Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

What I mean there is, simply, when you get the idea and your first instinct is to seek confirmation from others, you've already erred by basing the entire thing on the whims of others. Even if you get them to become stakeholders with a substantial interest, they are still most likely operating on their whims. They go to the meeting because they are obliged to have a meeting, and the extent that they care is simply the extent that you have entangled them in it. You cannot rely on others in this regard; they can be great friends in most aspects of life and still be utterly perplexed by your ideas, even if they start seeing them working in practice. We all fly to our comfort zones. But this means that being a good student, a hard worker or a loyal friend is not sufficient to cross the threshold into realizing something original.

What you can rely on to make that crossing are tools of logic and reason: first do some philosophy and determine your thesis. Find principles, themes and references to give it structure to hang the work off of. Make sure it coheres in an explicable way, with logical premises: compare everything pair-wise, make diagrams, whatever you have to do. There are a lot of possible "systems" but having one is the important thing. You do not want to be in a position of blind faith in the idea alone, and a strong high-level concept has the power of making it easier to rationalize, explain, and argue for a certain way of doing, thus eliminating your doubts.

Once you have some starting point, generate requirements with binary true/false factors: it must have this, it cannot have that. Sketching out requirements can tell you something about the principles you have in mind so it helps to cycle between the two a bit. But you don't build a solid project just on requirements because those are so often subject to whims: "why do it that way?" "meh, felt like it." You instead challenge each requirement against the broader idea to ensure that it works at scale.

From the aggregate of binary factors, key metrics to focus on also appear. And as you do requirement generation, the motivation to do the work appears naturally because you have to do it to answer the question!

And of course, doing this, it becomes a marathon, not a sprint, because it quickly takes you out of the space where you just grab off-the-shelf solutions and slap it together. You start going well out of the comfort zone to answer your question. Now you have experiments to run and research to follow up on. The principles and themes of the project never change once established, they only become more refined and nuanced as you evaluate what the best means of achieving them are.

And I think that is, in essence, how you do it. You can achieve something resembling a successful creative work by accident, but if you stick to a principled approach your chances improve sharply.

I spend my work time on embedded engineering. I like it well enough, but it's stressful because there are goals to be met and drudge work to be done. But I spend my free time working on classic sports cars. I fix what I want on the car and if I'm tired of it, I just get rid of it and move on to something else. No goal, no stress, just enjoyment.

I think this was your first mistake. I believe the author's point is that whatever that thing is, it's important to you and potentially you alone. If it so happens to be interesting to others that's icing on the cake. And, there's at least some chance that that thing you find to be so important others, somewhere, will find it valuable too, more or less. But maybe not, and that's OK.

As a front end dev and someone who teaches front end stuff (React mainly), CSS really doesn’t change quickly, and when it does change, those changes are additive. CSS is very very good about backward compatibility.

To give a specific example, CSS Grid is a newer feature than Flexbox, but both are useful for layout, and in this case newer isn’t better, just different. (I know, newer == better is nearly a universal constant in the front end world, but CSS doesn’t suffer from that nearly as much as JS does).

I just wanted to mention this in case part of the problem is that you don’t know the “new” way to do something in CSS, and you don’t want to learn it, but you do know a way to do what you want... just do it the way you know, and it’ll very likely be fine.

You might enjoy a utility CSS framework like Tailwind [0] that relieves you from some decisions and gives you some nice shorthand without locking you in to a specific look or a specific JS framework. (I know, another thing to learn... but it’s worth a quick look, might save you time in the long run)

0: https://tailwindcss.com/

What worked for me: make an absolutely minimal version of the idea (2 hours), and a webpage that describes its promise (9 hours). 500 people looked at it, one thought it was cool - that was enough for me.

Not everyone wants to get swole or be a rails core maintainer.

One thing I've noticed though - regardless of whether or not I do something about my current top most exciting thing, these things come back. The same videogame idea has been visiting me regularly for the past six months. This means that even if I lose steam after a few days of working on something, it's not work lost - I'll probably resume it for a bit a few weeks or months down the line.

On top of that, I've learned to not consider any hard intellectual work as wasted. Things I've researched for random harebrained ideas I later flaked on often find a way to become useful in my dayjob, or a different harebrained idea.

But why? What was special about the video game idea that interested you, and the same about the design app?

In my experience I often fail to see things through because they only interest me superficially or are primarily orientated around making money (quickly!).

But I know what I actually want to do (and I'm working towards it), and the reason is that I feel that activity has merit on so many deeper levels than just making money or the intellectual challenge of solving a problem. It aligns more with a sense of purpose than anything else.

So for me now, that's my yardstick. I may still do side projects that don't align with that core goal, but I don't expect too much from them - in fact if they were to actually take off they may get in the way of my core goal which would make the "success" seem pointless.

Perhaps through questioning yourself and digging into your motivations you'll be able to find something that you'll be able to stick with when other things come along competing for your attention.

But many times, you will learn something on the way that you can recycle in a future project.

PS: if you don't tell anyone about your "failed" projects, this strategy will make you look like a genius.

Some things will stick and some won’t. But I suggest testing each project you’re excited about for at least a month with a daily habit before moving onto another one.

The docs told me I have ADHD. Maybe you do, too?

This includes things like skipping military service and basically living as an outlaw for many years because of that.

I've also played a lot of video games and consider that time well spent.

I think this all turns to reddit (the comments are very much Reddit like) because this is the 20billionth article about 'following you passion' basically. And this title really seems to annoy people who have seen it all before; most people cannot just drop everything and do whatever. No matter if you are thinking 24/7 about playing in a bluesband; most (by far and wide) people cannot and will never be able to do that unless they win the lottery. And then you have all the negative thoughts; the anxiety attacks and the cravings that you really should not give into... It is all not so surprising response wise, but I thought it would just drop out and be dead before this went so much Reddit. That usually does not happen.

The amateur waits for inspiration, the professional knows that it will come after he starts.

The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway."

Basically, what it says is that you'll never feel like doing something that you don't want to do, and that's exactly the reason why you should just start doing and get it over with. That's my opinion

I disagree with this, and I'm curious what long term goals you might have that aren't aligned with whatever it is you're doing now.

How do you suggest a millennial choose a "long term goal they really want to achieve" in the first place? In my experience, goals grow out of a person performing an activity and having a desire to master it, but you appear to be suggesting that a person start with a goal in mind and then work on doing things they aren't motivated to do with the hope that the goal will be worth it in the end. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for depression.

Now, I'm not suggesting one should avoid doing anything difficult. Learning hard things is difficult, after all. The problem, in my experience, is that people are initially curious about something, but then tell themselves they can't do it. That they don't have the brain for it, or whatever it is. They're curious about something and so they make an attempt at it, but they don't do a very good job, and so they say to themselves that they aren't good enough and then they quit. This, to me, is where resilience is necessary. This is where it's necessary to do something even though it's hard. But resilience to do something you don't even want to do in the first place because you've set some arbitrary far-off goal for yourself? That seems like a gamble to me.

Generational division is also nothing new.

Please try to respond to the bad advice, and not provide generational troll bait. I'm not saying this with any authority, I just want to keep the level of discourse on HN from devolving.

Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

I think that's an important distinction. He's not giving diligent work short shrift, just trying to exclude drudgery from leisure time specifically.

My sister in law went to college and started working in the job she wanted at the company she wanted but at a location she didn’t want. She couldn’t get a transfer to the more prestigious location within her first year of working so she said it was a waste of her time and everyone was holding her career back. She’s now stocking shelves at a grocery store at 29 years old.

You gotta shovel a lot of shit before you get to the top, but that stuff isn’t Instagram friendly so it’s not glorified in the media.

I knew a girl who wanted to be an astrophysicist. She could’ve done it too. But she started rock climbing (I was mentoring her), and eventually gave up college so she could be a climbing guide because “it’s what I love.” I tried my best to remind her that she also loves physics and can participate in BOTH if she pursued physics. But now she’s working to be a guide somewhere.

I’m not saying being a guide is a bad thing, but I know more than a handful of people who’ve guided most their life and wish they had just put in the time to get skills to get jobs that pay more and have more longevity. This anecdote is just one example (there are more) of my experience with the next generation that I haven’t quite seen in millennials. However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong.

Couple that with the commercializing of pretty much everything that the sun bares down upon, such that nothing around you has much authenticity, which leads you to have bizarre situations like humans who think brands are their friends, and there being no non-commercial spaces to meet new people at. It's no wonder there are so many confused Millennials who don't really get how to fit into society anymore.

Of course you won’t love every task, some might even be downright terrible, but if you can’t stop thinking of the overall goal, then keep going.

But if you find yourself not caring about the end goal, time to reconsider.

> To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside.

People who are obsessed with "motivation" point to people like Elon Musk who work extreme hours, and recommend others do the same. But they have cause and effect backwards.

You start working insane hours when your own personal talents align with society's rewards, and you are blessed/cursed with ambition that demands to be satisfied.

Elon Musk didn't start off saying, "I'd rather spend time with my family and play video games, but I'm going to start working 80 hours a week to get rich." No, it started with a spark within him. How did it get there? I can't say.

They say talent is rare, but I don't think that's true. I believe what is rare is the intersection of talent and ambition.

I've been on both sides of this -- I've been very ambitious, and I've been not very ambitious in different parts of my life. It's hard to work your butt off when you don't feel particularly ambitious, and it's hard not to when you do.

Some days I can put in hours. Though in practice I have too much else going on. So the baby steps help maintain momentum without feeling like I can't finish anything.

It also helps to look back at milestones that were satisfying to me even if no one else noticed. And to remind myself it's OK to walk away if my original goals proved too far out of reach.

> You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.

It will be very difficult for you to get the skills/attitude/vision you need if you don't have a clear vision of where you're going and why you're getting them -- and if you're struggling with motivation, asking yourself if you really care about the end goal can be valuable.

As an example:

I've been working on the same game for almost 2 years. There's a lot of boring stuff that goes into that, there are a lot of just multi-hour, multi-day coding sessions that are not spent on cool gameplay stuff, they're spent on optimizations and infrastructure, and signing up for conferences and writing blog posts. Stuff I don't really enjoy. I've spent 8 hour weekends just working on this, to the point that I struggled with insomnia at some points. And there's some stuff there that's really not fun.

BUT, every day I get up I'm still excited about the game. Every day I get up I desperately want the game to be completed. So it's not actually all that hard to work on boring, mundane things that will get me to that goal. I know, with 100% certainty, baring some kind of horrible accident I will finish this game -- because even with all of the mundane and difficult work, finishing the game is easier for me mentally than living in a world where I have not finished the game.

On the other hand, there are side projects I've tried to invest a lot of time into and when it got to the boring stuff, I couldn't be motivated to work on it. And I spent a long time trying to figure out what the difference was and why I couldn't pull off the same 8-hour practice sessions before realizing that I did not care enough about the final goals of these projects to put in the work. I am not a very good piano player. I'd like to be, but I don't care enough to put in the time and practice. I'd like to be the type of person who's an excellent piano player, but I don't actually love playing the piano.

If you really, genuinely love something, you will be able to put in the time on the boring stuff. If you do not genuinely love something, putting in the time on the boring stuff will be exponentially harder. So while being able to preserver is important, I also advise people who are trying to do hard things to first find hard things that they really, really care about.

Some motivational problems do come down to perspective, not character. I do believe that some people have problems with maintenance and work. But I also believe that sometimes people who can't preserver are in that state specifically because they have convinced themselves that they love something that they don't actually care about.

If I wasn't working on my current game, I would go insane. Motivation does not factor into it; I just do whatever needs to happen next regardless of whatever it is, regardless of whether or not it's fun, because that's what needs to happen next and I emotionally need the game to be finished eventually. To me, that's what working on something that I love means: caring about something so much that you're willing to do hard or mundane things.

If I'm going to spend 3-5 years on game, maybe even longer, I need to know up-front that I care about it on that level. So one of my tests when I start working on a game is exactly what the article asks: "can I stop thinking about this?" If I can stop thinking about it, then I probably am not going to have the motivation 4 years from now to spend a bunch of consecutive weekends debugging stack traces.

After the War, there were kids everywhere. So, so many kids. They had to open schools. Whole industries about kids exploded into existence. But as one of those kids? There must have been ten other people wanting to be what you wanted to be and half of them were better at it than you could hope to be. That, my theory states, fucked them up badly.

When they had kids, they pressured us into being unique snowflakes, to be exceptional. It was too goddamned much pressure, and that fucked us up. So the next cohort started congratulating their kids for doing absolutely nothing at all. Which fucked them up worst of all.

So, like, we are very sorry, but we were just trying not to pass our neuroses down and ended up giving you different ones. Same as our parents.

> Here’s a little hint from someone whose been there and back: Avoid the Zone. This state of consciousness is not really hyper-productive and is certainly not infallible. It’s really just a mild meditative state in which certain rational faculties are diminished in favor of a sense of speed.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

When I was looking for an entry-level New York studio apartment four years ago, one thing I absolutely insisted on having was a dishwasher. Screw the overall size of the kitchen or the square footage of the apartment, or even whether I had a stove or an oven—I needed a dishwasher god damn it!

My parents and a lot of my friends told me I was being silly. Washing dishes doesn't take that long, they said, and dishwashers take up a lot of space you'll want to have in a tiny kitchen.

Every day when I use my dishwasher, I'm glad I didn't listen to them. I do have exceedingly little space in my kitchen, but I don't mind, as long as I don't have to wash dishes.

My point here is, there's a lot of ways to cut down on mundane tasks, and it's really worth prioritizing that effort over other concerns.

Of course the future 80 year you would love it if you made every effort to make his life better, but the current you may value comfort more than going on terrifying adventures that make for amusing reminiscing if you survive them.

By 80, I should be so satisfied in my cynicism, I should not regret not having done anything in particular.

I also find it quite relaxing, perhaps even therapeutic

You can learn to love what you do, no matter the task. You can foster love and appreciation with anything.

Learn first to love what you do, no matter the task.

Ha yes, how will you find anything if you already have everything figured out?