[gnode]

> releases dopamine that makes you feel good about your choice, motivating you to execute.

Dopamine can be motivating, but over a threshold it's satisfying, which is essentially the opposite of motivating.

I think what's really being warned about is that if you dream too much it becomes satisfying. If you allow yourself to experience the pleasure of fantasising about your future, then you lose the motivation to actually realise that future. Instead of training your neural pathways to more effectively improve your circumstances, you train your neural pathways to get to that satisfaction quicker by simply imagining and believing you will have done so in the future.

[arandr0x]

I'd like to submit the possibility that in a lot of cases dopamine is doing its exact job (which seems to be ranking your brain's predictions and facilitating learning of patterns) -- if you are correctly able to predict with high confidence the outcome of whatever you are wanting to do, then you'll end up not wanting to do it anymore (because you'd learn nothing from it -- and because the pleasure from imagining doing it is just as real). The solution is to attempt harder stuff, things that you can't right now predict, where outcomes are still uncertain, things that might bring you suffering and not just pleasure.