Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself?

My father dropped out of high school to help support his family. He served in the military and started his own business. Except for Sundays, he worked his ass off 12 hours every day of his life until he died.

My mother could have been anything, but never got the chance. Instead, she raised us so that we could become what she never could.

My grandmother had nothing. When she was 13, she had to drop out of school to care for 7 other children. She ate her first egg as an adult. She never travelled more than 50 miles from home her entire life.

My grandfather was the smartest man I ever knew but never went to school a single day in his life. Instead he did mind-numbing factory work and stimulated himself with books, musical instruments, languages, and people whenever he had energy after work. He died prematurely from industrial causes.

I, on the other hand, was born at the perfect time. I got to go to college and now I'm a computer programmer immersed in thousands of opportunities of the biggest technological change in human history. I am limited only by my own imagination in building almost anything I want. And I make more money than any of my ancestors every dreamed possible. I'm probably the first out of 100 generations of my family who actually gets to do what I want and love it.

It that doesn't motivate someone, I don't know what would.

Here's how we look at it: We force you to toe the line at least for a while so that when/if you do fall off your yellow brick road then the motivation Beeminder provided up until that point still seems worth it. Everything we've worked on in building Beeminder has been with the objective of making people succeed and we'd have to be very myopic for it to be otherwise.

More on this: http://blog.beeminder.com/perverse

Or just think of it this way: You're paying a fee for Beeminder's service and that fee is waived if you never happen to need Beeminder's kick in the pants.

If you really want a charity option though, some of our competitors offer that: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors At least one (StickK) offers an anti-charity option, but I really don't think that's a good idea: http://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity

I like to set external-facing deadlines. I'll do things like tell my department I'm going to do a presentation on technology X in two weeks, and then start learning about it. If I don't get it done, I have to tell 20 other developers why I have to cancel the meeting they've all accepted.

This is part of the motivation of team and peer-accountability in some of the agile methods like Scrum / XP / Pair Programming. If you feel personally responsible to someone else, you're likely to follow through. A good way to do this with personal projects is to find a partner - I work with a designer on a lot of my personal projects, and telling him that I'm going to get X done helps, as well as seeing the time and progress he's invested in the project.

I use the Napoleon Hill method of having a definite chief aim - Bruce Lee is probably one of the most famous users of it. http://imgur.com/r/GetMotivated/CvaN5QB

The method boils down to writing something down to yourself outlining what you want to achieve, how you're going to achieve it, and when you're going to achieve it by. Then you keep reading the aim and it helps to motivate you.

There's a whole sub Reddit dedicated to getting motivated - /r/GetMotivated - always helps me.