[_98fj]

Let me quote from the internet:

Fuck motivation. it’s a fickle and and unreliable little dickfuck and isn’t worth your time.

Better to cultivate discipline than to rely on motivation. Force yourself to do things. Force yourself to get up out of bed and practice. Force yourself to work. Motivation is fleeting and it’s easy to rely on because it requires no concentrated effort to get. Motivation comes to you, and you don’t have to chase after it.

Discipline is reliable, motivation is fleeting. The question isn’t how to keep yourself motivated. It’s how to train yourself to work without it.

[stavros]

Isn't that basically saying "fuck liking the thing you do, instead practice doing it even though you don't like it, and if you have to train one of the two, train the latter"?

If I had to choose between liking the thing I do and not liking it but doing it anyway, I'd choose the former. I don't find "how can I be more motivated?" a bad aspiration at all.

[ndh2]

I don't think that's the best way to put it. First you decide what you like. Then you keep doing it.

It's pretty unlikely that you'll find one thing that, no matter what happens, will always keep you motivated. The question is not whether you like it or not. It's where you keep getting the energy to stay on course, to keep working on it.

[karmakaze]

This comment and the parent to both ring true and precisely captures the problem for me. The disambiguation I find is to choose a path following a passion, and eliminate any demotivation along the way. Optimizing for motivation is an unachievable goal. The two things that have worked the best for me is to avoid labelling things mentally as 'not fun' and recently pair programming. In place of the former, keep in mind that each thing needs to get done to get to a goal you desire. Whenever I work on a project I take pride in, I rarely feel demotivated, so eliminate things which reduce pride in a project, such as tech debt or low quality implementations. Of course there has to be a balance and timing to this as well.

[shkkmo]

I believe the idea is that relying on motivation to work on the things you like is much less effective that relying on discipline to work on the things you like.