
Ask HN: How do I get my motivation back? - throwaway_emb
I have always been fascinated with computers. I am in my mid-twenties and I figured out how the hardware worked with no English and no internet, and that was almost 20 years ago.<p>Up until a few years ago, I used to code. PHP, MySQL, HTML, and C# were what I was into. Then suddenly, something happened and I lost interest. Started gaming, Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. Coding became what I did after playing games.<p>During this time, I got a BA in Linguistics but afterwards, I wanted a degree in computing so I enrolled in an MSc in CS. Completed with Merit, now I don&#x27;t know what to do.<p>I am looking for graduate schemes and jobs. I am alone at home, with all the time in the world, but instead I watch movies and TV shows. I feel horrible doing so.<p>I have also been battling depression and am on two different medications. Friends call me lazy, but I just don&#x27;t have the motivation for it. I LOVE computers and there is nothing more interesting to me than computers.<p>I want to learn more, but I don&#x27;t know how. I come here and see you guys comment on threads, try to understand. But it intimidates me.<p>For example, I want to learn Node and Angular. There are tons of stuff available online that I can learn from but I am comparing myself to professionals and then lose motivation. I know C, I know Linux, I know some Java, so I am capable, but I lack motivation.<p>What to do? How do I read through and build and read more and expand and so on?
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nostrademons
Your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Listen to it, carefully.
Nobody on the Internet can tell you what it's saying.

Here are a couple possibilities, though, both based on personal experience:

1\. You don't actually want to code, but you have a long, generally enjoyable
history with it. It's hard to give up something that has worked well for us in
the past, even if it's not working well now. Our actual self changes much
quicker than our self-image does, particularly in the teens and 20s.

2\. You do want to code, but you are afraid of not measuring up to some
external standard. In this case - forget the external standard. Other people's
ideas of fame & approval don't matter, only your own.

It's pretty common in our 20s to re-evaluate all the stuff we thought we liked
& were good at, but really just fell into because that's what we did when we
were kids and we were too afraid to give it up. I would get up off the couch
and turn off the games, TVs and movies - but don't force yourself to code if
it's not really what you want to be doing. Instead, let yourself be drawn to
whatever actually interests you. Maybe it's programming, but it could be any
number of other things instead. Writing, socializing, linguistics, business,
science, etc. The world is a broad place.

~~~
throwaway_emb
I followed my subconscious and pursued CS without formal education on the
subject, and I did well! I know it's not much but now I have a master's
degree! Some of the courses I did better than the ones who had a BSc in CS. I
wouldn't have invested so much time and money if I wasn't interested.

For example; now I'm kind of curious about chemistry. I want to learn more
about it, but I can't study forever, I need a job.

I DO want to code. I want to code so well that one day maybe I want to
contribute to the Linux kernel! But I want to ask you: HOW do you go on about
doing that? The degree I have doesn't mean much. I think I might learn more
from books than I did at the university, actually.

~~~
nostrademons
If you want to contribute to the Linux kernel, you may want to start here:

[http://kernelnewbies.org/](http://kernelnewbies.org/)

(Found via Google search on [linux kernel development].)

Start with a small project, maybe just learning how to compile and install
your own custom kernel. Then go look for bugs that other people would like
fixed but don't have time to fix, and see if you can fix them. There're a
bunch of guidelines (that I'm not too familiar with...I don't personally do
kernel hacking) to getting your patch accepted, but I think there's pretty
substantive mentoring available for new developers. Good luck.

------
read
You are afraid. It's a good sign.

You are afraid of looking bad: of creating things with computers that you'll
then make public, with your name on them. Or that these computers, that you
LOVE (your words), might turn out hard to program, with the looming prospect
you then won't have what you love. If you weren't, you might have gotten a BA
in computers first. After the expectation of getting a college degree went
away, then you went and did what you actually liked.

And that's ok.

Because it's the things that frighten us the most that we tend to have to do
next. You should be happy about this. There are people, lots of people if not
the majority, who don't even attempt during a lifetime to do what they
subconsciously want to and you managed to break through it.

The fear of creating never fully goes away.

 _Then suddenly, something happened and I lost interest._

Mmm... I'd love to go deeper into this "something that happened". But either
way it's ok.

Now what to do about it. The typical things like finding supportive people,
starting secret projects, or writing programs for yourself are unlikely to be
enough. The bigger issue is you have to find a way to counteract resistance.
You are sabotaging yourself. The bigger the prospect of humiliation, the
bigger the resistance you'll put up.

That's why it's ok. Big creations are _terrifying_. You can't see them
directly in the eye. You have to approach them indirectly. You have to
practically trick yourself into working on big things, and computers are big
things for you. You need to allow yourself to make mistakes [1]. To screw up
(everybody does). To write programs that aren't great in the beginning
(nobody's are). Aim small, have no expectations (push them away) and just
play.

I'd love to be user #1 for something you build.

[1] trivia: research shows that when people feel free to make mistakes they
end up making fewer mistakes.

------
valarauca1
In short you have to realize WoW is a drug. Now I say this as an ex-player,
who had a very long complicated battle with depression and parental abuse. WoW
makes it easy to escape and hide into a world where its very easy to get
rewarded for what feels like fun, but is actually hours of your life.

The game rewards you like rewarding a dog to shit outside, or do funny tricks.
The rewards become spaced further out over time conditioning you to work
harder for the same reward. Its very easy to stay motivated when a green bar
shows you how far you are from the next reward. Its just as easy to stay
motivated as you slam your face into Heroic Ragnaros for the 246th time
straight, because we're getting him to P4 and well its just RNG at that point
if we keep it up because its just a matter of keeping focused. Depression is
bad. I've been there and for well over 6 years I attempted to hide in another
world to avoid it.

What you have to do is accept that slow action is still action. When ever I
catch myself sliding back into older/bad habits I find its often good to
mediate on the why you are doing that. A quote I've really fallen in love with
is:

"One can be deceived by three types of laziness: of indolence, which is the
wish to procrastinate; the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your
capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or
putting great effort into non-virtue." \- the Dalai Lama.

Medication and Therapy can be very useful.

------
wrd
My assessment of this is that you have motivation in the sense of interest but
that you're afraid. Not entirely sure of what, but mostly it sounds like
social consequences of being/feeling inferior. I can empathize -- that's a
real fear. Fortunately, it's not something that's going to kill you in a
physical sense so you can train yourself to work around it. It sounds like
right now you're running low on courage. The key word in your question is
"depression," and it sounds like everything else you've said points to
clinical depression of some kind. It seems like there are things that you want
to do but right now you're keeping yourself down out of a set of abstract
fears that are difficult to verbalize. I don't know that this works for
everyone, but I think one way to wiggle yourself out of this hole you're in is
to deliberately do things that scare you. Cultivate courage. Teach yourself to
be strong and resilient. Learn to keep pushing forward no matter what. Don't
give in.

To be concrete: We want to develop courage as a skill, so we need to practice
it. When faced with two decisions, pick the one that requires more courage,
even if it doesn't make as much sense. When you feel like you can't keep up or
that you're failing at a task, quietly tell yourself, "No, I'm not going to
stop. Even though it doesn't feel good I am going to keep doing this to make
myself more courageous." Just do whatever you can to exercise that courage
muscle. You can start small and work your way up. If you keep it up you'll
soon find yourself able to be courageous in situations where you couldn't
before. But it all depends on practice. So be courageous, even in small ways,
and work from there. Once you have courage, depression--and life--become
easier to tackle.

------
cLeEOGPw
Fuck the motivation. Motivation is a lazy man's approach. It takes no effort.
You have to force yourself. You have to learn to force yourself. Even if you
get motivation, it is temporary. Real success comes from discipline and
continuous effort. Drop the idea that you need motivation - just force
yourself to learn Node right now. There's no easy or lazy way to do it - you
have to win over yourself.

Reason for this is that frontal cortex - part of brain responsible for your
conscious actions - only finishes developing in mid 20s. You only recently
finished that stage. Motivation is used in teen years, when more primitive
parts of brain dominate frontal cortex. Now it's time to take matters into
your own hands.

After time goes on, it get's easier and easier, and motivation comes as a
result of forcing yourself to do it.

------
rifung
Hi, I was in a similar situation to you so I'd like to try and help a little
bit.

First of all, you should try to talk to a therapist. I think that your
reaching out here is a great idea, but a therapist will likely be much more
effective long term.

As for your lack of motivation, that is literally a symptom of depression. I
remember when I was in college I went to my professor and he told me that if I
didn't have motivation then I probably should switch majors. Pretty awful
advice.

What's worked for me in the past when I had no motivation was to start easy.
So, say tomorrow you apply to one job. If you tell other people that you are
going to do this, it's even better because you will be less likely to back
down.

After you apply to one, the next day you apply to two, and so on. The reason
this works is that usually you'll feel good after applying and then the next
time you'll use that as motivation to do it again. Also because if all you
have to do is just apply to one company, well that's pretty easy so hopefully
you can at least motivate yourself to do that.

Finally, if you truly love something then you don't need to compare yourself
to anyone else, because it doesn't matter. You shouldn't like something just
because you are good at it, you like it because you find it interesting. Also,
the reality is that if you want to be good at anything you're going to have to
go through the part when you suck at it. It's one of the main things that
separate people who excel from those who don't make anything of themselves.

------
lordbusiness
At the risk of being overly sentimental or mushy, I feel compelled to say that
the responses in this thread represent exactly what brought me to the tech /
hacker community back in the early '90s.

Thank you to the original poster for expressing emotions we can all relate to,
and thank you to each and every motivational comment from those who have
rallied around someone in need.

There is wisdom here for all of us.

I'm privileged to be part of this community.

------
lucio
Maybe you need to find a real-world problem _to solve_ using code, instead of
learning for the sake of learning. Maybe if you get a job? maybe an
internship? or you can volunteer on a charitable organization to make/enhance
their web site?

~~~
throwaway_emb
Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. During my dissertation, I _had_ to write
code and I enjoyed it. And now I want to learn more, but not sure where I'd
start.

The other problem is that I couldn't approach a charitable organisation and
say "hey, I suck at coding and know almost nothing but I'd like to do your
website". I lack self-confidence. Not sure how I build that up?

~~~
xaa
I work for a nonprofit medical research foundation in a lab that does
bioinformatics, including some research on text mining information from
biomedical journal articles, which might relate to your interest in
linguistics.

If you're simply looking to learn, we could certainly use a volunteer,
although I don't make hiring decisions for paid positions. It is possible but
would be hard without practical experience. There is also a possibility to
become a graduate student, although this is a health sciences center so the
PhDs are in things like biochemistry, cell biology, etc, even though our lab's
research is very computational.

My e-mail in base64 is: Z2lsZXNjQG9tcmYub3Jn

You can translate easily with:
[https://www.base64decode.org/](https://www.base64decode.org/) or your
preferred method.

EDIT: Just to add a little more detail about the kinds of work and
technologies. Broadly speaking, we try to mine information out of large
biology-related datasets, including text and more numeric kinds of data, using
machine learning technologies. Sometimes we put a web-based front end on
things, but it is not our primary focus. So if you are more interested in web
dev, there is a need for it, or if you'd rather get more into what is now
called "data science", there is a lot of that as well. We primarily use Linux,
Python, and some bash scripting.

------
lazyjones
You should try different things. Some people will find this blasphemous, but
Node and Angular are a fad and possibly a nice-to-have skill, but actually not
really extremely interesting to the point that not being motivated to learn
that stuff can be considered extraordinary. I'm not motivated either, instead
I'm dabbling around with robotics for the first time (got myself a Wild
Thumper and a Raspberry Pi to control it...) and am doing more work around the
house now. So many things to try and explore, find what suits you best and
motivates you! Perhaps it's climbing, flying RC drones?

------
topkai22
Motivation is a funny thing. I have often felt motivated and excited to do
something only to find that when I sit down to do it I just stare at my hands
for a bit and then walk away. I've been getting better at finishing things
lately, it is tough. Here is what's helped me 1.) Deadlines. This is one of
the great things about having a job- you have to produce something by date X
or there will be consequences for you and your team, which brings me to 2.)
Teamwork. Not wanting to disappoint others is a huge motivator. I work far
harder when I think someone is counting on me to finish something then I do on
my own. Join a hackathon team (preferably in person) and agree to produce a
component. You won't sleep till its done. 3.) Permission to fail. From
yourself. Especially about the small stuff. 4/5 side projects I start ( and
mean the ones where I get past staring at my hands) end up being terrible
ideas or far to hard to implement. But 1/5 have been great, and totally worth
everything else. It took me a long time to stop being embarrassed about the
failures of my side projects, but once I realized that starting was a heck of
a lot further then most everyone else got, I felt a whole lot better about my
mistakes and found it much easier to start new ones 4.) Success. Yes there is
a chicken and the egg problem here, but once you have success at something
you'll probably find yourself continuing to do it. Note- this is how WoW gets
you, feeding you lots of little successes at a variety fairly rapid rate. 5.)
Cutting out the crap- I had to unplug my Xbox in college and put it in
storage. It sounds like you need to do something similar- take steps to cut
the electronic media down to zero. Uninstall the games, disconnect the cable,
etc. It's really not that severe ( you can always hook them back up) but you
do have to think about it before committing the time. Also, exercise if you
aren't, because exercise is surprisingly good at mood and effective function
improvement.

I'd recommend taking a job, even a mediocre corporate one, if you can. The
need to forces you to learn things, even if it's not what you expected or
would have picked on your own. Failing that, other users have suggested great
volunteer ideas. I recommend going to your local hackerspace or coworking
space if you have one. Being around other people doing stuff is hugely
motivating.

------
taternuts
I think your depression is probably your #1 deterrent here, and unfortunately
I think you are headed into a destructive cycle by feeding into your
depression by not accomplishing anything. I don't really have much of a
suggestion to break out, because that's not really something someone on the
internet can tell you - but I do wish you luck. Start small maybe, with
something related to WoW or another game that is still able to grab your
attention.

------
sova
Hello friend,

Motivation is not a singular entity that you can hold like a marble, it's more
like a flame. Think well on people in your life who are not doing what they
love when they could be. Simply by helping others, even in a small way,
uncover their deepest motivations, your own shall take root🌲

------
gpfault
Why do you need to compare yourself with someone else? You enjoy it, right? do
it because it's fun. Don't worry :)

~~~
throwaway_emb
I compare myself because I want to see progress. If I can do 1% of what some
of the guys here can do, then I am onto something, or at least that's what I'd
like to think!

~~~
crpatino
This is totally the wrong way to think about it.

When you see a role model you see the finished product, but not all the hard
work involved nor those embarrassing mistakes that turned in valuable lessons.

Progress is a fiction. And self actualization is non-linear. If you see what
you have done in one year and declare that it is less than 1%, you will think
it's going to take more than 100 years and quit. Then you will fail to realize
the 5% hike that was waiting for you 6 months down the road.

p.s. And cold quit the WoW thing. It is crack for the soul. (I had to scratch
my Diablo II CDs and avoid any other game for 2-3 years. I just could not have
helped it otherwise... so, been there)

------
andrewhillman
Exercise/ yoga can be really helpful. You wont realize right away but it will
get you going again.

