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

It also sounds like you're not chatting enough with your would-be clients. Instead of building first all while wondering if you'll get market traction and eventually losing interest, find the would-be customers first (if only as a pre-launch page to build a list) and then build what they want. It's a lot harder to walk away from a project when there's a mob of hungry buyers at the door who was promised you'd deliver in 3 months.

That is, I may allocate parts of my free time to "doing programming" but the precise nature of it is not that relevant. Some programming is easy and valuable, other programming is dreadfully difficult and fixes a minor bug. I do not know which I will encounter when I "do programming" but I treat it as a course of exercise and try to make something happen during that block of time.

Likewise the act of creating shouldn't wear you down. The personal project is the place where you have the best chance of growing and getting out of your comfort zone, and achieving this growth may mean countering the impulse to immediately chase a project idea with a business plan.

A business is also a kind of machinery - a machinery made of people, their roles and relationships and usage of time and space. It means having two projects, not one, and presuming to allocate your time to "the business" and reap the tangible rewards of it. But in doing that you can kill your motivation since the two projects in combination will quickly start engaging skills you don't have and possibly aren't ready to learn.

When you get to that point, and your attitude to the work becomes "someone needs to pay me to do this," you may want to stop, because then you're engaging with the problem space at the same level as anyone else chasing after money. Good work can be done by mercenaries, but that doesn't mean you're able to "just turn it on" and work on the business because of a hypothetical prospect. You have to have some ability to keep faith in it if you want to last through the "despair" periods, and that limits what you can work on solo. Two or three people working on it can keep their momentum and power through a considerably higher degree of misery - hence your statement about having an easier time at the office.

And that brings me back to the "cycles of practice" idea. It's not that you will never succeed solo, it's that you need to develop a better understanding of yourself and what keeps you in for the long run. The idea may be a good one, but you also need to be the person who can execute on the idea. It's worth continuing your education when and where you can find it - take classes you didn't consider and read books you never thought about - to try to scout out your territory better.

- Guido van Rossum wrote the first line of Python in 1989 or so (started)

- He released the first version on Useset pretty quickly ("finished" the MVP)

- He worked on himself for four years or so (maintaining, improving)

- Then other people started contributing for 25 years or so (leading)

So I would say he's able to do all 3 things, plus lead the team, which is even harder.

I think you can also say the same about Linus Torvalds, probably the leaders of similar projects like Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Richard Hipp of sqlite, etc. (without much of the leading part, since sqlite is relatively closed to contribution.)

One exception might be Stallman. Although Stallman's achievements are great, what I learned from reading his autobiography is that he started with existing pieces of code for GCC and Emacs.

In other words, he tries NOT to start from scratch. That's probably what enabled him to be productive enough to start so many projects simultaneously.

He also tends to be pretty good about handing over maintainership. That is, he is relatively good at recruitment to the cause.

Anyway, I guess this is why we hold such people in high regard! Because they're able to do things that most people cannot do -- that would normally take huge teams of people and/or entire companies.

Even with love, it can be difficult to remain focused. A trick I do when I run is to constantly recalibrate my goals as I am going. If I am having a hard time a few miles in, I tell myself to get to the next quarter and then the next until it's a half. Eventually it's a mile and I start again if I need to or expand scope. I will apply this same technique to life and have found it can be very useful.

If you've tried all of those, consider the process of abstaining from something or extreme focusing for a set period of time, say drinking alcohol or performing a 1 min plank every day for 30 days. I will do these exercises and the feeling I get from them is similar to the dragging feeling at the final 25% of a project. It conditions you to push through it because at the end of the day, it's only 30 days.

And I guess as a catch-all, if you really want to see it through, make that your goal––To complete one single project from start to finish, no matter what.