Ask HN: How do I get my motivation back?

Your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Listen to it, carefully. Nobody on the Internet can tell you what it's saying.

Here are a couple possibilities, though, both based on personal experience:

1. You don't actually want to code, but you have a long, generally enjoyable history with it. It's hard to give up something that has worked well for us in the past, even if it's not working well now. Our actual self changes much quicker than our self-image does, particularly in the teens and 20s.

2. You do want to code, but you are afraid of not measuring up to some external standard. In this case - forget the external standard. Other people's ideas of fame & approval don't matter, only your own.

It's pretty common in our 20s to re-evaluate all the stuff we thought we liked & were good at, but really just fell into because that's what we did when we were kids and we were too afraid to give it up. I would get up off the couch and turn off the games, TVs and movies - but don't force yourself to code if it's not really what you want to be doing. Instead, let yourself be drawn to whatever actually interests you. Maybe it's programming, but it could be any number of other things instead. Writing, socializing, linguistics, business, science, etc. The world is a broad place.

I followed my subconscious and pursued CS without formal education on the subject, and I did well! I know it's not much but now I have a master's degree! Some of the courses I did better than the ones who had a BSc in CS. I wouldn't have invested so much time and money if I wasn't interested.

For example; now I'm kind of curious about chemistry. I want to learn more about it, but I can't study forever, I need a job.

I DO want to code. I want to code so well that one day maybe I want to contribute to the Linux kernel! But I want to ask you: HOW do you go on about doing that? The degree I have doesn't mean much. I think I might learn more from books than I did at the university, actually.

> HOW do you go on about doing that?

Start small. There are tons of open-source projects that would appreciate help fixing small issues. For example, I've found Mozilla to be very helpful in mentoring developers who are earnest about trying to contribute to Firefox.

And if none of the large projects have any tasks that strike your fancy, pick something on GitHub, fork it, fix a bug or improve some documentation, and submit a pull request. Worst case is you'll run into a jerk or someone who doesn't want outside help, but at least you'll get some experience with the process, and with learning to read other people's code.

If you want to contribute to the Linux kernel, you may want to start here:

http://kernelnewbies.org/

(Found via Google search on [linux kernel development].)

Start with a small project, maybe just learning how to compile and install your own custom kernel. Then go look for bugs that other people would like fixed but don't have time to fix, and see if you can fix them. There're a bunch of guidelines (that I'm not too familiar with...I don't personally do kernel hacking) to getting your patch accepted, but I think there's pretty substantive mentoring available for new developers. Good luck.

Regarding point 2., which I absolutely agree with, I think we suffer a bit from "the WhatsApp problem"; that is, there's this ludicrous benchmark set by WhatsApp - ~$19,000,000,000 - that taints our view of the world.

It's like, here there's zero, and that's you sitting on the couch watching TV. Then over there there's nineteen billion dollars, and that's you being "successful". And in the middle there's nothing. And that's daunting and, of course, ludicrous.

Code little things. Or don't code, do something else. Go make something out of wood. But do it for the enjoyment, for the little thrill it gives you. Don't think about anybody else while you're doing it; don't think about what it might make you, or whether you'll end up on the front page of HN, or whether you'll get funding, or move to SF, or whatever.

Good luck. I'm 38 and your post resonated with me - this stuff doesn't necessarily get easier as you get older!

I do enjoy coding. A friend asked me to create a little website for him and instead of telling him to check out WordPress, I sat down and coded a CMS, complete with authentication and multi-user options etc. But that was years ago. Now it feels like I WANT to do it but I just can't. Which language? Which DB? Which tutorial? Which whatever? I get tired just thinking about the questions...

Don't ask just do.

In this world there are 2 kinds of languages. The kind people like, and the kind people use. You'll find pro's and con's everywhere. Just sit down and do something, it doesn't matter how fast it is, how bad it looks. You'll have finished something.

Your problem resonates well with me. I used to be able to code 24 hours straight, forgetting to sleep, when I was just out of high school. I dreamt about code. Now I'm a grown man, professional developer, but I have a hard time accomplishing my (code) goals. I want to learn Clojure, I want to build some side projects, study SICP, and become an expert in one language. But I don't. I play bf4 and watch bad TV shows ("The 100" iirc). I'm a great heli pilot, though...

On to my advice:

Decide on a project to build. Set a deadline you want to build it by.

All those other questions will fall into place.

Don't pick a project that is the next-big-whatever. Just pick something you can accomplish within, say, a week. If you want a list of ideas, I have a couple of links or I'd even be willing to share my list of (mostly non-trivial, hopefully profitable) ideas.

Doing a few projects small projects has turned me around more than once, and made me focused and proud of myself.

Just pick something that seems sane and run with it. One thing you learn when you've worked with a bunch of frameworks is that they all rely on the same fundamental concepts, and it's basically just window-dressing. The framework you choose will determine what sort of jobs you get and which community you follow, so make sure you're happy with those, but it won't ultimately determine your success as a programmer.

How are you doing physically?

Your description resonates with me - physical exercise (a lot of it - back then, it was running 5-10Km 4-5 times a week, in addition to other gym visits and martial arts practice) seemed to be the cure. (Or, it was just coincidence ... who knows).

And I wasn't a sporty person back then, by a long shot - before I took that up (around age 20), I couldn't finish a 2Km run to save my life.

if I could upvote this more than once I would

You are afraid. It's a good sign.

You are afraid of looking bad: of creating things with computers that you'll then make public, with your name on them. Or that these computers, that you LOVE (your words), might turn out hard to program, with the looming prospect you then won't have what you love. If you weren't, you might have gotten a BA in computers first. After the expectation of getting a college degree went away, then you went and did what you actually liked.

And that's ok.

Because it's the things that frighten us the most that we tend to have to do next. You should be happy about this. There are people, lots of people if not the majority, who don't even attempt during a lifetime to do what they subconsciously want to and you managed to break through it.

The fear of creating never fully goes away.

Then suddenly, something happened and I lost interest.

Mmm... I'd love to go deeper into this "something that happened". But either way it's ok.

Now what to do about it. The typical things like finding supportive people, starting secret projects, or writing programs for yourself are unlikely to be enough. The bigger issue is you have to find a way to counteract resistance. You are sabotaging yourself. The bigger the prospect of humiliation, the bigger the resistance you'll put up.

That's why it's ok. Big creations are terrifying. You can't see them directly in the eye. You have to approach them indirectly. You have to practically trick yourself into working on big things, and computers are big things for you. You need to allow yourself to make mistakes [1]. To screw up (everybody does). To write programs that aren't great in the beginning (nobody's are). Aim small, have no expectations (push them away) and just play.

I'd love to be user #1 for something you build.

[1] trivia: research shows that when people feel free to make mistakes they end up making fewer mistakes.

In short you have to realize WoW is a drug. Now I say this as an ex-player, who had a very long complicated battle with depression and parental abuse. WoW makes it easy to escape and hide into a world where its very easy to get rewarded for what feels like fun, but is actually hours of your life.

The game rewards you like rewarding a dog to shit outside, or do funny tricks. The rewards become spaced further out over time conditioning you to work harder for the same reward. Its very easy to stay motivated when a green bar shows you how far you are from the next reward. Its just as easy to stay motivated as you slam your face into Heroic Ragnaros for the 246th time straight, because we're getting him to P4 and well its just RNG at that point if we keep it up because its just a matter of keeping focused. Depression is bad. I've been there and for well over 6 years I attempted to hide in another world to avoid it.

What you have to do is accept that slow action is still action. When ever I catch myself sliding back into older/bad habits I find its often good to mediate on the why you are doing that. A quote I've really fallen in love with is:

"One can be deceived by three types of laziness: of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate; the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or putting great effort into non-virtue." - the Dalai Lama.

Medication and Therapy can be very useful.

My assessment of this is that you have motivation in the sense of interest but that you're afraid. Not entirely sure of what, but mostly it sounds like social consequences of being/feeling inferior. I can empathize -- that's a real fear. Fortunately, it's not something that's going to kill you in a physical sense so you can train yourself to work around it. It sounds like right now you're running low on courage. The key word in your question is "depression," and it sounds like everything else you've said points to clinical depression of some kind. It seems like there are things that you want to do but right now you're keeping yourself down out of a set of abstract fears that are difficult to verbalize. I don't know that this works for everyone, but I think one way to wiggle yourself out of this hole you're in is to deliberately do things that scare you. Cultivate courage. Teach yourself to be strong and resilient. Learn to keep pushing forward no matter what. Don't give in.

To be concrete: We want to develop courage as a skill, so we need to practice it. When faced with two decisions, pick the one that requires more courage, even if it doesn't make as much sense. When you feel like you can't keep up or that you're failing at a task, quietly tell yourself, "No, I'm not going to stop. Even though it doesn't feel good I am going to keep doing this to make myself more courageous." Just do whatever you can to exercise that courage muscle. You can start small and work your way up. If you keep it up you'll soon find yourself able to be courageous in situations where you couldn't before. But it all depends on practice. So be courageous, even in small ways, and work from there. Once you have courage, depression--and life--become easier to tackle.

Fuck the motivation. Motivation is a lazy man's approach. It takes no effort. You have to force yourself. You have to learn to force yourself. Even if you get motivation, it is temporary. Real success comes from discipline and continuous effort. Drop the idea that you need motivation - just force yourself to learn Node right now. There's no easy or lazy way to do it - you have to win over yourself.

Reason for this is that frontal cortex - part of brain responsible for your conscious actions - only finishes developing in mid 20s. You only recently finished that stage. Motivation is used in teen years, when more primitive parts of brain dominate frontal cortex. Now it's time to take matters into your own hands.

After time goes on, it get's easier and easier, and motivation comes as a result of forcing yourself to do it.

Hi, I was in a similar situation to you so I'd like to try and help a little bit.

First of all, you should try to talk to a therapist. I think that your reaching out here is a great idea, but a therapist will likely be much more effective long term.

As for your lack of motivation, that is literally a symptom of depression. I remember when I was in college I went to my professor and he told me that if I didn't have motivation then I probably should switch majors. Pretty awful advice.

What's worked for me in the past when I had no motivation was to start easy. So, say tomorrow you apply to one job. If you tell other people that you are going to do this, it's even better because you will be less likely to back down.

After you apply to one, the next day you apply to two, and so on. The reason this works is that usually you'll feel good after applying and then the next time you'll use that as motivation to do it again. Also because if all you have to do is just apply to one company, well that's pretty easy so hopefully you can at least motivate yourself to do that.

Finally, if you truly love something then you don't need to compare yourself to anyone else, because it doesn't matter. You shouldn't like something just because you are good at it, you like it because you find it interesting. Also, the reality is that if you want to be good at anything you're going to have to go through the part when you suck at it. It's one of the main things that separate people who excel from those who don't make anything of themselves.

At the risk of being overly sentimental or mushy, I feel compelled to say that the responses in this thread represent exactly what brought me to the tech / hacker community back in the early '90s.

Thank you to the original poster for expressing emotions we can all relate to, and thank you to each and every motivational comment from those who have rallied around someone in need.

There is wisdom here for all of us.

I'm privileged to be part of this community.

Maybe you need to find a real-world problem to solve using code, instead of learning for the sake of learning. Maybe if you get a job? maybe an internship? or you can volunteer on a charitable organization to make/enhance their web site?

Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. During my dissertation, I _had_ to write code and I enjoyed it. And now I want to learn more, but not sure where I'd start.

The other problem is that I couldn't approach a charitable organisation and say "hey, I suck at coding and know almost nothing but I'd like to do your website". I lack self-confidence. Not sure how I build that up?

I work for a nonprofit medical research foundation in a lab that does bioinformatics, including some research on text mining information from biomedical journal articles, which might relate to your interest in linguistics.

If you're simply looking to learn, we could certainly use a volunteer, although I don't make hiring decisions for paid positions. It is possible but would be hard without practical experience. There is also a possibility to become a graduate student, although this is a health sciences center so the PhDs are in things like biochemistry, cell biology, etc, even though our lab's research is very computational.

My e-mail in base64 is: Z2lsZXNjQG9tcmYub3Jn

You can translate easily with: https://www.base64decode.org/ or your preferred method.

EDIT: Just to add a little more detail about the kinds of work and technologies. Broadly speaking, we try to mine information out of large biology-related datasets, including text and more numeric kinds of data, using machine learning technologies. Sometimes we put a web-based front end on things, but it is not our primary focus. So if you are more interested in web dev, there is a need for it, or if you'd rather get more into what is now called "data science", there is a lot of that as well. We primarily use Linux, Python, and some bash scripting.

You should try different things. Some people will find this blasphemous, but Node and Angular are a fad and possibly a nice-to-have skill, but actually not really extremely interesting to the point that not being motivated to learn that stuff can be considered extraordinary. I'm not motivated either, instead I'm dabbling around with robotics for the first time (got myself a Wild Thumper and a Raspberry Pi to control it...) and am doing more work around the house now. So many things to try and explore, find what suits you best and motivates you! Perhaps it's climbing, flying RC drones?

Motivation is a funny thing. I have often felt motivated and excited to do something only to find that when I sit down to do it I just stare at my hands for a bit and then walk away. I've been getting better at finishing things lately, it is tough. Here is what's helped me 1.) Deadlines. This is one of the great things about having a job- you have to produce something by date X or there will be consequences for you and your team, which brings me to 2.) Teamwork. Not wanting to disappoint others is a huge motivator. I work far harder when I think someone is counting on me to finish something then I do on my own. Join a hackathon team (preferably in person) and agree to produce a component. You won't sleep till its done. 3.) Permission to fail. From yourself. Especially about the small stuff. 4/5 side projects I start ( and mean the ones where I get past staring at my hands) end up being terrible ideas or far to hard to implement. But 1/5 have been great, and totally worth everything else. It took me a long time to stop being embarrassed about the failures of my side projects, but once I realized that starting was a heck of a lot further then most everyone else got, I felt a whole lot better about my mistakes and found it much easier to start new ones 4.) Success. Yes there is a chicken and the egg problem here, but once you have success at something you'll probably find yourself continuing to do it. Note- this is how WoW gets you, feeding you lots of little successes at a variety fairly rapid rate. 5.) Cutting out the crap- I had to unplug my Xbox in college and put it in storage. It sounds like you need to do something similar- take steps to cut the electronic media down to zero. Uninstall the games, disconnect the cable, etc. It's really not that severe ( you can always hook them back up) but you do have to think about it before committing the time. Also, exercise if you aren't, because exercise is surprisingly good at mood and effective function improvement.

I'd recommend taking a job, even a mediocre corporate one, if you can. The need to forces you to learn things, even if it's not what you expected or would have picked on your own. Failing that, other users have suggested great volunteer ideas. I recommend going to your local hackerspace or coworking space if you have one. Being around other people doing stuff is hugely motivating.

I think your depression is probably your #1 deterrent here, and unfortunately I think you are headed into a destructive cycle by feeding into your depression by not accomplishing anything. I don't really have much of a suggestion to break out, because that's not really something someone on the internet can tell you - but I do wish you luck. Start small maybe, with something related to WoW or another game that is still able to grab your attention.

Hello friend,

Motivation is not a singular entity that you can hold like a marble, it's more like a flame. Think well on people in your life who are not doing what they love when they could be. Simply by helping others, even in a small way, uncover their deepest motivations, your own shall take root🌲

Why do you need to compare yourself with someone else? You enjoy it, right? do it because it's fun. Don't worry :)

I compare myself because I want to see progress. If I can do 1% of what some of the guys here can do, then I am onto something, or at least that's what I'd like to think!

Sorry, I might have been not clear enough. I didn't mean "compare yourself because you enjoy comparing".

I meant "just do what you like without comparing yourself to anyone". Or, compare your current self to your past self. That is the only reliable way to measure progress.

This is totally the wrong way to think about it.

When you see a role model you see the finished product, but not all the hard work involved nor those embarrassing mistakes that turned in valuable lessons.

Progress is a fiction. And self actualization is non-linear. If you see what you have done in one year and declare that it is less than 1%, you will think it's going to take more than 100 years and quit. Then you will fail to realize the 5% hike that was waiting for you 6 months down the road.

p.s. And cold quit the WoW thing. It is crack for the soul. (I had to scratch my Diablo II CDs and avoid any other game for 2-3 years. I just could not have helped it otherwise... so, been there)

Exercise/ yoga can be really helpful. You wont realize right away but it will get you going again.