For myself, I always blamed the system. The fact is, I don't think it's fair to take a primate, put it in front of a screen all day, and expect it to want to type constantly and drag jira tickets. At least not this primate.
A lot of the time my job has felt like defusing my manager's daddy issues rather than improving the world. And I think surrendering to the idea that that was inevitable was crushing to me. So I quit.
Once I realized the world wouldn't collapse if I broke out of the system (e.g. you could quit, you could move to malaysia and coast, etc etc) I realized this was prison was entirely in my head. I realized most rich people I knew weren't really happy, and most jobs are dysfunctional wealth-making machines for those at the top.
Right now, I'm researching whether there is a possible connection between environmental chemicals and the skyrocketing illnesses (ADD, allergies, asthma, etc) for a youtube channel. Will I go back to work? Not sure.
But I've decided, if push comes to shove, I'd rather be poor than surrender to feeling like a pawn in a system I do not respect.
And while it seems great at first "oh people like this don't burn out, don't stress out, they're fine !", the actual truth is that when you look back you see plenty of things you could have done that would have been awesome, or made you ton of money, or been unique, ... But you didn't. And you didn't do anything else instead. You just ... kind of go along.
I believe being above average talented is actually a detriment to getting better on that front, as it means you can cruise through life without much pressure of work and money.
I never had to work at all during school to have good grades. So I didn't.
When reality finally checked in, I didn't have working routines or techniques.
I still miss some of them, and there's not a day than I look back at my career thinking I could have done muuuuch better.
And sadly getting the people around you to understand is not easy at all.
How do you tell the people around you that telling you you're good/talented/gifted, and acting like you are by default, is hurting you. That when there is any kind of challenge to do, "yeah it's hard but I'm sure nolok can do it" being the go to expected comment has long term effects.
Even in my current adult situation, my friends answer when we talk about it goes something like "oh yeah poor you, not having to kill yourself working all week because you can do it in a few hours, and then being forced to relax and not do work stuff for days ! I would cry for you, if I didn't have to go back to work for my daily 6 hours shift for half your salary."
And I can't even say I don't get why they don't understand it, I totally do, but it hurts nonetheless. The only ones who truly know how much it gets to me are my girlfriend and close family (parents, brother, ...), and after a while you feel like you're complaining about nothing while others have real issues.
That's probably why I tend to vent out here instead of to my family.
We're not rich. One of my siblings is finishing their medical studies, and struggling with the fact that in our area, it's mostly a thankless job for shit pay. The other one is on a path that probably won't bring much riches either. My SO works twice as hard as I do for half the pay. I just can't talk about my job to those closest to me, because from the point of view of general society, I'm the lucky one who has a well-paying job sitting in front of computer all day, with plenty of time to goof around.
I try to help them all as much as I can, both materially and in terms of finding access to education and better opportunities. But it doesn't make me feel any less guilty that I happened to luck into a good job by the virtue of my teenage hobby turning out to be a great career choice.
Here, at least, there are other people who can relate. The jobs I've experienced are boring and soul-suckingly pointless. It's hard to find a meaningful one, when most of the industry is just about making rich people richer. Also, I suspect that learning how to program in my teenage years hurt me in terms of job satisfaction as well - the novelty of making computers do things has long worn off, so (unlike some people I work with) I don't get happy and excited that I can use the new bloated framework X and finally get to use generic types like a boss, or whatevs.
Except I suppose the same is true for most people in most other jobs. But they are too busy making ends meet to complain about the job being bullshit.
Another thing was I felt like people were shrugging off my hard work because I made it look easy and there's 3 things for that -- A.) realize people are focused on their own life, they aren't going to understand everything going on in yours and B.) Stop being silent about your hard work. Even if it's just to some of your close friends, having some people realize you work hard too is nice. C.) Talk to people (like here on HN) with the same problem as you. I'm in some entrepreneur groups on Facebook and it is SO nice to have like minded people with similar problems to talk to or read about.
It all came crashing down for me, though, when I got my first semester law school grades back. For the first time in my life I did poorly, when I expected to do just as well as I had done before. It is not an exaggeration to say my entire sense of self erupted beneath me. I became depressed, anxious. I withdrew completely. I ended up dropping out of school. I am still recovering.
This sort of problem doesn't get much sympathy until it's too late. I hope gifted kids get more support these days.
I found some hope in the work of Carol Dweck and her book, "Mindset." All my life I had been told how smart and talented I was. I adopted this "fixed" mindset about myself, and when it was contested, I broke. Adopting a "growth" mindset is a much more sustainable, workable model. I highly recommend looking into Dweck's work for anyone who might be struggling in this vein.
However, if you "do" all of your ideas, you may have to face the cold reality that none of them worked out or were that great/enjoyed after all.
So there's pros and cons.
Do you think that it's just a normal degree of variation found in different people?
In the past I've occasionally been wondering if there is something wrong with my health that drains my motivation, or if actually I'm just lazy, or care too little about what i can give to other people, or whatever.
At that time it has also caused problems at work for me and kept my self-esteem low for quite some time.
Since then I have been a lot better and I'd say it's fine now. But I still wonder about what causes such wildly differing forms of motivation in different people.
I used to be very very similar, and with some help I identified that it was a combination of people around me expecting me to succeed a lot more than others, which lead to a fear of failing. Which then slowly creeped into a lot of aspect of my life. I really caught on it and decided to do something about it when it started going against what I actually wanted, making me decline events I wanted to get into and had the motivation but my brain just wouldn't let me hop in.
I feel that something is expected of me
-> I feel pressured to do it, since failing to do so will surely have bad consequences
-> Being pressured, I feel like I have little freedom to do as I think fit
-> Feeling like I have no freedom makes me lose motivation, even if the task might have been interesting to me
It's not like that all the time, but it has happened fairly often. Sometimes I still fall into that mode of thinking and have a hard time pulling myself out again.
What I believe is the problem here:
I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express).
Since I realized that I have tried the following to improve my situation:
I make myself aware of my fears as they come up, and don't try to push them away, but also don't acknowledge that they're justified. I then reassure myself in the feeling that I can look after myself and cause my needs to be fulfilled just fine. In other words, I try to make the cause of my satisfaction intrinsic.
I’m a people-pleaser so this is great insight into my own behavior. But being a people-pleaser is also why I don’t understand making my satisfaction factors intrinsic. When people push their “successes” — jobs, cars, girls, diamonds, houses and iPhones — onto me, how can I to continue to work on my small WordPress project with the same level of motivation I had before they brought their “successes” to my attention? I do need them for my survival — I get a lot of anxiety just thinking of living without their support — but I don’t want them influencing my motivation, so how do I go about insulating my poor self-esteem from their occasional, and btw completely unintentional, blitzkrieg attacks?
The problem with anxiety is, that you just want to get rid of it, the anxiety hinders you in a way to look at it, to reflect about it.
Instead of trying to get rid of it, it might be better to reflect about it. So in the case of the anxiety about the thoughts of others: what kind of effect these thoughts really have, even if they think the worst about you?
The anxiety of the bad things that might happen in most cases have no foundation in your current life, but have bean created somewhere in your childhood.
Generally I'd say if you find that some things you do or think are not the way you want them to be and you feel the cause is other people influencing you, then you have to take a step back and try to assess what your motivations and priorities are.
The hard part is to stop your fears from messing up your reasoning. Try to think about what you value first and worry about how that is attainable later. I think you will find that there are always more ways to reach a goal if you just take a chance, than you thought there were when you worried about it beforehand. So try not to worry too much.
Self self-esteem can be irrational, but I feel like it is very valueable to me nonetheless. I think I have come to accept that being confident involves being somewhat crazy and actively taking risks.
After all, most things we worry about never happen, so you might be able to afford being a bit more light-hearted :)
What I have is the opposite. In seconds I can think of this grandiose accomplishment in all its beauty if it was finished, and then I'm confronted with a white slate and tedium of doing even first steps in that direction.
What discourages me from smaller tasks is impossibility of failure. Why do a barely challenging exercise if i'm not the first to do it and not the best at that?
Exactly! My motivation primarily stems from the self-esteem boost I get from doing meaningful work that’s exclusive to me. But to do the experiments and research required to get to the exclusive domain I need to pass through the tedium of mundane jobs to pay the bills, learn the technology etc. I can find the motivation to do the tedium for minutes, but not for hours like others seem to be able to.
A result of all this is that now after 5 years of being web developer I'm already bored of the job because the small mundane tasks outnumber the challenging projects by a lot. Already switched of employer twice... Looking to do freelance work now hoping the constant switching helps keeping my motivation up.
Even things done a million times can be turned on their head.
That's why it's nearly impossible for me to make a project in modern javascript or anything like it with a ton of setup, but give me golang and it lets me just start hacking at the "awesome steps" and suddenly I'm building stuff.
I only got with it when I've learned some raw WinAPI with message breakers and stuff, but all and all fitting a program in one source file.
> At that time
> Since then
Can you point to anything that has caused this change for you? I can identify myself with OP's description as well and would be happy about any ideas how to address it.
Would highly recommend anyone to read. Revealed a lot about what motivates me. It covers things like only being able to focus on something you find interesting, and doing so for crazy amounts of time (Hyperfocus), while being unable to focus on a very simple task that is of no interest for even a moment.
Edit: I have a deadline in 5 hours time and I'm checking HN. I only work well under pressure...
>I only work well under pressure.
Made me chuckle. I'm similar. But it's more like: I only work under pressure. I'm not so sure about the quality, whether it's well or not. ;)
Unfortunately, it's currently not realistic for me to expect to be able to make a living from any of these hobbies. I don't think that's very uncommon, though, and there is no need to worry or be shocked about it. Some people work primarily to earn money and there's nothing wrong with that, even though you're apparently not supposed to state that simple truth in job interviews.
For the parent poster: I think a good way to tackle learning new stuff is to break it do it in small increments at a time. Ex. if learning graphics programming, start with trying to open up a blank open gl window, then try displaying a single triangle etc. If the tasks proves to be more complex or requires going on a tangent, break that down into goals as well. The point is to always have something on your plate that is small-ish and feels achievable.
On the flip side, these same mild stimulants may be helping me get to the burn out phase. Heh. The net is that taking the stimulants while feeling a lot of stress or anxiety is not a good plan, and something I have to watch out for. So when I'm stressed out, I stay way from the stimulants -- I fall back to coffee and Diet Coke.
I also found that being able to complete one small task and then switch gears on the project kept me more entertained.
Also working with a good coding partner can be helpful, but that takes it's own time to setup and organize.
I hated the very idea of someone sitting with me at the computer and coding together, I mean that's stupid right ? And I'm going to be super slow compared to usual, and will have to explain stuff, ...
But even if you're only going at 80% of your usual speed, you're going. 100% speed is useless if you stop after 5 minutes. Consider telling the other person about your focus issue, so they don't let you play around too much.
With time, I've seen plenty of other great sides and bonuses in pair programming, but that one alone has been a god send. And after a while you get used to the rythm and get better at coding alone without stopping too.
[1] What has been a temporary solution is vasodilation through garlic-driven TRPA1 activation. Sometimes I get so down I wonder what is the point of life when I’m going to die in about 1600 weeks and me and all of my work is going to be forgotten; I pop in 70 to 120 garlic cloves (very hard to chew, they sting) but it does seem to work (could be placebo although the vasodilation does actually work as I get incredibly horny after). Since garlic is hard to chew I have my eyes on chocolate flavonols (chocamine) that does the same vasodilation effect. Still looking for better alternatives, if I can find them.
That might be the greatest single sentence I have ever read on HN.
Tons of people looking for the same thing, or open to it for the experience, and after a while it just gets second nature.
Judging from your experience as well as Bret’s, not working alone seems to be the key factor. I wonder why that is the case, but the mall idea is worth a try, thanks for the inspiration!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
If that fits, you may wish to speak with a psychologist/psychiatrist. Best not to self-diagnose :)
My experience since getting the diagnosis has been pretty positive. I've dropped a lot of personal guilt after realizing many of these traits were not my fault. And I've also better understood how to manage them.
Finally, I'm titrating onto medication and so far my experience with that has been quite positive as well. It's nice to feel like I have productive weekends.
Someone should invent a straitjacket for the mind.
[1] http://ask.metafilter.com/272294/Why-am-I-most-productive-la...
However I still have a long list of side projects that I should do one day (or even worse, return to them one day).
I know the feeling, it just compounds the problem: https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/753567329380732928
It means that in order to do some task X, you need to roll 1 or more dice and have the sum total of the result of the dice roll be greater than some arbitrary requirement.
This means that, for every productive action I'm taking, I have to "roll a morale check" and I fail that one more often than not, and stop doing whatever I wanted to accomplish. I consider myself talented but my output thus is inherently constrained.
It was very shocking for me to discover that many many people don't work like that: instead they need to roll a check to ever stop working, otherwise they don't, eventually burning out (but in process, earning e.g. good grades which was always unreachable to me).