Mine : Remember a pay cheque goes a long way in alleviating the horrors of a corporate job. Not everyone can afford to be a struggling hacker waiting for the big pay-off.
Sitting in your day-job having to use (a very flaky) ClearCase instance working on a monster code base that has no tests and has a non-deterministic build process. Think of the pay-cheque at the end of the month. Get paid, save/invest properly and use your evenings and weekends to work on "that" project.
Course, this is my personal motivational technique.