[thriftwy]

I, for one, never have fear of failure.

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?

[vijay_nair]

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.

[knightofmars]

I used to be like this and began to realize that it was limiting me professionally as well as in general growth as a person. I started forcing my perspective to be this instead, "Can I do this more elegantly than those that came before me?" It pushed me to learn about problems and really foster a depth of understanding that I never would have reached due to the "If I'm not the first..." mentality. Now I find a deeper self-esteem boost in gaining understanding and subsequently teaching others the knowledge I've gained.

[ddnb]

Incredible, your post and the one you responded to describe perfectly how I feel. I also noticed a new environment gives me an overall boost of motivation. Changing jobs makes me super exited the first few months but after that the enthousiasm start to die off.

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.

[devotedtoneu]

Fellas, do it in a way no one else has. Or use it for something no one else has.

Even things done a million times can be turned on their head.

[wolco]

Have you considered changing languages? 5 years in one stack can make things too easy in a way.

[kvgr]

I have the same thing... we should start a support group.

[TeMPOraL]

So do I. I'd gladly join the group.

[nolok]

I'm not sure I'm on the same spectrum as you, but I can recognize the "boring first steps stopping me from going further even though I can see the solution to 99% of the thing and it would be awesome".

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.

[thriftwy]

I can relate to that! I remember I could not start any Windows programming because MSVC offered pages and pages of stuff as a Windows "Hello World" and I just could not figure what is this stuff for, and could not proceed without understanding.

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.