http://storyharp.com/

And at least that result is a big improvement from some previous independent projects which took much longer (sometimes years) and where hopes for making money from them were disappointed.

This has been mentioned in various permutations, and I'll add another one. The happiness in figuring a puzzle out is not when action is taken, it's when you figure it out in your mind. What about when you >think< you have figured it all out? Could you trick yourself into considering that your proposed solution might not actually be correct and you have to build it in order to check? Perhaps that doubt could slow someone down as well, enough to not want to continue either. What helps motivate me to finish is guilt, or more to the point the guilt of someone expecting the outcome and not receiving it. Not the best thing to chase/avoid, but everyone has their carrot/stick. Also consider that the work and upgrades are never over so the current release is just the latest iteration of your efforts.

That's also on one of the YC founder's blog (PG?), and really it makes a lot of sense. Let the market suggest the 2.0 version.

It sucks to fail, but hey; most people do not have the inherent desire to even play. That means something in and of itself. Good luck.