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

Find out something through HN/Reddit/Other medium --> Get motivated --> Get good knowledge about it through research --> See others succeed, get motivated a bit more --> Execute and get to, say, 25-50% of the journey --> Get bored --> Abandon --> be passive for couple of months --> repeat.

Be it creating new websites or new products (probably the reason I have not launched something as a personal project, despite having tried like 10-11 of them with varying degree of success), weight loss journey, running, meditation etc. I have tried breaking things into manageable chunks and then taking them one-by-one, or through methodologies like GTD, or by making others accountable (tough to find someone who takes personal interest in what I would do; also, I have strongly come to perceive myself as being driven by external accountabilities which makes me good at work at office but bad at executing personal projects).

I see folks who are disciplined, are ruthless executors, are self-motivated, and wonder, what could I improve or work towards to get things in a better shape. Any suggestions?

Some people are great at coming up with new ideas but quickly bore with the implementation. Some people can relentlessly improve on an existing thing but can't come up with the initial idea. Some people are great stewards of an established program but don't thrive in the chaos of rapid iteration.

I think instead of trying to mold yourself into something you're not naturally good at, you should try to figure out what you are naturally good at and build a team around it to support you.

I'm speaking in broad strokes of course, but reading your post, I think you are just not going to be a sole proprietor. You need a team member who can catch your early enthusiasm and then help see the project through to completion.

You need a finisher. Not every starter is a finisher, and not every finisher is a starter, and not every finisher is a good maintainer, either. They're different things.

Fitness and money are easiest examples. For some, being fat is disguisting and unimaginable, so they will do everything possible to stay thinner. For some that threshold is having an actual six pack, and once you lose it, you go into emergency "at whatever cost" mode.

That's def the case for me with below average college-educated income - when I was below it, I was in "how can I be such a failure" mode. But now that I am above it, I am not in panic mode, even though I consider myself a failure, it's "good enough" on some "subconscious" level, despite me constantly trying to change it. Whereas if someone was born rich, I think not being able to keep up with the previous standards of life could be the threshold.

So, there are three take-aways from this. Once you establish a new height, you realize how good it is to be there and that it's possible, so you can get back there far easier. The second is that it's very easy to get lazy once you are comfortable. At that point you can also "afford a life", and that starts eating away your time. Edit: The last one is what the poster below said - maybe realizing how important these thresholds are is a key to artificially creating them.

Other than that - I think "focus on one thing at a time and set a concrete time block for it x days a week" is the vest possible strategy.

My side projects always die soon after figuring out what I want and how to do it. My job I'm doing the messy stuff I'd prefer not to do.

When you read blog posts, its easy to feel that a person is doing all this by themselves, but I would bet that most of them have a solid network. This is why I think we are in this productivity porn era of computing, tech bootcamps/silicon valley are echo chambers for the stuff, and the people inside these ecosystems have it easy in the networking world.

So make some friends who are trying to do similar things. I'm in college and can say that I'm a failure at what I'm preaching, but it will help immensely if my understanding is correct.