| I found myself in the cycle that you described up there for about 2 years almost a year ago especially with side projects. A couple of things I took away from that period: 1/ Being truthful w/ yourself on whether you are building something for yourself or building it because you are insecure and feel like you're falling behind people in the community (ie I'm building this because 3 of my friends are startup founders and I want to be one too because I'm just as good as them). If it's the latter, usually your willpower will fleet. I fell for this trap in my last project. 2/ Being truthful on what skills you have and can utilize for whatever you want to build. For my last project, I was working on a website and had no prior web skills besides HTML and basic JS. I took it on myself to learn React, Redux and the whole shebang. By the time my willpower fleeted, I had learned a lot but was maybe 50% through a project and I lost interest. 3/ Dividing your project up into small chunks. Take a subset of those chunks, throw it into your product and alpha/beta test it with friends and family. If you have nothing to show for your work after n months of work, it's very easy to give up. 4/ Constantly show people and get feedback. If you show people what you're working on and they give you insight, it'll energize you to build and continue down the journey. Otherwise, you'll feel like all your effort is wasted away towards a dream that seems more and more unreachable as time progresses In closing, I do think some people are more disciplined and motivated than others but everyone falls into the same traps. But I'm sure the folks you site as more disciplined and self-motivated have fallen to these problems; just earlier in their lives. TLDR: Understand your motivations, make sure what you're building makes you happy and tell folks about what you're building to get energized. |