That was a tedious read. Most of the article is just filler text. There is a whole page of it before the point: give yourself 3 years. Why 3 years? Because Rome wasn't built in a day. That's pretty much all there is to it.
The advice feels pretty circular. To stay motivated, do it for 3 years. If you can commit to something for 3 years, you already have the motivation.
Regardless, I disagree with this advice. Give it a month, tops. If you don't enjoy the process after a month and the goal is 3 years away, you won't get there.
From my experience, I stick to doing things because of the rewards along the way. After a month of playing an instrument, learning a language or trying a hobby, I will likely produce something that makes me want to keep going. It won't take 3 years.
I thought there were some insightful things in there. For one the biggest problem with staying motivated over a long period of time is the lack of instant gratification. Humans aren't good with delayed gratification - hardly surprising or revolutionary, but right on the money.
The other thing I liked was the somewhat non obvious advice to stay focused on your goal and not be open to other opportunities. This sank a lot of my projects over the years. Hot, exciting new idea beats familiar, hairy, in progress idea. But if you keep chopping and changing you'll never finish anything. There is a risk you ignore a really much better opportunity, so you can't do this 100%, but you do really strongly need to bias towards finishing what you started.
Lastly when I started on the project of teaching myself to write software more than half my life ago now, I hated it. It was alien and difficult and boring. If I'd quit after a month I would have not found my passion, and I would have missed out on a pretty great career.
Also, I would say learning to enjoy the gym took a lot more than a month.
So don't give up so soon, but also three years is a long time if you really are not enjoying what you're doing. Maybe something in between, based on how you feel about it.
It makes the assumption that the motivation is already there and he enjoys doing it, only is not seeing immediate feedback.
I think 3 years is kind of arbitrary and not to be taken literally. He's just saying that sometimes these projects take longer than expected to gain any traction
The thing about not being open to other opportunities reminds me of the idea of flow: You don't focus on getting into flow but you focus on avoiding distractions that would prevent you from getting there.
For some reason what has always worked for me is just abandoning rational thought entirely and working day-to-day.
I go into a project thinking "I bet I can get 50% to 100% of this thing done today" and that's almost never the case, but the thought of it gets me excited. That's all the motivation I need. I work like crazy until I'm ready to stop working. I say "Wow I sure made a lot of progress. Tomorrow I'll probably finish it off." feeling satisfied. This repeats forever. Maybe it's a kind of madness, but it gets the job done!
I agree with your sentiment. Something that's helped to keep me learning/improving/progressing past the 1 month mark is to remind myself how much I managed to learn and or enjoy during that time. If I can't think of anything -- usually this is rare -- I'll give it up. Extend your reassesments to every 2 months, 4 months etc... I end up finding it harder and harder to give up. Still, it's good to know when to throw in the towel.
Along with this, what's helped me with my long term project is to realize that Rome wasn't built in a day. That I don't have to work on it today if I don't feel like it. I've got my ups and downs and it's helped me to realize that the project will take a little longer than anticipated but I've got time.
Ya know, I disagree with this advice. Give it a couple of hours tops. If you don't enjoy the process after a couple of hours and the goal is a whole day away, you won't get there.
The point is a little deeper than that. You might finish 10 to 20 different 3+ year projects which means almost nothing makes that cut. However, you can likely do 500+ one month projects. The second one is much closer to the number of interesting projects you might come up with in a lifetime and a month is long enough to see some real results on most things.
Spend 100+ hours learning to juggle over a month and you’re not doing tricks, but you’re going to be noticeably better at it. 3 years on the other hand is a long way from say mastering French, but it’s plenty to be useful on a trip. And that IMO is what separates two benchmarks, noticeable improvement is rarely worth much on it’s own.
Disagree, many (most?) things worth doing and doable take more than a month to get used to or to get to the good part. I’ve definitely not “hit my stride” until month 8 or so of certain projects of which I adore once I do. Keep at it so long as you believe in the mission.
Sure, but after doing it for a month, you can tell whether or not you enjoy the process. You'll learn a few chords, a few sentences, some basic techniques. You'll get an idea of what the activity is like, regardless of whether you're good at it.
Even from a business perspective, what you're working on today, if it's tech or software related, will be horribly out-dated in 3 years. Imagine how many "pivots" need to be made on a software product who's expected delivery is Fall 2023.
That's what gave rise to the whole Lean Start-up movement - spend 3 months, get a working version out there, get some paying customers, start improving the software with new features. If you can't get any paying customers with an MVP, it's a sign your idea might not be worth a 3 year investment.
> Even from a business perspective, what you're working on today, if it's tech or software related, will be horribly out-dated in 3 years.
Here's how outdated in tech usually works across three years:
We gotta switch to NoSQL, it's the new new hot hot thing! It's going to save us money, it's going to make our service much faster, it's going to be easier to manage. It's revolutionary, everybody says so. Our competition is switching too.
Three years later: we're going to switch away from NoSQL, turns out we didn't actually need to use that. It caused more problems than it solved in our case.
Outdated in three years is mostly only true in a small echo chamber of the tech industry obsessed with chasing fads 24/7. It's an almost entirely self-imposed form of torture by that part of the industry. There are exceptions of course, cases where things legitimately get outdated in just three years, and they're rare.
Was the NoSQL fad that so many people chased necessary? Nope. Are there great use cases for NoSQL systems? Of course. The legitimate use cases aren't fraudulent, it's the fad that is, the mania, the hype (which always implodes, then the headlines come rolling in about switching back).
That's a microcosm of the three year fad hopping that you're talking about (and there are obviously a lot of examples of it, from big data to AI/ML, to the latest framework craze). A small segment of the tech industry is like a dog that never stops chasing fad cars.
Can't argue with you there, but I get the impression (from other pages on the site) the advice seems more geared to personal growth or soft-creative goals, not business/tech/software development.
* A blog or novel isn't inherently outdated in 3 years, and good ones can certainly take that long to complete.
* Any fitness regimen lasting less than 3 years is a waste of time (IMO). You don't get meaningful "credit" applied to your lifespan for doing yoga for three months.
* Taking the time to develop your relationship with your children needs years of persistence, otherwise they'll just raise themselves and not respect you.
Much of this is the same advice given to ADHD candidates. I don't know if he is one or just happened to be inspired by self-help books about the subject, but the advice does work. Breaking large tasks down into smaller ones that yield more immediate satisfaction/feedback and riding that dopamine train until it's second nature is the best way to stick to a project and avoid burnout.
Exactly, do something as long as you enjoy it. Once you get bored of it put it away for a while. I have many many projects some of which may never get finished but once in a while I enjoy working on them.
I disagree with the part that if you're doing it for the reward then it won't get anywhere. Mainly because of what you say: we do what we do to make a living.
However, I believe that statement applies more to the vision/philosophy of our projects. A professor once recommended us to set ourselves an unreachable goal to keep driving your project/company/employees forward towards a common goal. They gave us an example of Bimbo –a Mexican food industry company– that states as its philosophy: "Feed, delight and serve our world, this is our philosophy."
They'll never really be able to feed the entire world but they're sure as hell going for it. Though whether a such big corporation's real interest is doing so is another discussion altogether. Even if that was their original intention.
I read this article and think about my goals to become a Game Developer. I take the advice of setting expectations for a couple of years down the road as a way to keep learning and investing the time that's required to become what I wish to become.
I shouldn't be naive to apply this to a particular game project at the earlier stages of my career. In my case I should take on multiple projects that will broaden my knowledge regarding game design, architecture, project management, etc.
Article gave me much more to think about than I though it would.
Exactly my feelings in response to scanning through the text. I was honestly expecting a list of ingredients and cooking instructions to appear towards the end.
No, you won't, but you'll get a good idea of what the activity entails. I've been learning to play the guitar for a few months, and I suck at it, but after a month I already knew that I enjoyed practicing.
>When I lack immediate feedback, I begin to doubt myself/my abilities.
He believes being conditioned by social media led him to that point, more specifically immediate-satisfaction instant-result culture.
That is not entirely true in my experience. Feedback is supposed to determine strategy, not your self worth as a person. He has been programmed, by the instant result culture or whatever, into emotionally charged reactions, not an objective response.
I have been working out and I hit a plateau, I should stop this is fruitless > I hit a plateau, I need to try a new workout routine. Not “I will workout for 3 years until I make any judgement.”
I have been blogging for months and nobody cares, I should stop > I have been blogging for months without any results, my current course of action needs adjustment. Not “I will blog for 3 years regardless.”
Reacting - Old habits/conditioning make you react to a situation
Responding - Taking in the situation and moving forward with calculated action.
The 3 year rule replaces his current reaction with another one, when he should be working on responding to situations instead. It takes you further, but will not take you further than if you were to correct that faulty outlook altogether.
I think there's some overlap with fame culture here too.
I'm a nobody and I'm sad. If everyone knew me I'd be happy.
A finger closes on the monkey's paw; You're famous now, for getting your drunk ass taken down in a restaurant waiting area. Now everybody hates you, and they recognize you while you're grocery shopping.
I think the reason why a big fraction of success stories comes from people who built something for themselves first is not just that they have a subject matter expert, or a captive audience (which doesn't hurt!). It's that they know the work is important, even if nobody else knows.
I have a project I used to work on where I got wedged on a rapidly shifting API for a dependency. I had grand plans for solving a problem for a niche that is one of my hobbies. Part of getting back into it has been trying to figure out how to be more... selfish. What parts of it would help me, as a tool? Not the bits that would improve my resume (turns out that doesn't motivate me very well), but me personally. Then maybe my friends. Then if I'm still going, the groups that were my original target.
I think the key thing is discrete deliverables that don't have too long of a gap between them. This allows you to feel there is progress, but also put the project on ice and resume because the next task isn't some huge insurmountable thing but another small piece.
> Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person. They’ll all tell you the same thing – It takes time to create something valuable. Something worth doing.
Over time I've ended up not really understanding this advice, but only because of something I accomplished in the past.
One day I just felt like writing something. I hadn't written since elementary school and had never published a piece of writing online before. But one day I just felt like writing something. The idea just would not leave my mind and I failed to get any sleep, instead spending all of my conscious time writing.
Within a week I was more or less finished. It was a short story numbering only a few dozen pages at most. But save for some minor editing it was complete.
And I decided that since I finished something, it was a success. And I also liked what I wrote, legitimately. I don't think it was that great in the context of people with experience, but it was mine, and that was enough for me to declare it a success. To me, I thought it was valuable. To me, I thought it was worth doing.
So if it's true that you must spend a lot of time to make something valuable, then in my view one of two things is true:
1. What I accomplished in only a week was not valuable to me or anyone else and was not worth doing, and I'm just deluding myself.
2. The advice was untrue and you can still create things of value without spending a lot of time - it just depends on what the scale is.
And if there is no way to create something valuable without spending a lot of time on it, then I don't understand why Ludum Dare and NaNoWriMo still exist, unless people believe the things they accomplish during those events are valueless, which doesn't sound right to me.
Since then I have never really felt like writing. I will either sit down and not think of anything for hours, or at most write whatever comes to my mind in a stream of consciousness and then proceed to not look at or edit it ever again. I think this is what people call being trapped by their past successes. I expect to be able to accomplish again what I actually did accomplish a single time in the past, which is not realistic. Not everything I do will turn out as well as that one time. But the fact remains that I called what I accomplished a success despite not spending much time on it at all, and on top of that it was the first thing I had seriously written in over a decade, and I seem to be unable to reconcile that with the practicalities of developing a skill properly.
I have a similar sentiment and anecdote. I'm fully aware that the OP is more about long term projects, but sometimes long term projects can be helped by a modular approach - including starting with a singular high energy event at the beginning to keep you motivated or get validation.
Anecdote: A few months ago I was speaking with a friend and I mentioned the prospect of writing a certain article for publication in a newspaper (at least a local one), but I quickly dismissed the idea. I thought "what are the chances?" I actually looked up the chances of getting published in a top newspaper, and, according to Quora, they were extremely slim.
My friend pushed me to go ahead with it anyway. I spent the next 4 hours producing and editing the first draft. My friend and a random guy sitting next to me at Starbucks helped revise it. I submitted the article to one of the top newspapers in the country/world and got published a couple weeks later.
I literally never wrote a blog or article before that, and two weeks later tens of thousands of people were reading it and it was shared in elite circles. I sent the link to random Starbucks dude to show that his 10 minutes talking to a stranger resulted in more words on a national newspaper. He got a kick out of it.
Though writing is not my profession, I would now feel more confident pursuing a long term writing project like authoring a book in my free time. This goes back to the modularity I mentioned above. This story could easily have been about a small side project that got traction on GitHub.
There is a paucity of action. Just do it. I'm glad my friend told me that.
There is a whole cottage industry on giving advice, coaching etc (not talking about this article, just in general). Maybe most of the advice is well intentioned. But everyone's situation, skills, motivations, drive etc are different. What works for one person may not work for another.
We can take general advice from successful people, I guess (especially those who has had recent success). But more than that, it is on the individual to tailor what he/she learned according to their needs.
After listening to whole bunch of people giving advice and trying many of them, I haven't found much that can be applied as is.
There is an idea of beginner's luck - that when one starts doing something one resonates with on a deep level, one tends to have unexpected success because the potential to be great at it is seeking to escape and wants to signal to the conscious mind that it exists. But the same set of attitudes also believes that as one continues on the same path, the challenges it brings will rapidly grow to match one's burgeoning capabilities.
So I would guess the people who say that worthwhile things take a long time, did often have experiences of grace like you, where things were easy. But I would guess they also found that anything worth doing is worth challenging oneself with.
Out of the side projects that I know of which made it past the MVP stage most had one thing in common: they solved a problem that the person who came up with the idea had.
Sounds obvious, but I've seen a few projects fail because the developer couldn't relate to their users.
Side note: quite often this lack of motivation is simply a matter of impostor syndrome.
The other day I managed to break out of that by looking at a "how to" of something from a field foreign to me.
It was a step-by-step demonstration of how a certain drawing was created.
My first reaction was: "this is amazing - I wish I could create such awe-inspiring things".
Then I remembered that I've been programming since I was twelve and am fully capable of creating things that might be as impressive to people who are not in my field as that artwork was to me.
This reminds me of something that happened to me the other day. We hired a developer to work with me, and he said he was excited to have a chance to work with a ‘brilliant engineer’ like me. I was at a loss for words and thought about it a lot for a couple days. I almost worried he’d be disappointed to find out how mediocre I am. I came to the same conclusion though, really - I feel like an imposter, and after 15 years or so I probably do seem competent to people with less experience.
I’m not a brilliant engineer but yeah, he will probably learn a bit working with me. A lot of us probably need to give ourselves more credit.
It’s hard not to think so much about how our work is only possible on the shoulders of giants. I don’t spend enough time thinking about what I can do, and too much thinking about what I can’t.
I like the idea of being realistic with a timeline and start with a 3 year goal. I think the most important part of getting quick feedback for me is setting up my environment for tiny iterations (for a web dev side project), but the balance is tricky between getting more efficient and endless "yak shaving"!!
I would love to do some electronics design but I find it much harder to have smaller sessions, it takes me a least an hour or two to get into a flow where I have my mental model of the complete circuit, mechanical layout, etc.
I also want to balance being a good parent with side projects as well! Currently my kids are too small to participate in engineering, but you can bet that I am totally going to build a robot with them some day :)
I started working on a long-term project 1.5 years ago. It's in cryptocurrency. People in crypto would call it a shitcoin project. Up until now, it's a solo project. I'm the only person working on it. Not much outside interest. But I learn some things along the way.
When you think about the expected or probable ROI, you'd likely give up. These projects or ideas will likely fail. You have less than 1% chance of success. You're trying to calculate the extreme tail risk. It's not worth the time to think about it. The process is demoralizing.
One trait that I found useful for these long-term ideas: curiosity. If you're curious about something, you can do it for a long time. You still do it even when you know it would likely fail. During the process, you can learn things that are not exactly applicable for your idea. But they are useful for your learning.
Another aspect to think about is to find the failure criteria. You can decide when your long-term idea is invalid. When you see X happens, you know X would invalidate your idea. X is the correct idea, your idea is incorrect. At that point, you can stop.
An example: I have a hypothesis that battery electric cars may not be the future. I work on alternative ideas. A failure criteria for my idea: When battery electric cars have more than 50% market share. This example illustrates the unpopularity of working on long-term ideas. People would call you stupid. You'll likely fail. Curiosity is the only thing that keeps you going.
But that doesn't answer the question at all. The question becomes, how do you stay motivated for those 3 years?
The answer, for me and people I know, is that you have to break it down into small pieces (month-sized, then week-sized, then day-sized) and find happiness in the progress. In the small daily wins.
If you think you'll only be happy once you succeed (3+ years later) you'll never make it. It's trite but it's true, that you've got to find happiness in the journey, not just the destination.
Because if you don't, then you'll absolutely give up and fall back to the things that do give you instant happiness today, whether that's social media or spending time with your spouse or kids. And if you choose your family over a long-term project because the project isn't producing happiness... then that might be the right choice for you! :)
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The advice feels pretty circular. To stay motivated, do it for 3 years. If you can commit to something for 3 years, you already have the motivation.
Regardless, I disagree with this advice. Give it a month, tops. If you don't enjoy the process after a month and the goal is 3 years away, you won't get there.
From my experience, I stick to doing things because of the rewards along the way. After a month of playing an instrument, learning a language or trying a hobby, I will likely produce something that makes me want to keep going. It won't take 3 years.
The other thing I liked was the somewhat non obvious advice to stay focused on your goal and not be open to other opportunities. This sank a lot of my projects over the years. Hot, exciting new idea beats familiar, hairy, in progress idea. But if you keep chopping and changing you'll never finish anything. There is a risk you ignore a really much better opportunity, so you can't do this 100%, but you do really strongly need to bias towards finishing what you started.
Lastly when I started on the project of teaching myself to write software more than half my life ago now, I hated it. It was alien and difficult and boring. If I'd quit after a month I would have not found my passion, and I would have missed out on a pretty great career.
Also, I would say learning to enjoy the gym took a lot more than a month.
So don't give up so soon, but also three years is a long time if you really are not enjoying what you're doing. Maybe something in between, based on how you feel about it.
It makes the assumption that the motivation is already there and he enjoys doing it, only is not seeing immediate feedback.
I think 3 years is kind of arbitrary and not to be taken literally. He's just saying that sometimes these projects take longer than expected to gain any traction
The thing about not being open to other opportunities reminds me of the idea of flow: You don't focus on getting into flow but you focus on avoiding distractions that would prevent you from getting there.
Design each two week goal so that you get a dopamine rush from doing it, get some value out of it, and it also helps your long term goal.
I share my attempt at doing just that here: https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/do-more-by-doing-less/
I go into a project thinking "I bet I can get 50% to 100% of this thing done today" and that's almost never the case, but the thought of it gets me excited. That's all the motivation I need. I work like crazy until I'm ready to stop working. I say "Wow I sure made a lot of progress. Tomorrow I'll probably finish it off." feeling satisfied. This repeats forever. Maybe it's a kind of madness, but it gets the job done!
Spend 100+ hours learning to juggle over a month and you’re not doing tricks, but you’re going to be noticeably better at it. 3 years on the other hand is a long way from say mastering French, but it’s plenty to be useful on a trip. And that IMO is what separates two benchmarks, noticeable improvement is rarely worth much on it’s own.
That's what gave rise to the whole Lean Start-up movement - spend 3 months, get a working version out there, get some paying customers, start improving the software with new features. If you can't get any paying customers with an MVP, it's a sign your idea might not be worth a 3 year investment.
Here's how outdated in tech usually works across three years:
We gotta switch to NoSQL, it's the new new hot hot thing! It's going to save us money, it's going to make our service much faster, it's going to be easier to manage. It's revolutionary, everybody says so. Our competition is switching too.
Three years later: we're going to switch away from NoSQL, turns out we didn't actually need to use that. It caused more problems than it solved in our case.
Outdated in three years is mostly only true in a small echo chamber of the tech industry obsessed with chasing fads 24/7. It's an almost entirely self-imposed form of torture by that part of the industry. There are exceptions of course, cases where things legitimately get outdated in just three years, and they're rare.
Was the NoSQL fad that so many people chased necessary? Nope. Are there great use cases for NoSQL systems? Of course. The legitimate use cases aren't fraudulent, it's the fad that is, the mania, the hype (which always implodes, then the headlines come rolling in about switching back).
That's a microcosm of the three year fad hopping that you're talking about (and there are obviously a lot of examples of it, from big data to AI/ML, to the latest framework craze). A small segment of the tech industry is like a dog that never stops chasing fad cars.
* A blog or novel isn't inherently outdated in 3 years, and good ones can certainly take that long to complete.
* Any fitness regimen lasting less than 3 years is a waste of time (IMO). You don't get meaningful "credit" applied to your lifespan for doing yoga for three months.
* Taking the time to develop your relationship with your children needs years of persistence, otherwise they'll just raise themselves and not respect you.
Much of this is the same advice given to ADHD candidates. I don't know if he is one or just happened to be inspired by self-help books about the subject, but the advice does work. Breaking large tasks down into smaller ones that yield more immediate satisfaction/feedback and riding that dopamine train until it's second nature is the best way to stick to a project and avoid burnout.
Usually these are software-enabled service businesses (I.e. the software is not the essential part of the business).
Standing up a pure SaaS business in 3 months just doesn't happen unless it's really straightforward and you already have it planned out.
However, I believe that statement applies more to the vision/philosophy of our projects. A professor once recommended us to set ourselves an unreachable goal to keep driving your project/company/employees forward towards a common goal. They gave us an example of Bimbo –a Mexican food industry company– that states as its philosophy: "Feed, delight and serve our world, this is our philosophy." They'll never really be able to feed the entire world but they're sure as hell going for it. Though whether a such big corporation's real interest is doing so is another discussion altogether. Even if that was their original intention.
I read this article and think about my goals to become a Game Developer. I take the advice of setting expectations for a couple of years down the road as a way to keep learning and investing the time that's required to become what I wish to become. I shouldn't be naive to apply this to a particular game project at the earlier stages of my career. In my case I should take on multiple projects that will broaden my knowledge regarding game design, architecture, project management, etc.
Article gave me much more to think about than I though it would.
Some things are just harder but that doesn’t mean they are not worth it.
He believes being conditioned by social media led him to that point, more specifically immediate-satisfaction instant-result culture.
That is not entirely true in my experience. Feedback is supposed to determine strategy, not your self worth as a person. He has been programmed, by the instant result culture or whatever, into emotionally charged reactions, not an objective response.
I have been working out and I hit a plateau, I should stop this is fruitless > I hit a plateau, I need to try a new workout routine. Not “I will workout for 3 years until I make any judgement.”
I have been blogging for months and nobody cares, I should stop > I have been blogging for months without any results, my current course of action needs adjustment. Not “I will blog for 3 years regardless.”
Reacting - Old habits/conditioning make you react to a situation
Responding - Taking in the situation and moving forward with calculated action.
The 3 year rule replaces his current reaction with another one, when he should be working on responding to situations instead. It takes you further, but will not take you further than if you were to correct that faulty outlook altogether.
I'm a nobody and I'm sad. If everyone knew me I'd be happy.
A finger closes on the monkey's paw; You're famous now, for getting your drunk ass taken down in a restaurant waiting area. Now everybody hates you, and they recognize you while you're grocery shopping.
I think the reason why a big fraction of success stories comes from people who built something for themselves first is not just that they have a subject matter expert, or a captive audience (which doesn't hurt!). It's that they know the work is important, even if nobody else knows.
I have a project I used to work on where I got wedged on a rapidly shifting API for a dependency. I had grand plans for solving a problem for a niche that is one of my hobbies. Part of getting back into it has been trying to figure out how to be more... selfish. What parts of it would help me, as a tool? Not the bits that would improve my resume (turns out that doesn't motivate me very well), but me personally. Then maybe my friends. Then if I'm still going, the groups that were my original target.
Am I responding or reacting?
Thanks!
Over time I've ended up not really understanding this advice, but only because of something I accomplished in the past.
One day I just felt like writing something. I hadn't written since elementary school and had never published a piece of writing online before. But one day I just felt like writing something. The idea just would not leave my mind and I failed to get any sleep, instead spending all of my conscious time writing.
Within a week I was more or less finished. It was a short story numbering only a few dozen pages at most. But save for some minor editing it was complete.
And I decided that since I finished something, it was a success. And I also liked what I wrote, legitimately. I don't think it was that great in the context of people with experience, but it was mine, and that was enough for me to declare it a success. To me, I thought it was valuable. To me, I thought it was worth doing.
So if it's true that you must spend a lot of time to make something valuable, then in my view one of two things is true:
1. What I accomplished in only a week was not valuable to me or anyone else and was not worth doing, and I'm just deluding myself.
2. The advice was untrue and you can still create things of value without spending a lot of time - it just depends on what the scale is.
And if there is no way to create something valuable without spending a lot of time on it, then I don't understand why Ludum Dare and NaNoWriMo still exist, unless people believe the things they accomplish during those events are valueless, which doesn't sound right to me.
Since then I have never really felt like writing. I will either sit down and not think of anything for hours, or at most write whatever comes to my mind in a stream of consciousness and then proceed to not look at or edit it ever again. I think this is what people call being trapped by their past successes. I expect to be able to accomplish again what I actually did accomplish a single time in the past, which is not realistic. Not everything I do will turn out as well as that one time. But the fact remains that I called what I accomplished a success despite not spending much time on it at all, and on top of that it was the first thing I had seriously written in over a decade, and I seem to be unable to reconcile that with the practicalities of developing a skill properly.
Anecdote: A few months ago I was speaking with a friend and I mentioned the prospect of writing a certain article for publication in a newspaper (at least a local one), but I quickly dismissed the idea. I thought "what are the chances?" I actually looked up the chances of getting published in a top newspaper, and, according to Quora, they were extremely slim.
My friend pushed me to go ahead with it anyway. I spent the next 4 hours producing and editing the first draft. My friend and a random guy sitting next to me at Starbucks helped revise it. I submitted the article to one of the top newspapers in the country/world and got published a couple weeks later.
I literally never wrote a blog or article before that, and two weeks later tens of thousands of people were reading it and it was shared in elite circles. I sent the link to random Starbucks dude to show that his 10 minutes talking to a stranger resulted in more words on a national newspaper. He got a kick out of it.
Though writing is not my profession, I would now feel more confident pursuing a long term writing project like authoring a book in my free time. This goes back to the modularity I mentioned above. This story could easily have been about a small side project that got traction on GitHub.
There is a paucity of action. Just do it. I'm glad my friend told me that.
We can take general advice from successful people, I guess (especially those who has had recent success). But more than that, it is on the individual to tailor what he/she learned according to their needs.
After listening to whole bunch of people giving advice and trying many of them, I haven't found much that can be applied as is.
So I would guess the people who say that worthwhile things take a long time, did often have experiences of grace like you, where things were easy. But I would guess they also found that anything worth doing is worth challenging oneself with.
Sounds obvious, but I've seen a few projects fail because the developer couldn't relate to their users.
Side note: quite often this lack of motivation is simply a matter of impostor syndrome.
The other day I managed to break out of that by looking at a "how to" of something from a field foreign to me.
It was a step-by-step demonstration of how a certain drawing was created.
My first reaction was: "this is amazing - I wish I could create such awe-inspiring things".
Then I remembered that I've been programming since I was twelve and am fully capable of creating things that might be as impressive to people who are not in my field as that artwork was to me.
I’m not a brilliant engineer but yeah, he will probably learn a bit working with me. A lot of us probably need to give ourselves more credit.
It’s hard not to think so much about how our work is only possible on the shoulders of giants. I don’t spend enough time thinking about what I can do, and too much thinking about what I can’t.
I would love to do some electronics design but I find it much harder to have smaller sessions, it takes me a least an hour or two to get into a flow where I have my mental model of the complete circuit, mechanical layout, etc.
I also want to balance being a good parent with side projects as well! Currently my kids are too small to participate in engineering, but you can bet that I am totally going to build a robot with them some day :)
When you think about the expected or probable ROI, you'd likely give up. These projects or ideas will likely fail. You have less than 1% chance of success. You're trying to calculate the extreme tail risk. It's not worth the time to think about it. The process is demoralizing.
One trait that I found useful for these long-term ideas: curiosity. If you're curious about something, you can do it for a long time. You still do it even when you know it would likely fail. During the process, you can learn things that are not exactly applicable for your idea. But they are useful for your learning.
Another aspect to think about is to find the failure criteria. You can decide when your long-term idea is invalid. When you see X happens, you know X would invalidate your idea. X is the correct idea, your idea is incorrect. At that point, you can stop.
An example: I have a hypothesis that battery electric cars may not be the future. I work on alternative ideas. A failure criteria for my idea: When battery electric cars have more than 50% market share. This example illustrates the unpopularity of working on long-term ideas. People would call you stupid. You'll likely fail. Curiosity is the only thing that keeps you going.
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But that doesn't answer the question at all. The question becomes, how do you stay motivated for those 3 years?
The answer, for me and people I know, is that you have to break it down into small pieces (month-sized, then week-sized, then day-sized) and find happiness in the progress. In the small daily wins.
If you think you'll only be happy once you succeed (3+ years later) you'll never make it. It's trite but it's true, that you've got to find happiness in the journey, not just the destination.
Because if you don't, then you'll absolutely give up and fall back to the things that do give you instant happiness today, whether that's social media or spending time with your spouse or kids. And if you choose your family over a long-term project because the project isn't producing happiness... then that might be the right choice for you! :)
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