Ask HN: How do you maintain motivation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you maintain motivation?

17 pointsozarker10 comments

I've been really struggling with my personal goals recently. Some days I have the energy to work out, eat healthy, work on personal projects, etc... But more often than not I feel totally dead and struggle to do more than the bare minimum. What are your strategies to maintain consistent motivation and productivity?

I feel like a fraud because even though I've made good progress on traditional goals (finished university, have a decent paying job, married, have a kid, hoping to buy a house soon) I feel stuck and unable to move forward. Apologies if this is an inappropriate topic for HN but any advice/resources would be greatly appreciated.

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The most rigid discipline ultimately snaps. You have to cut yourself slack

The best motivation for me is _social_. You work with people that want to achieve your goals. You're motivated to work with them and be accountable to others.

The other big thing is building in routine. Have a consistent schedule you follow. Your body/mind will eventually crave the routine

Great piece of advice and very elegantly put!

To add to the social aspect, I like tricking myself into being held accountable by talking or mentioning ideas that are in very early stages. If I never share my thoughts with other people they are almost not real at all.

Motivation can't be given. It's a unique, deep, personal thing. The best motivational speakers out there like Tony Robbins often specialize in sparking the fuel inside you.

To quote a chapter from Alter Ego, Todd Herman, there are commonly 4 sources: Trauma, Destiny, Altruism, Self-expression.

Trauma is the Batman route. Someone hurt you deeply. You want to prove an ex wrong. A teacher didn't believe in you. Part of my motivation is corruption. I have a relative who's hardcore poor. People would give donations to her, but when the religious authorities pass her the envelopes, a little would be missing. They digitised the distribution of cash and the corruption stopped. I've been digitising a lot of third world bureaucracy since.

Destiny can be if you're in the right circumstances. Both my parents went to Harvard, in a country where it's very rare for people to have a decent education. My dad was a startup guy before the word startup was even common. So I feel it's wasteful to not be doing something ambitious. Or some people feel that the responsibility just fell on their shoulders.

Altruism can be the will to see your community improve. You might be say, the eldest in a family of people who work hard labor, with a parent who worked their ass off to pay for your education. Or go deeper, maybe you had a grandparent who migrated and worked two jobs so that your father could become the doctor. Maybe you are the one who wants a better life for your grandchildren. Maybe you're a minority who wants to give inspiration to others.

And then self-expression, where you feel the urge to experiment and build. Why do people climb mountains? A lot of techies start here; many made games or something as a kid and somehow landed in an office job.

Tap into yourself to find that inner motivation. The Five Whys are a good place to start. Why do you want to work out? Why be healthy? Why live longer? Why are you where you are?

There's a well of emotion deep inside you somewhere. Striking it will bring the tears out. You have a good idea where the well is. You'll normally dig around it; it carries a lot of weight, responsibility, and it limits your options. This is probably a good time to tap into it, though.

Understanding motivation is ephemeral, while discipline is not and a sense of momentum is important, what keeps me going is having an “emergency mode” of my habits for my “off days”.

This varies by habit, but includes tracking at least one minute of work on a project per day, or just going for a walk if don’t have the energy to workout.

I think one has to manage expectations and factor ‘off days’ and ‘rest days’ into their model of productivity and routine.

I treat myself like a server with a bad uptime SLA. I aim for >= 90% adherence to habits, which over a long time horizon compounded is pretty meaningful.

I wrote a guide around this for a product I’m building if of interest: https://conjure.so/guides/habit-completion-types

Not sure, but normally certain things are inherently enjoyable. Like it's fun to solve problems at work, it's fun to socialize with loved ones, etc..

When un-motivated, sometimes it can be cured by making a change like leaving a job for a better one.

The question is, do you need motivation to move your projects ahead? Take notes of your goals, what you need to do, and break them down into smaller tasks. Remove the extra weight so you can push that thing thru the door. Don't over expect from yourself, take the writer's advice to write a few lines of code every day. If you can't do it for a week backup your project and do something else. You can always come back to your project later on. Don't get demotivated of not finding motivation.

You don't. Motivation maintains you. There's only so much use in ignoring your feelings of dread, and it can only last for so long until you'll regret it.

I’m curious too but in a large scale. I have some goals that are very long term because they have to be. We’re talking a decade out.

I can’t find the ability to motivate myself for something that only might offer reward and only after a decade of focus. I can occasionally muster the motivation for maybe two weeks to a few months at a time, but it always falls apart soon after.

It's good to have your own goals. The root of much unhappiness I see on HN is individuals comparing themselves to others. I would just check with yourself that comparison is not at the route of your frustration. Are you beating yourself up unnecessarily with some of these goals?

The answer is simple: I don't.

I'm not motivated by anything, and I don't feel the need to be. Instead, I focus on what's right in front of me—whether that's one task at a time or all the tasks in my inbox—and I do them.

There are times when I am inspired by something outside myself—a great article, a movie, or a song—but most of the time, it's just me and what needs to get done.

And this works for me! It might not work for you, but that's okay. We all have different ways of staying on track and keeping ourselves motivated.

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