It's the same with me and this might be the first time I notice someone else actually talking about it and assessing their situation so well, so thanks for that.
Do you think that it's just a normal degree of variation found in different people?
In the past I've occasionally been wondering if there is something wrong with my health that drains my motivation, or if actually I'm just lazy, or care too little about what i can give to other people, or whatever.
At that time it has also caused problems at work for me and kept my self-esteem low for quite some time.
Since then I have been a lot better and I'd say it's fine now. But I still wonder about what causes such wildly differing forms of motivation in different people.
Did/do you by any chance have what I can only describe as a "fear of failure / of being ashamed of your result" ? I infer that from your "low self esteem" remark.
I used to be very very similar, and with some help I identified that it was a combination of people around me expecting me to succeed a lot more than others, which lead to a fear of failing. Which then slowly creeped into a lot of aspect of my life.
I really caught on it and decided to do something about it when it started going against what I actually wanted, making me decline events I wanted to get into and had the motivation but my brain just wouldn't let me hop in.
Here's what I think my brain does, when it happens:
I feel that something is expected of me
-> I feel pressured to do it, since failing to do so will surely have bad consequences
-> Being pressured, I feel like I have little freedom to do as I think fit
-> Feeling like I have no freedom makes me lose motivation, even if the task might have been interesting to me
It's not like that all the time, but it has happened fairly often. Sometimes I still fall into that mode of thinking and have a hard time pulling myself out again.
What I believe is the problem here:
I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express).
Since I realized that I have tried the following to improve my situation:
I make myself aware of my fears as they come up, and don't try to push them away, but also don't acknowledge that they're justified. I then reassure myself in the feeling that I can look after myself and cause my needs to be fulfilled just fine. In other words, I try to make the cause of my satisfaction intrinsic.
I didn't have the confidence that I can take care of myself and have my needs fulfilled regardless of specific issues at hand at that moment in time. This has caused me to feel overly dependent on others and on meeting their expectations (or the expectations I think they might have of me, that they didn't even express).
I’m a people-pleaser so this is great insight into my own behavior. But being a people-pleaser is also why I don’t understand making my satisfaction factors intrinsic. When people push their “successes” — jobs, cars, girls, diamonds, houses and iPhones — onto me, how can I to continue to work on my small WordPress project with the same level of motivation I had before they brought their “successes” to my attention? I do need them for my survival — I get a lot of anxiety just thinking of living without their support — but I don’t want them influencing my motivation, so how do I go about insulating my poor self-esteem from their occasional, and btw completely unintentional, blitzkrieg attacks?
I know about that anxiety, what other people might think about you.
The problem with anxiety is, that you just want to get rid of it, the anxiety hinders you in a way to look at it, to reflect about it.
Instead of trying to get rid of it, it might be better to reflect about it. So in the case of the anxiety about the thoughts of others: what kind of effect these thoughts really have, even if they think the worst about you?
The anxiety of the bad things that might happen in most cases have no foundation in your current life, but have bean created somewhere in your childhood.
Honestly that question is quite hard for me to answer, since I have rarely felt pressured to acquire or achieve something because of the successes of others.
Generally I'd say if you find that some things you do or think are not the way you want them to be and you feel the cause is other people influencing you, then you have to take a step back and try to assess what your motivations and priorities are.
The hard part is to stop your fears from messing up your reasoning. Try to think about what you value first and worry about how that is attainable later. I think you will find that there are always more ways to reach a goal if you just take a chance, than you thought there were when you worried about it beforehand. So try not to worry too much.
Self self-esteem can be irrational, but I feel like it is very valueable to me nonetheless. I think I have come to accept that being confident involves being somewhat crazy and actively taking risks.
After all, most things we worry about never happen, so you might be able to afford being a bit more light-hearted :)
I don't think being a people-pleaser inherently works against making satisfaction factors completely your own. For me my motivation and desires are completely unrelated to the standard 'pop' model of success you allude to. But I sill feel like I am a people-pleaser myself, you just have to learn to make others understand you and how you are different, striving for a mutual understanding that allows relationships to flourish. Hope I am making sense, I have quite strong feelings about this and a lot to say but want to stay concise.
What I have is the opposite. In seconds I can think of this grandiose accomplishment in all its beauty if it was finished, and then I'm confronted with a white slate and tedium of doing even first steps in that direction.
What discourages me from smaller tasks is impossibility of failure. Why do a barely challenging exercise if i'm not the first to do it and not the best at that?
Why do a barely challenging exercise if i'm not the first to do it and not the best at that?
Exactly! My motivation primarily stems from the self-esteem boost I get from doing meaningful work that’s exclusive to me. But to do the experiments and research required to get to the exclusive domain I need to pass through the tedium of mundane jobs to pay the bills, learn the technology etc. I can find the motivation to do the tedium for minutes, but not for hours like others seem to be able to.
I used to be like this and began to realize that it was limiting me professionally as well as in general growth as a person. I started forcing my perspective to be this instead, "Can I do this more elegantly than those that came before me?" It pushed me to learn about problems and really foster a depth of understanding that I never would have reached due to the "If I'm not the first..." mentality. Now I find a deeper self-esteem boost in gaining understanding and subsequently teaching others the knowledge I've gained.
Incredible, your post and the one you responded to describe perfectly how I feel. I also noticed a new environment gives me an overall boost of motivation. Changing jobs makes me super exited the first few months but after that the enthousiasm start to die off.
A result of all this is that now after 5 years of being web developer I'm already bored of the job because the small mundane tasks outnumber the challenging projects by a lot. Already switched of employer twice... Looking to do freelance work now hoping the constant switching helps keeping my motivation up.
I'm not sure I'm on the same spectrum as you, but I can recognize the "boring first steps stopping me from going further even though I can see the solution to 99% of the thing and it would be awesome".
That's why it's nearly impossible for me to make a project in modern javascript or anything like it with a ton of setup, but give me golang and it lets me just start hacking at the "awesome steps" and suddenly I'm building stuff.
I can relate to that! I remember I could not start any Windows programming because MSVC offered pages and pages of stuff as a Windows "Hello World" and I just could not figure what is this stuff for, and could not proceed without understanding.
I only got with it when I've learned some raw WinAPI with message breakers and stuff, but all and all fitting a program in one source file.
I started to read psychiatry journals to investigate. You can learn a lot about your unknown behaviour... Or at the least get some convincing platitudes to excuse your faults. I made a mistake in being so thrilled to unravel some bloody obvious bad habits that were obscured by my fourth decade, obscured by imaginary excess of talent, because unused talent is squat, and obscured by the same unused talent doing a number on the cover up job, all embarrassed when I was younger and more honest with myself. Don't think that your discovery inoculated you from coworkers taking pernicious advantage of the revelations, no matter how minor they seem, they are your Achilles Heels.
There are different personality traits. Out of the big five, it may indicate you have moderate or low conscientiousness. people who are highly conscientious tend to be extremely anguished when they are not being productive
Can you point to anything that has caused this change for you? I can identify myself with OP's description as well and would be happy about any ideas how to address it.
Do you think that it's just a normal degree of variation found in different people?
In the past I've occasionally been wondering if there is something wrong with my health that drains my motivation, or if actually I'm just lazy, or care too little about what i can give to other people, or whatever.
At that time it has also caused problems at work for me and kept my self-esteem low for quite some time.
Since then I have been a lot better and I'd say it's fine now. But I still wonder about what causes such wildly differing forms of motivation in different people.