I'm not very interested in working on intrusive marketing, but I'm more motivated than ever on my current project, which involves linking enterprise architectural models to all sorts of other business data in order to provide insights into how the business is doing.

That doesn't sound terribly exciting, and yet it is. I've been involved in this project from the very start, I've been talking with many stakeholders, I've had to make decisions on how to approach this, what tech stack to use, what features to focus on, what new features we could add, how to prioritise different concerns, etc.

I'm involved in the context of the project, and not merely the execution of it, and that's given me a much greater sense of ownership. I really care about this project and want to see it succeed.

So maybe just talk about the context isn't quite enough; involve people in that context, make sure they understand the why and have them decide on the how. Make sure they're not just cogs in the machine.

(It helps that the tech stack involves a Graph DB, which we didn't have any experience with before, and we create a lot of interesting data visualisations.)