Ask HN: No intrinisic motivation to build stuff

Here's the problem, as I see it: who is your manager? Because a manager is normally paid a lot of money to help you be productive. It's a hard job, the kind people get degrees in and work for decades at before they can do it well.

If you're trying to work for yourself, then your manager is you. You're giving yourself a very difficult job, a job that you're trying to do at the same time as your creative work (and, if I'm not wrong, all of that while still working 9-5, so 3 jobs total). You may not even realise it, but you are a manager at the moment. Not knowing that doesn't stop you from being a manager, it just makes you a bad manager. An absentee boss.

Here is some evidence from your own words that tells me you're crying out for good management:

"As soon as I understand the basics of X, I lose interest. After I had managed to open a very simple lock, I stopped practicing." <-- This is classic lack of perspective - a manager needs to keep focus on the big picture, to give direction and focus to the work being done. Without that, you end up just doing whatever's in front of you, whether or not it's useful.

"Actually, (graded) university projects are the only projects I've finished in my life. Why do I need grades to motivate me?" <-- Because grades can be very motivating. A good manager understands that people aren't robots. You need to have your work structured in a way that makes you want to do it. At university you get tasks divided into small packages, each properly structured with a clearly defined goal and scope, steps to achieve the goal, and a metric for measuring your success at the end. Can you say the same for the work you set yourself?

"It's typical for me to open 40-something tabs of news stories, just to skim through them, without reading a single one in detail" <-- Have you considered that you do this because you're interacting with a very simple manager-bot? "Hey, HN", you say, "give me something to do". Well, HN will give you stuff to do, with a (small) reward for a clearly defined action.

Here's my suggestion for you: Be a manager. Set aside an amount of time each day to work as your manager. Ask yourself about your goals, figure out what you need to excel at those goals, and make sure that you get what you need. Is your work structured the right way? Is what you're doing now working? If you can't figure out what to do next as a manager, go learn. Read a book or online article about management to get ideas. But, mostly, just make sure you actually do it.

Your trade, if you want to be a self-motivated creator of worthwhile things, is both creation and management. You have tools and skills and time invested in the former. Invest in the latter too.

It seems to me that you're problem isn't that you don't have motivation it's that you need rewards right ways. I used to be the same way. Learning a few tricks in each of those areas gives you a thrill, but once that thrill wears off you lose interest and go off to find your next thrill.

Grades are just a slightly longer term reward. You work hard for a few weeks or a month then you get rewarded with an A or a B.

Instead of beating yourself up over these things you need to find a way to "reward" learning something in more depth.

Discipline isn't forcing yourself to do something it's more like tricking yourself into doing it until it's second nature and that's what you naturally do. For example, surround yourself with Haskell materials and environments to the exclusion of all else AND have set up some kind of reward system for yourself. Or removing junkfood from your house in order to get hungry. If you're hungry and search the house for a snack and all you have are salads or pre-cooked chicken breasts then odds are you aren't going to go to the trouble to leave the house to find something else, you'll just eat what you have.

Basically you need to find a way to make delayed gratification more gratifying to you than instant or short term gratification.

Follow the example of Khan Academy. They use game mechanics to keep people coming back. Do the same for things you want to study.

The other thing to realize is that at some point you need to commit to a path and ignore everything that's not applicable to that path. You can't be know everything. If you want to be a PHP developer don't go off and read a book about embedded C programming. It's outside of your area.

I have started numerous websites, web businesses, blogs, and spend nearly $10k on a project and left it because I didn't have enough money to complete it. I also get too much satisfaction from small successes. I also get demotivated when a project of mine doesn't "take off" immediately. I am starting a new project now and I have more of a sense of urgency about it. My future depends on it and I can't fall back on school or my parents if I fail. It's all or nothing. And I think that is the attitude I lacked and needed for all of my past projects.

For me, addressing underlying health issues has helped. I also read a book a long time ago about "psychology" (for lack of a better word) which talked about how people have different profiles for what stuff they will do in varying amounts. You figure out how much of different types of things you need to do and find a lifestyle that gets the results you want (in terms of money or whatever) and do that.

Real life example: I'm a middle-of-the-road extrovert, so I need a certain amount of social interaction but I have my limits. When deprived of the minimum necessary amount of social interaction, my functioning is impaired. When I reach my limit, it's time to stop and go be alone for a bit. That doesn't mean I'm a flake and now abandoning folks or some such. It means my "budget" has been spent for this particular thing and I need to recharge before I can do more of it.

Folks on HN sometimes talk about being only able to code X number of hours per week and no more, so they can't manage to work full time as a coder and also do a side project. Others talk about needing to code a certain amount and being unable to just stop until they have done a certain amount of problem solving or the like. Some "needs" can be channeled somewhat into different pursuits but when the limit is reached, that's all you can do. So maybe part of the issue is that being in college uses up so much of what you have to give that there isn't enough left to finish something else on top of it? If so, then doing a start-up full time might work but trying to do it on the side might not.

I think the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is grossly overblown, especially for getting stuff done. You might notice that all of the research (at least all of it I have seen reports of) uses very short term operations, things that can be done in minutes, or hours at the most, to show the contrast. I do not think intrinsic motivation can be maintained without something outside of itself to keep it focused. I don't think it an accident that nearly all advances in knowledge (explicit or process) comes from academia with its obsessive status games or from for-profit businesses with the need to make money.

I have mostly used work to help maintain my focus over the years. While most of my projects were not directly part of my job, I used the requirements of my jobs (and expected jobs) to guide my learning from project to project, for some continuity. Those that were not related to work were a lot more scattershot.

ADDED: Before someone brings up examples of people who weren't currently academics contributing to science, like Einstein writing papers while he was a patent clerk, there is no reason to go through the extra effort to write up results into publishable papers (which is a lot of work) if you are not aiming for something more than the sheer joy of discovery.

Wow, hits close to home.

I tend to see it as the bi-polar disorder of learning. There are periods of maniacal interest in a certain topic. I can acquire vast knowledge in a matter of very short time yet it always quickly wears of.

The lack of immediate recognition, reward etc. is definitely a factor. I too always knew school didn't mean much, but being straight A has always been sort of a thing I had to do, it was my responsibility. How could I let other people see I am not the smartest guy?! Haha.

I was actually thinking about finding some projects partners on-line in a similar situation so all of us could work to gather on fairly simple projects (and perhaps building those out later on), it's definitely far harder to just dismiss a project if there's other people expecting you to perform.

I know I have all the capability to deliver crazy performance. And hey, I still do from time to time, it's not like we're doomed. We have already proved that we have the mental capability to achieve great things, now it's time to utilize it.

Same for me, good at grades, competitions, having fun with prototyping but rarely building anything finished.

I rarely find motivation to build stuff, but I am strongly motivated to find out why stuff doesn't work and how to fix it, even sometimes to actually fix it.

My advice for you is to pair up with a builder, look at what he's doing, help him when he gets stuck on some bug and struggle to keep up with his creativity.

I think you are perfectly normal. Suspect that your frustration comes from comparing yourself to other people who are intrinsically very different to you.

You come across as being smart, clever and high energy levels. Try stuff that is much harder intellectually, physically, etc. Get out of your comfort zone. You might find your passion in the most unlikely place.

I'm pretty sure you just described me to a tee. I completely understand how it is to hop from hobby to hobby, trying to find the next new novelty.

In high school I spent a lot of time learning tools but never really made anything with them. I must have started 50 games, but would always throw them away at 300 lines of code because they were not interesting anymore. One time I got the idea to make a Flash cartoon website like HomestarRunner.com. I learned the Flash IDE, and the time that I started to get good at it was when I started losing interest.

In college I discovered that there are better tools out there than the ones I had been using. I traded Windows and Gamemaker for Linux and Python. I still never finished anything, because I kept finding new and better languages. For a while there I tried out almost every popular language there is, including Haskell and Erlang.

Once my friends and I decided to make a game, and as the "lead programmer" on the team, I wanted to use the best language there is for making games. I started on Python, then switched to Perl (yes, Perl for games!), then C (because the others were "too slow") and finally back to Python because C was too hard.

Some things that I have noticed include:

-Perfectionism is a nasty beast. Are you a perfectionist too? I will go back and forth between things because I want to find The Optimal Way (TM), but after a certain point you can't really find a better way that helps more than the cost of changing. My dad, a mathmatician, once told me, "Life is not an optimization problem." I am coming to see that he is right.

-You mention that you do well in college even if you can't stay focused on your own projects. I have found that true for myself as well. I think the structure helps to keep us on track. Personal projects and side hobbies have no inherent structure, and all it takes to give up is to just stop working on them. I have found success when my hobbies and side projects intersect with each other. I finished a Flash animation when it was for a class project. I actually did learn a Haskell for Great Good when I made my senior research project "An Investigation of Lesser-Known Programming Languages." Then learning Haskell was not just a thing that might be cool but rather a school project that I had to finish. I recently finished a three year long programming project with a professor advising me. I wanted to quit several times, even though it was a great project, but my advisor half convinced/half forced me to stick with it, and I am glad that he did now that it is done. If something like school motivates you, then use that to your advantage!

-The biggest thing that gives me motivation to do anything is the people who will benefit from it. After thinking long and hard about the meaning of life, I have come to decide that love is what is most important. As such, I can turn away from the most interesting project in the world if I am just working on it for myself, but if I know that people are really going to benefit from it, that provides motivation. I think of all of the times that I have failed to complete a side project like a game or Flash website, I failed because they weren't really helping anyone, and as such they weren't really worth doing to me.

So, I suggest that once you leave college, find a lean startup that fulfills a need you care about. Maybe you wouldn't do well founding a startup, but you could work as an employee at one. Then you have structure similar to what you have in school, only this time with an employer, but you don't waste away at $BIG-CO. (I too have this dread of $BIG-CO!)

Do note that knowing a lot about a little does give you some unique advantages. If you ever do need to really learn something for a job or school project, it will be much easier than if you knew nothing about a subject. You are also more aware of what tools are available for various projects, and you can select the right tool for the right job.

As a final thought, I notice that you have been registered for 250 days or so and have 5 karma. That is almost the same as me. I usually don't say anything because I don't feel like I have anything to add, but I've been trying to comment more recently. Lurking allows me to just be a passive observer, but I take in less when I'm actually invested enough to comment.

If you'd like to talk, send me an email. Info's in my profile if you are interested.

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