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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I have been trying to force myself to learn to program for years [...] My biggest problem is that I find it really, really hard to get interested, and I'm terrible at motivating myself to do something I'm not interested in.

Why are you trying to force yourself to do something you aren't interested in? My first suggestion would be to really understand what you want out of it, and why you are doing this.

My second suggestion, if you decide it is something you really do want to do and you have a good story for yourself as to why you are doing it is to try to do learning with either a co-learner or a mentor who understands your motivation for learning, and to try to work with them to find real projects to apply what you are learning that relate to your motivation.

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Because I recognize the value in it. I hate sitting by waiting while my co-founder builds things and keeps servers up and I feel like an idiot. I can go get more users and sign them up all day, but I can't really contribute to product, even when I'm wildly passionate about it.

Isn't getting users just as, if not more, important? The best product in the world is pointless if no one uses it.

Sure, and I'm pretty good at that: We have users signing up in droves to an empty landing page. But I'm passionate about product, too, and I can't get my hands dirty.

This! You may not realize it but your co-founder is likely very dependent on you getting those users. You can try and broaden your horizons but make sure you get your work done first and foremost!

Also ask yourself, does my co-founder even want me touching the code and servers?

Of course not, but I'm still really young, and I hate not being able to help.

In that case you can try and make your developers life as easy as possible by taking on a more supportive role (what that entails depends on the developers) to help them pump out the code.

That or really stick to your guns and get into coding for real. It seems that the major problem is that you lack the proper motivation to learn. So why not ask your co-founder if there is some small aspect of the website that you could work on in your free time?

Get your co-founder to set you up on your own branch so you can work in isolation and learn how to do that small feature step by step. This way you'll have the motivation that your feature might someday make it into the final product. Just make sure to have your partner review your code and live with the fact it might not be good enough to use (yet).

Practicing on features used in real projects can really help you learn at lot.

> Because I recognize the value in it. I hate sitting by waiting while my co-founder builds things and keeps servers up and I feel like an idiot.

I think you need to consider whehter the issue is that you see the value in programming and can see yourself enjoying that role and adding value in that way, or you are just having trouble seeing the value you are providing in your current role as, apparently, a non-technical co-founder.

> I can go get more users and sign them up all day

So-called "soft" skills like getting users, signing them up, and learning what they want that would make the product more valuable/attractive to them are important, value-producing skills that many technical people don't have. You shouldn't feel like an "idiot", or like you don't have value, because your skills are there rather than in writing code.

I'm not sure what the product is that you're building or how complex it is, but my sense is that maybe you're trying to start too big.

You may be passionate about it, but if you don't have the skills to contribute, setting the goal of contributing to that product without any intermediary wins is guaranteed to demotivate. Put another way, lets say your business is an automotive repair shop, but you're not a mechanic. You are passionate about fixing cars and work with a bunch of people who are really talented at fixing cars so you want to jump right in. If your first task is to repair the inner workings of a combustion engine, you're going to give up before you even start. Start by learning how to work a wrench and change tires. Assuming you are truly passionate about fixing cars, completing this simple task will provide you with an emotional reward. Move to something slightly more complicated that will require you to learn something else.

It's not a perfect analogy -- you could ask a 100 developers what wrench to pick up and get 100 different answers ranging in complexity, power and learning curve -- but the idea is to avoid tasks that have a huge up-front learning curve that would result in demoralization and disinterest.

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