Motivation

Hi there! This blog post will be more of a rant rather than an actual post, but its something ive been wanting to write up for a couple days now.

I love programming, and ive been doing it since the young age of 7. Not too long ago (february) i started learning rust. I felt like i had outgrown python and was up for a challenge, and even though i loved the language, and quickly made projects in it (the first being coolcaves) my motivation has slowly disappeared, nowadays i can get a really good idea for a project, and then either not even start, or spend an hour coding, just to come back the next day and not feeling like continuing.

Now i know that i want to make such a project like the ones i start but dont finish, i want to show that i am on such an advanced level, but i cant get myself to do it. Yesterday i watched a really inspiration video by AvenAlchemy (here) where he goes over why most cant play on a single world forever in minecraft, but i, as well as everyone in the comments on that video, feel like this is a lesson that can be applied to everyone, even outside of minecraft, and i feel like this is exactly what i am experiencing.

Now some may wonder “well if theres a video about it why are you writing about it too?” and to that i can just say that i want to spread the word even more, as i think its really important that everyone hears this.

While motivation will get your project started, you maybe pass the stage of bootstrapping your project and setting up axum (im going to take a web project as an example), you maybe even get a /health endpoint up and running, but now you dont know what to do. You feel like you are stuck, and you dont know where to start. This is what has happened to me several times, maybe you ask chatgpt to give you a step by step guide so you can get a clear path to follow, or maybe you just close your IDE, disappointed in yourself that you couldnt even finish a project, and then move on.

This is the exact scenario i have been experiencing for almost 2 months now, and i feel so unproductive i might as well not code at all, and that is what ive done for the past 2 weeks. I have not coded at all, as i know that if i ever start something, it wont be finished, and i will never be proud to show it off, and i will never put it in my portfolio and i will never mention it to anyone else in conversation, because it wont get finished.

This is where the video comes in, it gives the absolutely amazing point that, while motivation will get you started, it will not get you anywhere further, but instead you have to follow discipline. That might sound a bit dramatic to some, but it is completely true, if you are not disciplined, you will get nowhere in your project.

Now discipline doesnt mean that you have to code for 4 hours a day for 3 weeks straight, and i think the video says this very well, discipline means consistency, some days you might feel a bit more motivated than others and code for 4 hours and that is okay, but some other days it might be a pain in the ass to even touch the project, but forcing yourself to take time out of your day to put at least 5 or 10 minutes into your project those days is what leads to progress. Just imagine what happens if you dont touch the project that day, then it will be the exact same tomorrow, what are you gonna do then? Skip that day as well? And again? Might as well quit the whole project now?

If anyone for whatever reason took time out of their way to read this little rant i wrote at midnight while tired then please, take away this from everything you read:
Motivation is needed to get started, but discipline is what gets you the rest of the way. Dont give up, as long as you believe in yourself, there is at least 1 person who believes in you.