"I think it’s a bad question because we’re just not good enough at predicting our desires over the long term to be able to answer it. We’re capricious animals. We’re generally fickle and impulsive. We’re maddeningly mercurial"

The conclusion is — motivation is complex. It's hard to understand what makes people stick and no set of objective questions can possibly answer if people will be resilient if things fall apart (which usually do in a startup). Gabriel Weinberg worked for more than five years on DuckDuckGo before getting the first taste of real traction[1]. Some may have worked on a similar scale without even getting any significant success.

Although, humans are fickle by design, it seems some motivation is sticky. That's probably the difference between doing Supply Chain Management and building a Google competitor. The former seems to be an impulsive idea triggered by recently gained facts but the latter seems to be working on something you actually believe in.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/motivation-being-cusp-somethi...