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Loss of motivation is mainly due to not being able to progress significantly in the full and working implementation of our projects to build something exceptional within our achievements.

That lack of progress is in turn due to lack of educative resources. This can only be solved both by better and more practical investigation techniques (to effectively dig and find all the tricks we could need to implement a program from others' code and tutorials/documentation) as well as actually making more documentation with fully-runnable examples available.

I'm not convinced that there is merit in giving too many detailed examples of runnable code, particularly when it comes to OS development. This can lead, as we see all too often on these forums, to people cut-and-pasting code without understanding it. It also provides strictures as to the "right" way of doing things, leading to a lack of creativity. Far more useful is a clear explanation, with links to the definitive reference manuals, leaving people to put the theory into practice by themselves.

Obviously this is more time consuming (in the short term) than just pasting workable code but it leads to a much deeper understanding and more original solutions. It also enhances the skill of reading technical documentation which will be very useful when presented with new hardware. The joy of finally producing working code far exceeds that of copying someone else's work. Not that I am championing the concept of reinventing the wheel every time; pre-written libraries of code obviously have their uses, but not as a teaching resource.

I don't quit anything, guys. (Developing C++ Compiler in background, A Direct3D game which currently looks like Doom, etc.)
Althrough korean cogently can't quit anything, even more than me.

Lukand wrote:I don't quit anything, guys. (Developing C++ Compiler in background, A Direct3D game which currently looks like Doom, etc.)
Althrough and how to get rid of gyno korean cogently can't quit anything, even more than me.

I wish I were like you. But I get distracted easily. When the priority in the life is making both ends meet, it is tough to concentrate on learning.

Sometimes I'll get distracted by something interesting (ooh look, Plan 9), but I'll often come back the next day.

Usually my reason for stopping, is that I'll make some progress, then get depressed again, then get back.
Eventually, I'll come back to OS development because OSs drive me crazy, so I'll come back and end up rewriting everything from scratch because I have issues.

On that subject, and forwarding good advice from my therapist (yes, I've been to that black hole myself):

A hobby should always be a CAN do, not a TO do. Have a good hard look at what each of your hobbies is giving you, and be ready to drop hobbies that drain your energy instead of recharging it.

There are always periods where even the best hobby can turn into a chore -- I am in that position right now, having started a rather unproductive tangential work that I am nevertheless reluctant to drop because I've already sunk so much work into it and am 80% done -- but the bottom line must be positive. Not "in ten years when this made me famous" positive, but "in foreseeable future" positive.

I dropped two hobbies altogether and picked up two others which I had abandoned years ago. Because if you already feel depressed, putting energy into activities that don't give back net satisfaction isn't worth it, and damaging to you as a person.

Speaking of motivation,

Did any of you notice a pattern when it comes to motivation-failure correlation?

I remember being super unmotivated when I was working on my bootloader, due to the fact that I was stuck on one part and couldn't progress any further. Then, one day I decided to start playing around with it again and I managed to fix my problem.
Overcoming that problem has provided me with the additional "fuel" I so desperately needed.

Now I'm facing the same issue. Ever since I started working on my multitasking code I feel like I'm stuck. I feel like I can't progress any further. I just open my editor, look at the code and start doing something and immediately loose all the will to work on it. Like it is sucking all the life out of me. I have no idea what to do, there are so many questions and decisions to make but I'm lazy/uninterested to tackle them. I rather play an FPS game or do something else. This is exactly what happened when I was working on my bootloader.

Can anybody relate?

Absolutely.

Set a clear goal for the session before you sit down. Unless you have an idea of what to do, how to go about it, and how to define "done" for this step, don't start. (Perhaps have a cup of tea on the balcony instead, or a walk, while you think about it. Just, don't sit down in front of the computer and stare at the screen, or muck about with the source files without a plan.)

If you sit down to "just get it done somehow", you're setting yourself up for disappointment, which will just make it harder next time. You're also approaching it as a chore instead of something you want to do, feel inspired / motivated to do at that moment. Because it is a hobby. It must be the doing that gives you a feeling of achievement, not some (distant) end result.

And if you don't "feel it", then by all means, play a game or do something else, but do not feel bad about it. You are under no obligation to excercise your hobby. If you play a FPS game instead, that is not "failure", that is "doing some other thing I enjoy doing more at this point".

I know it sounds easier than it is. I cannot always adhere to these guidelines myself, but that's the advice I am trying to follow, and the more often I manage to do it this way, the better I feel.

----

Also, I found that my architectural decisions are much poorer when I'm trying to slug my way through like that -- as opposed to those moments of "damn I got an idea..." which usually result in something that satisfies me even when I look at it much later.

One more thing -- don't be afraid to drop a hobby / project altogether.

Perhaps it turned out to be much more involved than you bargained for. Perhaps you are no longer the person who once said, "I can / want to do this". Things change. Lives change. Letting go can be hard, and feel like failure at the time, but the most important thing is you, as a person. Do something else, or, indeed, just do less, if that is what makes you feel better, makes the feeling of inadequacy go away.

Point in case, over the years I've been doing sports actively, went to medieval reenactments, played both pen & paper RPGs and LARPs, met with friends to do music. Plus the coding work on the PDCLib.

I had a phase where I no longer did any of those. Just thinking about it made me feel like a complete failure, and I kept promising everybody I'd return as soon as I could.

Then I came to realize that I never once did all those things at the same time at any point of my life. Those had all been phases, interleaved, overlapping, but never all at once.

So I picked what I thought would feel best, the ones I really would enjoy and I felt would be able to pursue at this point -- pen & paper RPG, music, and coding -- and actually did pick them up again, one after the other, while putting the rest into the drawer reading "my past", and not feeling bad about those anymore.

It could easily have been the PDCLib that got dropped. And... so what? It's been a hobby. All of it. If I ever did any of those things because I felt I had to, I was doing it wrong at that time.

You only have this one life. Enjoy.

Finding motivation to program regularly does not work like you want it to. To program is create something or fix something. You must first identify what do you want to accomplish from this exercise.

For example, if you like to participate in programming competitions:

To find motivation is tricky sometime, few of them find it easily and few them need a catalyst. If you have the desire to improve your programming skills then you will have to plan for it. which i will explain later in the post.

The easiest way to keep yourself motivated is finding a group of people like you and make a pact of solving programming questions online and each other will re-enforce this belief and keep the momentum going[You get to make friends for life this way too].

I've been trying to pick things back up myself - so what else is new? - and one of the biggest problems I am having about it is lack of both focus and commitment. I have so many goals, each of which feel as if they are absolutely highest priority, must get done now, despite being hobby-level projects, so picking which to work on today ends up being a struggle on its own. Worse, the moment I do pick something, I being second-guessing the decision even before I really get going. It is an absurd situation but I can't seem to break this pattern of over-committing, over-prioritizing, and self-doubt.

The most perverse aspect of it is that, while one would expect someone my age to have more sense about such things, I have actually gotten worse about it over the years. I am looking at my fiftieth birthday in just over a month, and I have nothing to show for my life.

Solar wrote:On that subject, and forwarding good advice from my therapist (yes, I've been to that black hole myself):

A hobby should always be a CAN do, not a TO do. Have a good hard look at what each of your hobbies is giving you, and be ready to drop hobbies that drain your energy instead of recharging it.

There are always periods where even the best hobby can turn into a chore -- I am in that position right now, i take phentermine over the counter every day having started a rather unproductive tangential work that I am nevertheless reluctant to drop because I've already sunk so much work into it and am 80% done -- but the bottom line must be positive. Not "in ten years when this made me famous" positive, but "in foreseeable future" positive.

I dropped two hobbies altogether and picked up two others which I had abandoned years ago. Because since i it changed if you already feel depressed, putting energy into activities that don't give back net satisfaction isn't worth it, and damaging to you as a person.

Your post got me thinking seriously. Guess I have to drop a couple of hobbies that have been draining me.

ScottMorgan wrote:Your post got me thinking seriously. Guess I have to drop a couple of hobbies that have been draining me.

I think there's a lot to do with your attitude as well. I mean the same thing can be perceived as negative and as positive, and that only depends on you.

For example, the only thing in my life that used to drain my energy was performed by the Cult of Scientology. Therefore I decided to turn that into a hobby and experience the gangstalking as positive. And it worked! I've turned their own tools against them: those poor bastards are now literally begging to let me allow them to commit more crimes, isn't that funny? They are so extremely predictable, I usually have a huge and honest laugh every time they walk right into my traps. They keep me entertained and I can build up criminal profiles on them at the same time. That's a really cool hobby for me, and laughing is very healthy

Cheers,
bzt

bzt wrote:

ScottMorgan wrote:Your post got me thinking seriously. Guess I have to drop a couple of hobbies that have been draining me.

I think there's a lot to do with your attitude as well. I mean the same thing can be perceived as negative and as positive, and that only depends on you.

For example, the only thing in my life that used to drain my energy was performed by the Cult of Scientology. Therefore I decided to turn that into a hobby and experience the gangstalking as positive. And it worked! I've turned their own tools against them: those poor bastards are now literally begging to let me allow them to commit more crimes, isn't that funny? They are so extremely predictable, I usually have a huge and honest laugh every time they walk right into my traps. They keep me entertained and I can build up criminal profiles on them at the same time. That's a really cool hobby for me, and laughing is very healthy

Cheers,
bzt

This made me very happy! The other day, I was wishing I could do this, but they're very easy to ignore right now and anything I'd do would make it harder. I have health problems, I don't need that. I have had entertaining interactions with small-scale bullies; it very much is about attitude.

On topic, what's working for me is:

• Set goals achievable in the short term. If something is too large, (operating system!) set sub-goals you can be happy with.
• If an activity is hurting you, drop it, but don't drop it if you can fix the part of it which is causing problems. My posture at the computer is exactly such a part of every computer-related activity I have. I'm working on it. (If it's draining you, it's hurting you.)
• Attitude; think positive. If something seems bad, could adjusting the way you think about it make it good again? This point can be over-applied with bad results, but sometimes you can get very surprising good results too. Apply with caution.

EDIT to add an important point I almost forgot:

• Drop unnecessary standards. Someone posted saying he was using .bmp as a font file format, calling it silly. No it's not, it's much like what Plan 9 does -- that's Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's work! It's all worked out in Plan 9; how to support the full Unicode range without uploading it all at once to a remote window system, but at the core of it is a simple image file format which is basically Plan 9's version of BMP. Keep it simple. Sometimes this is the hardest thing to apply, irrational feelings getting in the way of logic. I guess that may be a health problem. :/

Octacone wrote:Speaking of motivation,

Did any of you notice a pattern when it comes to motivation-failure correlation?

I remember being super unmotivated when I was working on my bootloader, due to the fact that I was stuck on one part and couldn't progress any further. Then, one day I decided to start playing around with it again and I managed to fix my problem.
Overcoming that problem has provided me with the additional "fuel" I so desperately needed.

Now I'm facing the same issue. Ever since I started working on my multitasking code I feel like I'm stuck. I feel like I can't progress any further. I just open my editor, look at the code and start using phen weight loss pills for health doing something and immediately loose all the will to work on it. Like it is sucking all the life out of me. I have no idea what to do, there are so many questions and decisions to make but I'm lazy/uninterested to tackle them. I rather play an FPS game or do something else. This is exactly what happened when I was working on my bootloader.

Can anybody relate?

This is exactly how I feel. I keep on telling myself I can do it and then when I open my editor, it feels like I don't know anything. I keep on making the same errors with the code again and again and then it gets frustrating and I lose all my strength to finish it.

I can completely relate to you. That is why I have joined this forum so that I can take a break from doing anything and just observe and learn from people here. I hope this way I will again feel motivated to finish my coding project.