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.