How to never run out of motivation?

TLDR; So how can you never run out of motivation? By never relying on it in the first place. Being curious, is way more sustainable. In the long run, it will pay the most dividends too.

Over the past 30 days, I've spent about 200 hours working on ioignition. This included weekends, and I din even have to try. Now, I have to clarify that I was surprised myself, ever since I've started programming I've dreamed of working on something so deeply. Before today, I've never managed it. So what changed?

You know you read things, they sound simple but you never really get it, like really get it, till you experience it. You might find this similar to one of those things. So there is really only one thing that comes to mind, I was following my curiosity. To give a little bit of a context. About a month ago, we released translateaudio (opens in a new tab). One of the things we were setting up was the analytics on the app, we used plausible (opens in a new tab) because it's simple and easy to use. When I was on the website a simple question popped into my head, "Could I build an analytics platform of my own?". I was genuinely curious, so wrote a simple script to see how I would do this, and to my surprise it only took me a few hours to figure it out. Just like that I had done a proof of concept. I did not have to think twice before deciding to make it a fully functional app, because even if no one else used it, I would.

There were a lot of problems that I ran into on the way, it was my first time using Htmx (opens in a new tab) on something that was not a toy project. My SQL skills had become a bit rusty and had forgotten a lot of things which took more time and on and on. The thing that surprised me the most was that, I never felt like I did not want to do this, even when I had no clue how to solve a problem. In a way I became obsessed. At no point did have to tell myself, we should be working on the project, I woke up made coffee and sat right on my desk. I took breaks, and would get right back into it after. There were times when I had to force myself to stop because I had forgotten to eat or it was really late. It was like I unlocked a well with unlimited drive.

Now, does this mean it will be the same for you? I don't think so. Different things drive different people, figuring that out, is on you. Till you do, someone could tell you exactly what you need to do and you will not hear it. It's happened a lot to me, I've heard things and understood the value in it but never acted on it for more than a short time. Till I experienced it, which provided the context to the words that was necessary for me to be able to live it.

So how can you never run out of motivation? By never relying on it in the first place. Being curious, is way more sustainable. In the long run, it will pay the most dividends too. How do I know when I'm curious about something? When I'm spending weeks and months on something with no promise of a reward at the end, cause doing the thing itself is the reward.

So is the project complete?

It works, gives you basic analytics, I have plans for some interesting features which I'll work on once I've added some filtering options. I've added a live demo so that you can check it out without having to create an account. If you have any feedback or ideas on how to improve it, I'm all ears. Thank you for reading.

Update 28 Dec 2023

I got a comment on hacker news, that made me re-think my position. It was pointed out that, curiosity is also a form of motivation. It can be lost, I remember being insanely curious about programming when I started. Without even noticing it, I lost that a little bit over the years I was programming. It was only in the last couple of months, I found a new sense of joy in programming. Now I'm not really sure about my initial idea anymore. Will revisit in a future article.