Thanks for commenting and you make an excellent point. In fact I wrote a little piece awhile ago about how one can overcome distractions and in it I describe there are essentially two motivating factors: one is pleasure and the other is pain.
The same analogy can be used here. In order to accomplish something important to you (say your startup), you can either increase the pleasure or satisfaction you get when you achieve it, and/or increase the pain associated with failure.
So I take your point about focusing on the negative, but I never claim that "the only motivation that works is negative". In fact I believe both positive/negative and pleasure/pain play important roles as motivators.
Having said all that, don't underestimate the power of the fear of failure/pain/punishment, as it is a major component of the human condition. I disagree that only "mediocre" things can be created out of fear and punishment for failure.
In fact, experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that a "big unstoppable desire to build things" is a terrible thing to build a sustainable business on. Sure, it's great to kick start things, but building a business is 99% hard work. Can you truly build a business on sheer desire alone? What if that desire went away? Ask yourself that question the next time you are up at 3am trying to fix an obscure bug in someone else's code.
Thanks for the great comment! I would love to hear what everyone else thinks also given the diverse background of people here on HN.
The problem is that when you increase the pain, it also limits your possibilities. I do believe in building a business on desire alone and I believe that all great businesses were built this way.
Agreed to a certain extent. Yes, blindly increasing the pain will limit your possibilities, but appropriate application of it is a good move.
If you're in the planning phase or design phase, you don't want to needlessly time box it and/or punish yourself for failing to meet a deadline, because it will limit what you come up with.
However if you're in the building phase, say all the broad stroke type of decisions have been made and the main task is plain old coding / grunt work, you can use the pain to motivate you from distractions and procrastination.
Thanks for commenting and you make an excellent point. In fact I wrote a little piece awhile ago about how one can overcome distractions and in it I describe there are essentially two motivating factors: one is pleasure and the other is pain.
http://www.davecheong.com/2006/09/13/how-to-overcome-distrac...
The same analogy can be used here. In order to accomplish something important to you (say your startup), you can either increase the pleasure or satisfaction you get when you achieve it, and/or increase the pain associated with failure.
So I take your point about focusing on the negative, but I never claim that "the only motivation that works is negative". In fact I believe both positive/negative and pleasure/pain play important roles as motivators.
Having said all that, don't underestimate the power of the fear of failure/pain/punishment, as it is a major component of the human condition. I disagree that only "mediocre" things can be created out of fear and punishment for failure.
In fact, experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that a "big unstoppable desire to build things" is a terrible thing to build a sustainable business on. Sure, it's great to kick start things, but building a business is 99% hard work. Can you truly build a business on sheer desire alone? What if that desire went away? Ask yourself that question the next time you are up at 3am trying to fix an obscure bug in someone else's code.
Thanks for the great comment! I would love to hear what everyone else thinks also given the diverse background of people here on HN.