Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts (2019)

dvassallo.medium.com

52 points_trackno531 comments

> I’m going all in on independence, and I’m going to try to make a living with my own bare hands starting from nothing.

This sounds pretty wild, given $511K/y last year.

I don't want to sound bitter about it, but I am a sole provider for a family of 5, and I guess I could _retire_ after two years of these earnings.

Yeah there's some real mental gymnastics here; "Starting from nothing..." "...The goal is to provide for my family before I run out of savings"

I’d take it to mean starting a project from scratch. Obviously he’s not “starting from nothing” like he was kicked out of an orphanage.

> I don't want to sound bitter about it, but I am a sole provider for a family of 5, and I guess I could _retire_ after two years of these earnings.

To be clear: You really couldn't. After tax that's probably more like, what, 300k depending on where you live. Family of five, you could save, what, 250k optimistically? Which means 500k in two years. And you cannot retire on 500k.

But, say, 10 years? That's doable depending on your expected income in retirement. Which is, admittedly, still pretty damn good...

> And you cannot retire on 500k.

Not everyone lives in US, and I would not be starting from scratch, unlike what author suggests :)

500k for lets say 50 years means 10k per year (let's say you get out inflation by investing). That gets you pretty far in a lot of places.

If your intrinsic motivation is for your family, you might be able to pull it off. It's a recipe for burnout, but it can be doable. Assuming that the work itself is something you're not intrinsically motivated for.

You'd also be sacrificing a lot with time with your family. Your marriage will get tested. You'll miss out on some things with your kids growing up. If the stress is severe enough that it changes how you would habitually relate to your family (getting crankier, for example), that is the kind of dad you will be remembered by your kids. The question is if on your deathbed, looking back at how it all played out, that the sacrifice was worth it.

I don't think there is a universally right or wrong choice in this. The emotional toll of not having enough to support your family and being in a soul-sucking job is worse.

Two years of a senior job in Amazon that isn't motivating enough is a recipe for burnout? Come on.

That depends on the person, and that’s why it is intrinsic, not extrinsic motivation.

(2019). If you're wondering what happened next, he bootstrapped a business selling PDFs and videos and claims to be have made over $200k off it in 2021.

https://dvassallo.medium.com/from-employee-to-bootstrapper-9...

Is there reason to doubt his "claim"?

His class costs $375.

It seems reasonable that he has 600 sales in a year.

no but making money by telling people how to make money is pretty friggin lame. i wouldn't want to take a course by someone who didn't make money via some other means

Ah the old rise & grind trick of teaching other people to have grindset.

I went to his Twitter/website and the course is well marketed. But it's disqualifying to me that he's not building something else.

He's also part-time head of product (I think) at GumRoad.

Interesting - it's not on his LinkedIn and according to Twitter he no longer works there. But seems he was helping them on a contract basis for a bit.

Amazingly little perspective some of these guys have. Appears to have been his first job and he's 8 years in, so we're looking at what? A roughly 30 year-old guy who has worked at all of one employer and he's sitting here talking as if he's an expert on what motivates humans across a lifetime.

Feel free to share your experience and beliefs, but please don't act like this is science and you're some kind of authority. You have no idea if you'll even still agree with yourself in another decade. I know for damn sure I no longer believe life has the same purpose for me I thought it did when I was 30.

> Feel free to share your experience and beliefs, but please don't act like this is science and you're some kind of authority.

I’d suspect there’s a correlation between this behavior and quick IC SWE promotion at big companies.

We travel around our world 4 times: the first, to fall in love; the second, to teach people what we now know; the third, to apologize for being so arrogant; and the fourth time, to say goodbye.

Other than the fact that it is insanely self-indulgent to brag about leaving all this money behind, but it’s not even true. I left my job to work on my own project/startup for a while and the shine certainly wears off after a while.

At first you choose something, after a while you have something. That is the time to choose something again.

Did the shine wear off once your personal project became actual work? I want to quit and work on my personal stuff so badly, but I think I'll get to the point that I won't see a reason why I stopped getting money for doing the same thing.

It was actual work from the start. I just underestimated how much work.

It was quite edifying though.

This is a false idea that we have any idea what motivation actually lasts. As the saying goes, "change is the only constant."

Certainly intrinsic motivation is the more likely to last compared to extrinsic. But, I think there is a lot of selection bias when we choose to claim which is which.

And there is a lot of ignoring what having the ability to take a risk has. Stability and safety can help most anything last.

I think this depends a lot on how you are wired. Not everyone thinks of their job as their identity (some certainly do). Some people would just do the job for the lots of money/security and do something more meaningful in their spare time.

Money motivates me intrinsically. Feel free to send me whatever monies you have that don't have that affect on you.

You fool! Not starving or freezing is an extrinsic motivator!

Exactly, I despise these articles. I will never believe they are anything other than propaganda to trick people to want less money from work.

Oh so this guy is starting a company. Is there any chance that perhaps he cannot afford to pay people $500k like he was making. Now I guess he has some intrinsic motivation to promote lower pay so he can hire people to work for him cheap.

I'm sure some subset of people are intrinsically motivated by money as a high score. I'm extrinsically motivated by money. That's nice too.

Please update the post title to add “(2019)”.

Done :)

Thanks!

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