[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.