71–80 of 180 posts
Get married, buy a house, have kids. Then you know you have to finish your work because you are responsible for others.
One day, you will be dead. Each year that passes after your death, fewer and fewer people will remember who you were, what you did or what your face looked like. Eventually, you'll be completely forgotten. Who cares if that side project you put out sucked or not. Might as well put it out there and see what people think. There's a good chance too that the project won't even be remembered even by the time you die. The…
I usually like to save my existential crises for later in the week, but thanks for helping me dive right into it on a Monday morning.
Motivation/willpower is a very weak way to get things done, approach it instead with "I'll just write one line of code today/work on it for 15 minutes straight/document one thing/design one function". You'll likely find that once you start, you'll do more than you planned, the crux is almost always the start. You look at the entire body of work and think "its too much to do in one sitting", but ultimately thats your reptile brain talking you out of expending energy needlessly. So just use that little mind hack to get you out of your cognitive dissonance and started.
And if the prior posters statement gets you into an existential crisis, I'd start reading up on the stoics, buddhists, etc... Yes even if you're an atheist/whatever, accepting ones fate in the universe has no meaning is ultimately relieving. Or as a Shinto priest once told me: Life is a dance, dance to the music while it plays, you may not get another chance to dance!
From my experience, getting to release, it’s like I feel like I’m going to fail. The product isn’t attractive. The buckets of money won’t fall from the sky.
And you know what, that’s 100% true.
Engineering is but a small piece of making a business. “Build it and they won’t come” is what a bad ass marketing guy I know would say. So the thing is, you will NEVER figure out how to shake money loose from other people until you put it out there. So you have some choices, accept that the next phase is not going to be easy, and push through to learn and become the same bad ass at company as you are at coding. Or rm -rf your codebase and go back to your job. Or waste even more time before making one choice or the other. Procrastination does not change the reality of having to make tough choices; it merely makes getting to the results on the other side come much later.
One day, you will be dead. Each year that passes after your death, fewer and fewer people will remember who you were, what you did or what your face looked like. Eventually, you'll be completely forgotten. Who cares if that side project you put out sucked or not. Might as well put it out there and see what people think. There's a good chance too that the project won't even be remembered even by the time you die. The…
That line of thinking can also be quite demotivating. For instance, it could also be used to argue that since none of what I do matters anyway, I might as well spend it doing something else such as watching TV, playing video games, hiking in the forests, reading a good book, etc.
Tell yourself you’ll spend five minutes working on it. This tricks your brain into thinking it’s not a big pain commitment. Once you’ve spent five minutes immersed in it you’ll be more willing to keep working. Another trick is to break down the task into as many subtasks as you can, and when you’re feeling obstinate about working, just get one small subtask done. It also helps you visualize the finiteness of the tota…
This is the 'it's too cold outside' runner's trick for motivation. If it's very cold outside, you tell yourself 'if it's too cold after 10 minutes I'll come back in'. But you never come back in. It's a matter of getting started, nothing else. We are funny creatures.
One day, you will be dead. Each year that passes after your death, fewer and fewer people will remember who you were, what you did or what your face looked like. Eventually, you'll be completely forgotten. Who cares if that side project you put out sucked or not. Might as well put it out there and see what people think. There's a good chance too that the project won't even be remembered even by the time you die. The…
A while back I read "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity" [1], and though I'm not completely sold on his methodology, the author has a few ideas and techniques I really liked, that have helped me get motivated.
One of them is to figure out the next concrete, actionable task that needs to be done to make progress, and do that. Don't think about a million edge cases, or a big rewrite, but instead focus on the single edge case that's blocking you right now, or the first thing you need to do to start a rewrite, and then go do that smaller, specific thing.
It will feel good to have it done, and it'll motivate you to get to work on the next small step.
https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...