[oraphalous]

Amazing answer.

I don't have this sort of experience with founders to validate the specific claim that it needs to be about more than you - to give you the reason to keep going.

But I do have my own personal life experience in general... I've been a pretty self centered person in my motivation throughout my life. But eventually I reached a point where my drive just dried up. A deep and persistant despair began to infect everything I tried to do. What was the point of it... even if I succeeded somehow, it was all just going to be more of ME at the end of it. And I was pretty sick of me.

Strangely, it was a cat that saved me. A neighbours cat I used to walk past in the mornings as it was enjoying a winter sunbeam. I'd give it an ear scratch which it appreciated greatly. And I realised that interaction was giving me more pleasure / amusement than any of the big, important projects going on in my life at the time. Making some thing's / one's life better - even in some small way - is the raison d'etre I was missing. It's so obvious and simple to me now - yet somehow I'd gone through half my life blind to it.

Now I call it: the principle of the cat. It gets a laugh out of people, when I tell them that story.