Ask HN: Where do you get your inspiration from?

I always wonder what inspires different individuals....so basically what inspires you to build a particular tool?

Is it a problem? A passion for building something? Do you just randomly build stuff?

Would love your feedback, thanks!

I think another interesting question would be "where do you NOT get your inspiration" to which i 'll start: Not from techcrunch or similar blogs.

For me, it's mostly when I need something and I don't find a good solution. That's why I started hashtagify.me - I needed to find good hashtags to publicize a different website I had created about mortgages (that too, because I couldn't find a good one) and didn't find any good solution...

Depends on the project. Either that it has the potential to make money, or to help/inspire people (my blog), or it allows me to learn a particular skill (doing something lately to learn Backbone and other JS technologies), or it's just plain fun for me (game development).

My inspiration comes from the knowledge of my mortality, literally, not in a poetic romantic artsy way. If I am not going to give up on everything and die, then I will try my hardest in learning to live. There is nothing really that I can build that matters more than caring about my life. So, I just try to amass as much skill as I possibly can, pretty much all I do is study and try to develop skill and add more skill on top of existing skill, I relate almost everything to mathematics, computer science, logic, and code, aside from trusting a small subset of individuals with my physical presence. I hug my family and talk to my cat. That's my life. Sit at computer, code, food, sleep, exercise. Maybe it seems like I have no inspiration because there is no 'push' I need to do. I just 'do that' and 'that' is mostly, more or less, what I want my life to be. I could also say 'the world' is my inspiration but that's redundant, although much more humble, but it 'was' very hard getting my mind aligned into this particular habit sequence.

This is just in general. When I find particular projects to obsess over I have elevator speeches about them that could last decades. I get really really excited, super hyper, I like to explain why 'this tool' is the best thing in the world, and promptly forget my rant after I've finished it. I don't know 'why' I do it. I just 'want' this to be my life, because it's what I am passionate about, what clicks for me, what lights up my brain, what paints pretty pictures in my head, and what I love to think about, observe, learn about, and so on. Every explanation I could give for it in words doesn't do it justice.