What inspires me is fear. Fear that I'm stuck in a dead-end job that won't give me any options or marketable skills. That I won't be able to pay for my children's education, that I'll be a burden to them when I retire. And most of all, the fear that if I get hit by a bus today I leave them with nothing.
That drives me to work harder, keep improving my skills and stay on the lookout for projects that will make me valuable on the developer market and maybe bring in revenue.
Mine is driven by an eccentric fear of how the economy is changing and assumptions of what it will look like in 10 - 20 years, coupled with a pessimistic view of human nature (but not people, just the way non reflective people behave). I'm trying to financially secure my son's future.
I'm focussed on trying to make a successful startup. I think it really helped when my daughter (7 months old) was born, kind of pushed me to work away from my shitty day job.
My site will be ready in 1-2 months, if you're any good at UI/UX PM me and keep in touch, and maybe we could do a trade, you could have a look at my design, and I can teach you the marketing side - and, more importantly why I did things this way.
As much as I'd like to chalk my motivation up to ambition, I'm just as scared as you are. That's what keeps me working on products in my (limited) free time.
(1) Listening to lots of podcasts and audiobooks. Amazon's even offering a holiday discount on Audible subscriptions, so grab that while you can.
(2) Reading incessantly, both non-fiction and fiction. Let me emphasize the fiction. The scientists that brought us satellites were inspired by Asimov's fiction, and the same could work for you.
(3) Sitting and watching. Our friends and family (and total strangers) constantly put up with small annoyances and major blind-spots. Ask yourself: Why are they accepting these pains?
Oftentimes, they do so either because no one's engineered a fix, or because -- and this is often overlooked -- no one's found a way to sell them on an existing fix. If you could find a way to get programmers to consistently write unit tests first, for example, you'd have an engineering "miracle" on your hands.
(4) Make a habit of meditating and journaling. The first, so that you can notice all the inspiring ideas already floating around inside your head, and the second so that you capture those ideas.
I recommend pen and paper (or a stand-alone voice recorder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00COF74E4/) when doing both at once. That protects you from the "I'll only check Twitter for a minute" trap of using a phone or computer.
Agreed, but I do love that moment where I'm thinking, "This should do X" and then realize, "Hey, I can make something that does X!". Then months later, I wonder what the heck I was thinking...
I have never built anything when there is already something acceptable available. That's probably why I've never spent much time building low level stuff like platforms, utilities, and tools. People way smarter than me have that covered really well already.
But when a customer needs something and examining their options causes me to vomit, I am highly motivated. "I can do way better than that!"
I get emotionally inspired by Art or sometimes even just block colours.
However on a logical level my inspirations come from analogies between different domains. I have one of those minds that accidentally splices ideas together when I daydream so I read a lot to give myself material.
The paintbrush is applying the language of one topic onto another: this is an early stage, later you read these thoughts back and sometimes something clicks. It occasionally leads to ideas that have some game-theoretical economic value. Other times they remain poetic/fun.
The problem with inspiration is that it only leads you part of the way. Convincing yourself to forgo other interests to pursue them is a whole other thing. Additionally not all surface-level "good" ideas are economically viable today or (if they are) within my reach.
Practical ideas are a whole other deal. You need to empathise with your own and others pain. Personally I think it's often not worth creating these however unless they are partnered with ideas that can be executed to significantly alter the underlying economic reality.
I am interested in granular ideas and insights that can be used in the pursuit of better products. Not just the idea that "a product to do X should exist", but the ideas that would allow it to work well.
I would love to meet and discuss thoughts like these with others that live or work around Central London by the way?
My inspiration comes from the knowledge of my mortality, literally, not in a poetic romantic artsy way. If I am not going to give up on everything and die, then I will try my hardest in learning to live. There is nothing really that I can build that matters more than caring about my life. So, I just try to amass as much skill as I possibly can, pretty much all I do is study and try to develop skill and add more skill on top of existing skill, I relate almost everything to mathematics, computer science, logic, and code, aside from trusting a small subset of individuals with my physical presence. I hug my family and talk to my cat. That's my life. Sit at computer, code, food, sleep, exercise. Maybe it seems like I have no inspiration because there is no 'push' I need to do. I just 'do that' and 'that' is mostly, more or less, what I want my life to be. I could also say 'the world' is my inspiration but that's redundant, although much more humble, but it 'was' very hard getting my mind aligned into this particular habit sequence.
This is just in general. When I find particular projects to obsess over I have elevator speeches about them that could last decades. I get really really excited, super hyper, I like to explain why 'this tool' is the best thing in the world, and promptly forget my rant after I've finished it. I don't know 'why' I do it. I just 'want' this to be my life, because it's what I am passionate about, what clicks for me, what lights up my brain, what paints pretty pictures in my head, and what I love to think about, observe, learn about, and so on. Every explanation I could give for it in words doesn't do it justice.
I have to enable "ideas mode" and I when I do start looking at my day to day life with more critical and objective eyes. I run a software company too, so I'm not short of people throwing ideas at me!
Here's a couple of examples, one business focussed and one more personal.
Story one...
A few years ago one of my developers quit because I forgot their job review. Bad times followed as we were busy and replacing a good developer is not easy.
Once the dust had settled I looked for a web app to ensure this problem never occurred again. I couldn't find anything, and so my company built a HR app to simplify our HR processes and automate the heck out of them. A couple of years later www.staffsquared.com was born. So this was us building a tool to scratch our own itch, which is a common approach.
Story two...
My other half is obsessed about checking her bank account. She logs in twice a day to see what's happening and to ensure that her card(s) haven't been used. She's worried about identify theft. Thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that it'd be really cool to have a text message service that alerted my partner to any "strange" transactions. Some banks in the US provide this, but in the UK it's not a thing. I haven't had the chance to pursue this idea any further just yet.
So my approach is scratching a personal or professional itch. My co-founder and CTO at my software company takes an entirely different approach. He likes to build things because he gets a kick out of making cool technical shit work. I can't roll like that, I have to have an understanding of the problem and how my proposed solution will fix it. It needs to address a pain. I am technical, but I don't get a kick out of building things for the sake of building them to learn, experiment etc.
In a very general sense, the great systems of the past: Multics, ITS, the Lisp Machine, the Alto, UNIX(TM) and 2/4.x BSD, and early Windows NT. (Linux not so much.) Xen nowadays, perhaps. TeX, and let's add TCP/IP, Ethernet, and CHAOSnet. Public key cryptography and RSA. Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. The Whirlwind computer.
Hmmm, and of course the great languages, LISP, Scheme and Clojure nowadays, C, FORTRAN (each in their niches, of course). (C++ not at all, and I've sworn never to write another line of Perl after heavy use for more than half a decade. Hopefully the same with C++, but then there's LLVM....)
People who I only know through their books:
The great students of project success and failure: Fred Brooks, Gerald Weinberg, Richard Gabriel, Joel Spolsky, Ivar Jacobson, the Anti-Patterns crew.
The great explainers: Guy Steele, W. Richard Stevens, Harold Ableson (actually knew him, and we share first names :-) and Gerald Sussman, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrew Appel (compilers) and Richard Jones (GC), Paul Graham, Alan Kay, David Moon, some more Structured Programming types who's names may be less familiar: P. J. Plauger, Brian W. Kernighan for that (not the C book), and Edward Yourdon.
But to actually do something, it's to build something that's needed and has a shot at being enduring. From Perl scripts to manage my email, whatever a company needs to survive and thrive, to something open source.
I don't think any particular person inspired me in an overwhelming way, so much as the generally quiet competence of the programmers and system administrators I've worked with since 1977, the teachers and professors who knew their subjects, how to teach them well, and respected sincere students like myself, salesmen who could sell, small businessmen who could keep their companies afloat, etc. Solid competence with or without flair is highly underrated.
Freedom for me/security for the people close to me, I guess. I was one of the lucky few who made a lot off Bitcoin, and paid off my dad's mortgage with the profits. I think I work harder now than if his house had ended up being foreclosed, as now I realize what an outlier that opportunity was.
It's becoming increasingly hard to find inspiration for the things that conflict with my personal ambitions(school, getting an internship at a megacorp etc), I regret to admit. As I'm typing this I'm sitting in my last networking lecture of the semester, and it's difficult to find inspiration to pay attention to this to say the least ha. If I'm working on a freelance project I actually care about, I will work at 100% for days at a time without any need for external contributing factors. I'd be content at a startup living out of my car working 16 hours a day coding/moving boxes/anything for peanuts(I mean as long as everyone else was doing the same of course), but I want my parents and other immediate family to be financially secure.
I guess it's hard to find inspiration until I'm willing to sacrifice to attain whatever goal I have in mind. I first went the business route, wanted to become a quant and wore suits with the rest of 'em. I then realized that if I really wanted something, I wouldn't have to watch corny youtube videos to motivate me to go do it.
Inspiration comes in fits and spurts. The main cause of that is because ideas happen when different hunches or problems I have meet interesting opportunities or enabling circumstances. When that happens I get an idea and I work on it.
I find ways to maximize my exposure to new ideas. I read novels, poetry, and plays. I read humanities-focused introductions to new areas of maths that I haven't yet explored or histories on the maths-related discoveries that I had no previous exposure to. I then dig in deeper to subject matter that I find interesting or am curious about... or are fundamental. I play quite a lot and make one-off programs that have no function or purpose; often inspired by phenomenon I've read about. I keep journals of my explorations so that I can recount the threads that led me to particular ways of thinking and see where I am missing out: I then seek out the gaps. I meet new people in different fields and have no shame interrogating them about their ideas, passions, and inspirations. Sometimes you just need to stand on a desk.
Update: I have the advantage, now, that most of the CS fundamentals have been burned into my brain and I have a lot of experience writing software... it's almost reflexive now.
All of mine successful projects was created while learning new thing. I did learn Portuguese and can't find flashcards tool that I like, so I create mine, did learn to play piano and needed some way to practice sheet reading skill, so I created tool for that.
I am also wine maker and in need of one analytical tool and found out that it costs 30k, amount I can't afford (or even justify for business my size) so I found a way to create same tool that will costs just 3k.
First category is kind of simple: I do need it and the app is simple enough I can do it in few evenings so I just do it. The second category is something I really need and will be really happy if somebody else created it and because there is nothing like that on the market I have to do it by myself (and then sell it to other winemakers who I am sure need it as well).
The problem for me is the middle ground: something I found quite interesting (say nicely formatted tabs app with timing, sounds, fretboards...) and might use it from time to time. But the novelty wears off soon and I am not desperate to have it in my life. Still these kinds of projects need sustainable effort to make it work so I just keep working less and less on it and then quit.
I jump from topic to topic depending on what I'm currently interested in, then I think of a way to incorporate coding, then I put in some effort to get something working and as it progresses I become less and less interested.
I suspect burnout. Let me know if you have any ideas.
My ideas stem from conversations with friends. We'll either have chats that start with "I've been struggling with X" or "Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do Y" because those are the things we know. Occasionally we've tried to think of problems that other people will have, but without any (direct or recounted first-hand) experience of a problem working out a solution is exceptionally hard.
My inspiration for all of my work is a fear that no one else is going to look at the things I'm looking at, think about the things I'm thinking about or discover the answers I'm trying to find. This is less ego-maniacal than it sounds (I think), there just aren't many people pursuing my particular passion, so I genuinely feel like I need to do everything with it I possibly can before I die.
1. Real world issues that I personally encountered: hard to find a flat to rent? → build a zen process around this individualistic race, disappointed with your city lifestyle? → build the city of tomorrow, difficulty to learn how to sing b/c you have a visual memory? → build an app to visualize your voice, etc.
2. Whatever gets me in a state of free association:
- Semi-randomly browsing HN/wikipedia/the-web while learning new concepts got me a fair number of new ideas.
- Running or any physical activity (preferably outdoors) that occupies my body while not requiring a lot of thinking so that my mind is free to wander.
Now those are only ideas in my head. Right now I obviously can't launch three businesses and learn many hobbies while rebuilding my city, wish I could, I'm already committed to other things. So I write them down for later when I'll be asking myself "what's next?" otherwise I can't focus on the task at hand.
I normally end up building things that are useful to me. Storytella[0] was started for a Nanowrimo one year. I wanted something which would allow me to write at home or at work without having to worry about losing anything or having to keep files in sync. It also needed to make it really easy to change character or place names because I'm often indecisive about these things.
Sunstone[1] was built (and still needs a lot of love) because I'm a role-player and I often need to make maps. There are plenty of cartography tools available but they all seemed mediocre or required a Java install.
Ideas come from somewhere, not sure from where it is. I do believe that everything you read, watch or listen is somehow "stored" and influences how you think and the ideas you have. Once I have an idea, I try to share it with friends and/or colleagues to see if they approach the problem/idea as I did and how differently they look at it. I usually write it down so that I can go back months later and think about it again. Sometimes they seem ridiculous, other times they seem just different.
Keep reading, watching, listening and sharing your knowledge and ideas. Keep your eyes and your mind open and try to understand how other people think and how they see the world (traveling and getting to know different cultures might help a lot on that).
A bunch of Chamath Palihapititya interviews. There are other people who I'm sure I would take inspiration from if I knew everyone, but it's easy for now to just point at someone with a lot of money who I feel is very focused on real value creation in philosophy and wants more investment opportunities that fit that philosophy.
I pretty well believed that the world would become meritocratic. At 25, things looked very non-meritocratic. Check boxes, hang your hat on superficial measures of success, stop thinking because you'll be wrong because you never took enough risks to learn to get anything difficult right.
I feel like there's this built-in notion among people who get their first taste of greed and fall victim to success bias where they start thinking that the highest aspiration in life is to build Comcast, be the cybernetic CEO for 400 years, outlive all the rest of the shareholders, and by virtue of becoming the entrenched player with all the cards stacked in their favor, have all the money on Earth at some point. If we can just hold onto our rent-seeking empire...
Meanwhile nothing interesting happens whatsoever.
As a simultaneous complete rejection of this nightmarish aspiration and an attempt to live as close as possible to the centers of real value creation, I find it very easy to stay devoted to a technology career with some entrepreneur splashed in.
If your highest aspiration is to own something and sit back comfortably as a good citizen, you should first fight for a strong social safety net, perhaps even guaranteed income, and then give away all your excess to people who will do things with it that add real entertainment to your life by building cool things that weren't possible with people like you clogging up the pipes.
I find entrepreneurship to be the one career where I can wake up, be at one with dissatisfaction or ambition because I feel very close to direct pathways of action instead of acceptance or just ranting on social media somewhere. Even ranting becomes an exercise in synthesizing knowledge together into a vision of a better solution. You can't lose.
Ah, I just published a blog today somewhat related to this. But it's more about Startups that inspire me, personally.
It goes like this:
-
There are various aspects of a startup that can inspire us. Be it; good team, good culture, great product with exponential growth. But one thing that personally inspires me is the self-sustaining business model of a startup to create success."
The darkness and the silence. I have to turn everything off and just sit with my eyes closed. Well, going for a walk helps, too. Or laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling. Being anywhere near anything that involves a computer is pretty much a no-go.
Sometimes, I break out a quill pen and an ink well and I "think out loud" on paper. Something about how slow the writing process is when you have to refill my pen after every sentence gives me space to think. Typing just doesn't work the same.
I do Morning Pages[0], and then the inspiration comes automatically. I've more than plenty information sources shouting at me to be inspired by, but I need a clear head to be able to turn it into concrete ideas. I find that the clearer my head, the more creative I get. So Morning Pages.
Jimmy DiResta. You can laugh as it's not exactly related to CS but you can't help yourself when you watch him. You wanna build stuff, it doesn't matter what. He really makes you want to just build stuff... to solve a real problem... with the right tools for the job... the way you know how... and be proud of building it.
For me, it's mostly when I need something and I don't find a good solution. That's why I started hashtagify.me - I needed to find good hashtags to publicize a different website I had created about mortgages (that too, because I couldn't find a good one) and didn't find any good solution...
Depends on the project. Either that it has the potential to make money, or to help/inspire people (my blog), or it allows me to learn a particular skill (doing something lately to learn Backbone and other JS technologies), or it's just plain fun for me (game development).
I draw off of Statisfy questions. The data I get from this new web app has been really helpful. For example, this poll about Uber's market worth really intrigued me..http://www.statisfy.co/q/2082
Watching people bungle through life and then go all emo Skywalker. "I can't, it's too hard."
Try or try not, etc. I want to be the person that makes people feel that anyone can do anything in their life. I'm a blundering idiot. If I can do it, you can too.
>"Try or try not, etc. "
You mean: "Do or do not; there is no try".
You got a Trekkie to fix your Star Wars quote!
Though I definitely agree with the sentiment of what you were trying to say. I don't find myself any less of an idiot than most people around me. It's just that I sat down, self-inspected, and made the necessary improvements. I guess some would say that that sort of thing ultimately does make you less of an "idiot" than others, in that 'introspection' is the thing that separates the two.
The fact that my industry is full of a bunch of idiots who execute at 25% efficiency. They rely on their first-mover advantages and allow me to gain huge market share. I have to act quickly before they figure it out.
Creating something that has never been created before. Combining the latest technologies. Open sourcing it so the world can contribute. All outside of the corporate realm. So that all beings may be happy and free.
The student loan debt crisis we are dealing with as a country. It's just starting. Figure we are in the 3rd inning. Want to figure out how to dampen the blow it will have on middle class entrepreneurs.
A prominent author Steven Johnson tries to answer this question in his 2010 book: 'Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation'... Interesting read!
Fresh out of Brigham Young University, a man named Stephen Hales was having trouble figuring out a logo for his design agency, Stephen Hales Creative. He had spent weeks working on concepts for the logo but nothing felt right, until one day he was getting into his car when he accidentally spilled a drink of coffee or something similar. When he looked at the ground where the beverage had splashed, he saw what appeared to be the silhouette of a bearded man clutching at his scalp, a representation of the design process: both frustrating and enlightening. He used the spilled drink as inspiration for what would become — and is still, today — the company logo.
Anything can be inspiration, depending on the lens you have on when you encounter it.
Research has shown that even subtle things we don't consciously acknowledge have an impact on our ability to solve problems or generate ideas (i.e. to "inspire" us). The trouble is that, because we aren't always consciously aware of what is inspiring us, we credit creative "sparks" to current conditions and stimulus, even if what really sparked that solution or idea in your mind was really inspired by a billboard you passed on the freeway four days ago or a book you read when you were younger.
As a result, we waste quite a bit of time "seeking" inspiration. We feel like understanding where others gets their inspiration will somehow magically help us to find it ourselves more often. But that's not always the case.
More often than not, the best way to be inspired is to bury yourself in the problem or task you're working on.
To quote smashLAB co-founder Eric Karjaluoto:
"The problem with inspiration is that it’s random, which leads you to focus your hope on outside influences you can’t rely on...These stimuli aren’t under your control, available on tap, or always relevant to the work at hand. Thinking you can find ideas elsewhere leaves you flipping through magazines and browsing the web, hoping you’ll stumble on a magic cure."
Of course asking what inspires others can be enlightening and entertaining. I'm not going to bash any of that outright because that's a battle already won (just look at the thousands of books that sell each year around how to "find" inspiration).
Perhaps I'll leave you with another quote from Merlin Mann:
"Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging."
That drives me to work harder, keep improving my skills and stay on the lookout for projects that will make me valuable on the developer market and maybe bring in revenue.