[solarmist]

It seems to me that you're problem isn't that you don't have motivation it's that you need rewards right ways. I used to be the same way. Learning a few tricks in each of those areas gives you a thrill, but once that thrill wears off you lose interest and go off to find your next thrill.

Grades are just a slightly longer term reward. You work hard for a few weeks or a month then you get rewarded with an A or a B.

Instead of beating yourself up over these things you need to find a way to "reward" learning something in more depth.

Discipline isn't forcing yourself to do something it's more like tricking yourself into doing it until it's second nature and that's what you naturally do. For example, surround yourself with Haskell materials and environments to the exclusion of all else AND have set up some kind of reward system for yourself. Or removing junkfood from your house in order to get hungry. If you're hungry and search the house for a snack and all you have are salads or pre-cooked chicken breasts then odds are you aren't going to go to the trouble to leave the house to find something else, you'll just eat what you have.

Basically you need to find a way to make delayed gratification more gratifying to you than instant or short term gratification.

Follow the example of Khan Academy. They use game mechanics to keep people coming back. Do the same for things you want to study.

The other thing to realize is that at some point you need to commit to a path and ignore everything that's not applicable to that path. You can't be know everything. If you want to be a PHP developer don't go off and read a book about embedded C programming. It's outside of your area.

[twink]

How to trick myself into building an awesome web project? Remove all software other than a text editor? Wouldn't I need at least a web browser? :-)

I think it's not that easy in all cases. However, I already practice the food use-case you've mentioned (I simply don't buy unhealthy food).

[solarmist]

No it's not easy, but removing distractions helps keep you on track.

A lot of people on HN I've heard say they use a web filter on themselves. Only allowing most web sites for certain times of day, otherwise they're locked down to "productive" web sites.

Also, when you're looking for something new to learn instead of picking a new breadth topic, pick a depth topic you don't know about and learn about in one of your hand picked languages. Like if you're learning about networking or machine learning, use a language that you want to know better, but have "lost interest" in instead of one you already know well.