What I get out of all these different posts on motivation is that the amount of motivation matters a lot, the type of motivation matters very little, and motivation and come from very different places for different people.
Some of the most successful people are highly motivated by their insecurities (eg Warren Buffett). Some have a very specific vision they want to accomplish. Some like dhh follow one goal at a time. Some simply grew up with the expectation that great things were expected of them and see their success more as a result of their habits than their goals. Some are motivated by revenge. Some are motivated by proving others wrong. Some are motivated by not wanting to be ordinary. Some are motivated by wanting to be accepted and loved. Etc.
So really, the best thing you can do is look back at your own life and figure out what drove you to action. What was the time in your life when you were most productive & effective? And what was your life like then?
What I get is a lot of survivor bias. "This is how to do it because this worked for me". What about all the people still in the middle of the pack in the gentlemen's race? Do none of them desire a top-ten finish?
I look at motivation as the hind-sight rationalization for how people got lucky. For all we know, 30 other people were trying what DHH was, but we never heard from them because they didn't get lucky.
I do think you can stack the cards in your favor (DHH is a really smart guy, that is certainly one planted card), but no amount of internal anything can guarantee success.
So I try to stack some cards: work regularly on my project, make a concerted effort to find value to add, interact with people in a positive way so I don't burn bridges, etc. Maybe it's not an "I can remake the world to be what I want" entrepreneurial attitude, but I think it is more realistic for a bootstrapped project.
I didn't read DHH as saying that this method guarantees success. That's an extreme claim. I think he was saying that it helps you make the attempt.
If he had initially framed his racing goal as winning Le Mans, he might have said "You know what, this Rails thing is going pretty well, why don't I just stick to that."
And if he had initially framed his goals for Rails as "creating a popular new framework", he might have said "you know what, XBOX is pretty fun", and never tried.
I've no doubt that DHH has failed at some goals using this method. The important thing is that it has helped him try enough times to rack up successes as well.
I guess I'd never really given it much thought, but I'm glad to hear others are motivated by insecurity, proving others wrong, etc. The first company I ever built was when I was 15, to this day I remember a conversation I had with my dad explaining an idea "I'd heard about". In reality, I'd already built it, but his response was something along the lines of "that sounds like a terrible idea, and it's probably not legal". It hurt, and he probably wouldn't have given that appraisal had he known it was my idea, but it made me want to prove him wrong. A year later, he was managing sales at my company while I went to high school during the day.
All these motivators seem like emotional instabilities, is motivation really internal at all? I wonder, what if I hadn't been told my idea sucked, would I have had the same drive to make it work?
This is actually a pretty powerful mental hack while you're running or training. To get some extra mileage.
When you're getting tired, look ahead and pick an approaching landmark. Think "ok, I'll just run to there and I can stop." When you reach the goal, mentally celebrate then ask yourself, "can I make it to another?"
It's less daunting to run to the next lightpost than imagine a distant goal. My personal take away from this article is not that you shouldn't reach for the stars, but rather let the little goals take priority and save the bigger goal thoughts for when you aren't running.
It works for push-ups too. Instead of counting to 50, you count 1 through 10 and repeat. And if it gets really tough, just count to 5, and repeat. Even though you might be on 46th rep, but I found it easier to push myself harder if I'm counting 2,3,4,5 instead of 47,48,49,50. And if energy permits, I'll add another 5.
A very thoughtful article by DHH. I think there seems to be two "goals" at work.
1. Short-term, achievable goal. Acts like a milestone and gives you momentum, feedback, encouragement.
2. Long-term ambitious goal. This is something that acts like a lighthouse in the distance.
To me, it's interesting how these two types of goals interact and how one manages them.
For example, some companies seem to be formed by the small achievable "goal" method. They start small with little ambitions. They get traction and initial success, and then grow from there. This is similar to DHH's racing journey.
However, there are other examples of people starting out with more audacious goals, like Elon Musk with Tesla or even SpaceX. The long-term audacious goals seem to drive development and the short-term milestones. Without the long-term audacious goal I don't think that there would be enough momentum/energy/vision to push through the short term goals.
I'm not sure how these two goals work together, and would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Can you just have the short term achievable "goals" and then grow from there? Or do you need the long-term audacious goal to guide your short term milestones?
'You can think of goal creep as the test-driven development of a real-life pursuit.'. No!!! Think about it!!! Test-driven development would be to start writing your winning speech before learning to drive!!! Besides, goal creep is a way to get good motivation, but it's usually very bad for design!!! If you wanted to be very good at racing in the first place, you'd have hired the best instructor out there, and you probably wouldn't have taken all the bad habits that you have now, and would probably be a much better driver today!!!
That's like saying your first test would be "complete project management system". That's not what you do. My first test for driving was "gentleman mid-pack", for biz, it was "$4K/month revenue". For Basecamp, the first test was probably "add a single post".
I think there may be an issue with your driving analogy.
Your goal all along seems to be to achieve flow: "After all, racing to me was all about getting access to long stretches of flow, that sensation of being so completely engrossed in an activity that you lose track of time and place."
You set yourself tasks to achieve that goal, and as each task was fulfilled, you may have realized that flow, again, required additional tasks to achieve.
Ok I see your point. But that only works because before becoming the podium winner, you have to go through the mid-pack stage. Product design is not like that. Take Square for instance, where is the small first step ? Build a device that works with iPhones and that allows people to take credit card on the move? that's the product, it can't be split into smaller chunks!
You appear to lack imagination. For Square, here is one way to break it down into units which are easily tested:
1. Can I write an iOS app that reads incoming signals via the
headphone jack such that the app can separate the input into
"high" vs. "low" signals with sufficient accuracy?
2. Using "high" vs. "low" signals, can I encode "Hello world"
into a series of signals and then decode that back into
"Hello world" in my iOS app?
3. Can I encode the typical information contained on the magnetic
strip into a series of signals and then decode that back?
4. Can I do step 3 reliably such that errors during transmission
are automatically corrected for?
5. Rather than doing all of the above via prerecorded signals
being played back from another device, can I create hardware
which has data to be transmitted baked into the ROM and still
do the encode/decode?
6. Rather than baking the data into ROM, can the hardware accept
input via a serial port, encode it, transmit that to the iOS
app, and have the iOS app successfully decode it?
7. Instead of using a serial port, can I solder in a magstripe
reader to accept the input from a swiped card and send it to
the iOS app?
8. Rather than just reading the data into an iOS app, can the iOS
app communicate with a server over the internet and transmit
the data to it?
9. Can the iOS app receive a response back from the server?
... and so on. Each one of these are valid goals and are small enough to easily get a win on before moving to the next bigger goal.
You TDD your goals. Square could certainly have started with modest goals, like we did with Basecamp, such as "get to $4K/month in revenues". That probably wouldn't have floated for them, given all the VC they took. But there are many grays between that and "unseat every POS ever".
Well I guess you could say that you could split the goals to things like "make a prototype", "convince some VCs", raise "$100,000", etc. That makes for bitable chunks, but the goal has to remain. Otherwise, what's the point of breaking one's ass for 4000$/month?
You say that because you think Square is a little gadget for taking credit cards from a phone.
That is the little goal, though -- the big goal at Square is clearly to take over all real-world payments. The cheap reader was a simple place to start. (Go check out a store that running off an iPad with Square to see what they want to become).
I remember a friend in high school who I used to go on mountain bike rides with. I tried to get him in to racing, and he seemed enthusiastic. However, he said he didn't want to race until he was fast enough to win. He never participated in any races as long as I knew him. I didn't win many, but did pick off a few here and there.
I've been obsessed with auto racing, so thanks DHH for the illustration.
Getting into an LMP is a distant goal, and who knows if that's where I'll end up, so the advice about completing much closer goals makes sense from where I'm standing, and is exactly what I've experienced in other area of life where I've already accomplished 5+ year goals.
What a great thought and a what a great way to express it. 37signals proves time and time again they have mastered the art of expressing so much with so few words.
Some of the most successful people are highly motivated by their insecurities (eg Warren Buffett). Some have a very specific vision they want to accomplish. Some like dhh follow one goal at a time. Some simply grew up with the expectation that great things were expected of them and see their success more as a result of their habits than their goals. Some are motivated by revenge. Some are motivated by proving others wrong. Some are motivated by not wanting to be ordinary. Some are motivated by wanting to be accepted and loved. Etc.
So really, the best thing you can do is look back at your own life and figure out what drove you to action. What was the time in your life when you were most productive & effective? And what was your life like then?