This happened to my wife. It was torture for her for the first year. It's been almost 3 years now and she's just barely starting to enjoy food again. Most things taste fairly normal for her, but a few things, like mint, onions, and garlic, (which are in everything, unfortunately for her) are still wretched.
Indeed. Wanting things to be dead simple and not need to be fiddled with constantly and take months to learn how to set up is the big brained move. Same reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't have time to nerd out and customize Android till it's usable.
I can have discipline, if I'm doing something for a purpose. Losing weight, getting a job, etc. My problem I always lose what the purpose of my solo project is. Or, I shoot so many holes in my own idea that I can't imagine it being useful to anyone.
So get an accountability "partner" - perhaps another person who is doing their own thing and having the same challenges you're having.
Or do the public progress showmanship thing (recurring blog or vlog posts about your project and the current status). I admire the people that go this route, but it frankly scares me since we're talking here on a forum of talented people, some of whom could just hear the project idea and probably get it built faster. So sharing seems to create a lot of risk.
My issue is that I don't give a shit about other people outside of those I care about. imo the whole coach thing is a cottage industry of bullshit artists.
If Linus Torvalds wanted to give me advice/coach me I'd damn well listen, even if I disagreed with it (and I'd question if I'm right because Linus is that good).
But the random joe blow whose entire career is coaching? I just have no respect for it.
An accountability partner isn't a coach. It could be, but it certainly doesn't have to be.
For example, an accountability partner could be a potential client/user that you're building a tool targeting. You keep them in the loop with regular updates, and that activity alone can help keep you moving forward even when you might have moments of doubt. If you know you _have_ to report status to someone weekly, you're less likely to blow a week off entirely. At minimum, you might wait until an hour before the meeting and hustle to do at least something.
I do this too. And the flipside is many audiences dont care about the idea or do but find one problem and churn off. So external feedback is hard. tricky one to solve. scratching your own itch can keep you motivated but doesn’t answer the demand question. The other way is to go full mom test and just do full time market research and product hat for months and only then build.
I have the same problem. I see all these hackers out there making (something like) the millionth travel blog and sticking with it for years and somehow ending up making a decent income off of it. But I'm sitting here wondering if my potentially cool game idea that has never been done before is something that the world really needs, then I quit after about a week because of those thoughts.
I went through a phase of following a lot of “indie hacker” people on Twitter when everyone was posting their growth numbers and other stats in public. It was fun to watch them try different things and experiment.
Then slowly, nearly all of them stopped. Some got jobs at big companies. Others quietly stopped posting after numbers flatlined or declined. This includes a lot of people whose projects were “Ramen profitable” and then showing huge month over month growth, which was supposed to be the start of something bigger.
A disappointing number of them have pivoted into personal brand building and selling courses. It’s a lot of “follow me/subscribe to my newsletter for more advice” which turns into “sign up now for an exclusive spot in my new course” after a half a year. It’s like a switch flips after a certain number of followers where they realize it’s going to be easier to sell courses/content than to build their project into a successful company.
You're painting a picture as though they've all switched. Thats not accurate, still plenty of indiehackers hacking away. Only a small percent successfully, but thats always been the case.
I've worked on [side/pet/hobby] projects consistently for the last 6 years. What drives me is my friends. One of the latest projects I've started to work on is a free alternative to a mobile app called UDisc. They hit us with the ol' switcheroo by offering the service for free for several years and now force you to pay if you want to maintain your previous disc golf rounds (beyond 10 rounds).
I've tried to build things only I want and I usually lose steam or interest. For me, building things for, and with, other people keeps me motivated.
I extremely resonate with this. I write music and often don't finish a track because it's a lot of tweaking and monotony once you get the main idea down (much like software). But one time my wife wanted to make a "Great British Bake Off" show with her friends and I was suddenly extremely motivated to make the score. I scored the whole 30 minute video and it turned out great.
I think most people do better with a partner or small team. It can still be very much like solo, in that each person really has their own domain of activity and expertise. But unlike solo, you have one or more people to help you stay motivated and on track.
Of course it's possible to learn techniques and behavior patterns which can help you be a successful pure-solo creator, but it takes time and persistence (and motivation :) ) to learn and stick with those behaviors.
So my conclusion, as someone with a few dozen parked ideas (some of which got 80% near to MVP complete), is to find a partner or at least goal-buddy to help you stay motivated... and occasionally to help you remember why you're doing the thing.
Would working on it bring you joy? Because the world could certainly use more of that :D
I personally lean on people to help stay motivated. For your example, I would find a game dev meet up or some discord community, talk shop & share what I'm working on on a regular basis. Validate or give feedback on the work of others, and get some of my own.
It's a process of constantly pushing back the thoughts and community makes it easier
So every 45 days, the CPPA will tell these companies to delete your data. I wonder how many people realize that that means the CPPA or these companies have to keep a record of some of your PII, so that they can look you up and delete you from the database. Maybe privacy conscious people are fine with the California government keeping their PII?
This seems fine? PII isn't in and of itself sensitive, it's using PII to link individuals to purchases, actions, other data that's problematic.
Facebook knowing my name isn't that bad, facebook knowing that some individual bought "Hunky Firefighters Pt 7" isn't that bad. Facebook knowing that I'm the individual that bought "Hunky Firefighters Pt 7" is exactly what I would want to prevent.
I very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.
I definitely relate to that. I only started saving money seriously (with proper planning) after reading about FIRE (financial independence retire early) in a blog. Reading about that idea completely changed my mind about the true purpose of putting money aside while I was still young.
Before reading about FIRE I thought the idea of retiring silly because I was 100% sure I'd never stop working, even after turning 65. So saving money never made sense to me.
The blog about FIRE explained with a total different point of view which is not about retiring really but it's about having the choice to do only the work you really want to and being independent to make your own choices regardless of needing a paycheck.
What's the point? What one person needs at one point in their life is very unlikely to be what another person needs - it might appear banal or unintelligible to another.
It would be interesting to hear grandparent’s perspective. We learn from the experience of others. Otherwise, schools, best practices, or forums like HN would be completely useless.
For me personally, I read a blog post about motivation — and a quite silly one at that. I was young and struggled a lot with ADHD and motivation in general. I had a hard time in school because I just physically couldn’t work on an assignment. I’d set it down in front of me and stare at it, unable to start. I had kinda decided that I wasn’t good at those sorts of things, which made it harder.
But I found this random post online one day which has some ideas about trying to do small annoying things for no reason, to train your brain to be better at doing hard things.
The blog gave an example: go on a walk, but go out of your way to take on a pointless task. Like at the beginning, set out to touch 50 flowers. Then go on your walk touching flowers. When you get to the end, you’ve gotten practice doing something that you didn’t want to and which was a bit annoying. But now you’ll have a bit more confidence to do something else in the future.
I got in a habit of taking on these pointless goals a lot for a few weeks. Eventually I was sitting down and looking at my homework, thinking “I spent two hours touching flowers for no reason, I can spend a few minutes doing this” and would make some progress.
Looking back it seems ridiculous, but it was the advice I needed at the time, and it actually helped me make some changes in life. That whole process made me get into a habit of thinking about the end goal & how small little steps can help you do big things. And actually practicing and seeing that, took me out of the headspace of “I can never do that” to “maybe I can”.
And more interesting, I wrote about this on a forum back then, and more than a month after writing it I received a message from someone who said “hey, I just wanted to let you know that I started doing the annoying-little-task strategy after reading your post, and I feel it’s helped me a lot so thank you”
Maybe tomorrow I will touch 20 flowers on my daily walk. (50 seems like too much.)
Thanks for the idea.
I don't know if this is really similar, but maybe it's a bit related. One of my friends and I decided to write 100 words a day for 30 days. Two other friends ended up joining our little project. I kept it up for about 100 days, and it made writing much easier for me. Also, about 2 months ago, I decided to spend about 30 minutes a day writing. It is amazing how much easier writing became for me. (When I was young, I found writing to be very painful. The only C's I got in college were in English. Nowadays, I think of my self as a writer --- not a good writer, but a writer.)
A very basic one would be the realization that everyone else is more unlike you than like you.
Once this idea sinks in, it generally promotes empathy because you stop judging others by the "golden rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and start thinking about the (perfectly sane and logical) mindset and circumstance that could lead to a particular action or idea. Once you go deep enough you start to recognize the patterns within patterns.
It allows you to take others as they are, rather than as an imperfect you.
One could read the comment summarised by "what's the point?" as itself an idea that could change a life.
Towards the negative mainly but also maybe towards stopping negative behaviour or thoughts. "Why care?"
Nihilism is an idea that has changed the world.
The rest of the comment is more of a modern idea where no one is able to know anyone else, prioritising the individual over all. This is most common in identity politics today.
It's worse than nihilism and it also changes societies and people as it encourages and demands the rejection of understanding and empathy.
No, that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about reading books and lasting life changing things from them, and GP is right, I can guarantee the thing I have in mind probably won’t mean anything to you.
I don’t know why people suggest Pandora as an alternative to Spotify. They’re completely different things. Unless something has changed in the last few years Pandora doesn’t let you listen to albums, or even songs by a single artist. It’s like radio, and Spotify is like a music library.
