Ask HN: How do you deal with loss of motivation?

Satisfaction isn't found in money. Focus on helping others and you will find true joy.

The easiest way to make big changes is to make a lot of small changes. Try to focus on small improvements you can make and work towards them. Don't get frustrated if progress is slower than you expect.

I started a side project in 2013 to satisfy that constant urge to create. Year after year in part time growing the infrastructure, app ecosystem, and user base. Just completed launching a Twitter Event Recommendation Service Bot. The marketing and negotiation skills I learned in my side job helped me in my day job making me more successful in both. When I feel not motivated or tired, I play video-games specifically the Mass Effect series because it is Leadership training in a nutshell.

If you get in to MIT/Stanford it'll be fun. I did a masters, when I had a dead-end job. It was exciting and opened doors.

Paddle harder. Motivation is like wave/wind on the sea. Easier to get around with it, but we still have to move on with life even without it, even if it's harder, slower, or more painful.

I'm certainly no expert in motivation, and can't give you advice on your specific goals, but I personally find that reframing long term goals into short term goals can be a big source of motivation. for example, don't focus on bench pressing your own weight, focus instead on getting to the gym 3x or 4x a week and working on your bench press. don't focus on finishing that personal project, focus instead on making a little progress on your personal project every day or every week. having long term goals is still valuable, but having short term goals to focus on can make it a lot easier to find motivation. it's easy to get demotivated on big goals, but if in a given day you meet every single one of your daily goals, then you've aced that day as far as your goals are concerned. and you'll ace the next day, and the next, etc.

having a job with big impact and big money is a sizable goal that you won't reach overnight. you might not even reach it in a year, or several years, who knows. it's a big goal that's easy to lose motivation on. but reframing it into daily goals, and focusing on taking one step at a time, could be a source of motivation. just my 2¢

You alluded to this with mention of interest in a leadership position at work, but what are your near-term goals in life? Make a list, devise a strategy, and focus a portion of each day stepping toward those goals. Be careful and explicit in drafting these goals. For instance, "Become wealthy" isn't as clear and actionable as "Increase my income by $500 per month."

Are you focused too much on work? When is the last time you took a week or two off just to mentally reset? How is your social life? I was interested in a specific field a few years back, but I had zero friends or connections in said field. I started a meetup group around the topic, grew it to 1500 members in just over a year, learned a TON about the field in the process, and made invaluable and exclusive connections that would have been otherwise very difficult. It was a beautiful blend of social and professional advancement and I highly recommend something similar.

Last point: if you're considering grad school, be aware that this is much more accessible and palatable early in your career vs. late. If you have a shot at getting into an MIT or Stanford, why no give it a whirl? It isn't necessarily the degree that is of value, but the high-end network you'll obtain in the process.

Keep your head-up -- motivation will ebb and flow throughout your life. This is normal and a sign that change is in order.

First, if work is not challenging, you can make it challenging. For example, challenge yourself to automate every aspect of your job. It will give you something interesting to work on, you will learn a lot (and not all of the lessons will be technical), and you will have some tangible accomplishments to point to (whether that is efficiency, uptime, cost savings, ...) during you next conversation about being given more responsibility and authority.

Second, as you noted you can find challenges outside of work (particularly with all the free time your automation has given you. |-D

You could try for getting into MIT or Stanford, but you could also simply take the courses you are interested in. Learning something new if a great motivator, I've found.

Then again, so is crushing your enemies, seeing their men flee before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women.

But I digress.

Another possible creative outlet & source of inspiration is participating in open source, up to and including starting your own project (which might be part of your automation platform, or something completely different).

Or get a non-tech hobby. Drawing, painting, knitting, dancing, a sport, volunteering at an animal shelter, gourmet cooking, write a novel, learn a new language etc. I personally find gardening to be a great way to recharge my mental and emotional batteries.

Good luck!

You could be mildly depressed. How is your sleep? How do you feel about other aspects of your life, like relationships?

> Lately, I don't feel motivated about anything. Job is okay and I just switched about 8 months back.

I wonder why you mentioned "job" as your first driver for motivation and happiness. What about other parts of your life besides the job? Now I imagine since this is HN your probably only shared about that part, but I hope there is more to it - relationships with family, friends, significant other and so on. Hobbies (go to local meetups about your favorite technology), maybe other interests like sports. Someone mentioned other stuff like helping others: mentoring perhaps, a soup kitchen (I did that for a while, it really changes your perspective on a lot of things and challenges some assumptions).

> I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction.

That won't sit right with a lot of people. It is good you are honest though. But be prepared for people to focus on that. So you already make good money it seems but you feel you deserve big money? Why do you think you deserve to be in a leadership position and making big money?

> was hired for a position that has no decision making power at all. Everyone here seems dumb and working on a few useless things.

Now imagine if you made big money and still had no decision making power? What if you made less money but had decision making power? Which one would make you happier?

I take some time off and go scuba diving.

With how unhappy you are in your job the lack of motivation is no mystery. You should find another job or found a startup or if you think it will be useful to what you want to do, sure get a degree.

I would caution though that usually when people say "Everyone here is stupid" it's usually not everyone else that's really the problem. This goes for my younger self as well.

Its ok to feel unstatistifed some of the time, because it gives you the drive to be better or do better things with your time, and to find a way to challenge yourself to set higher goals. Its also ok to have loss of motivation some of the time, because it can make you more creative and let you step back and analyze different situations. But if you get stuck in a hole and need some advice, I'd say get rid of your comfort zone in life and take some risks and make life more exciting (for good or for worse) and just let things flow. Could be as easy as switching to cold showers, or selling everything and traveling in a van in the forest. That's why life is great, it's up to you!

Something that has helped me a lot with motivation is figuring out how to calm down my nervous system, for example, with a good massage, a yoga class that encourages holding poses for longer periods of time (Iyengar-style), meditation, and reading offline. It's really easy to be "on" all the time, even when you are not feeling particularly motivated — for example, being on the internet is often over-stimulating and leads me to feel a lot of fatigue and a lack of motivation. There is no one solution. I would be wary, however, of pushing myself into doing something just because it's impressive or exciting. Acting from a place of centeredness is always more fruitful. There is no one solution. Best of luck to you.

Sounds tricky. I would recommended you look into Stoicism: Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, etc.

I'm not saying you shouldn't keep seeking something, but the aforementioned might help you to decouple your happiness from it.

For the depressive affect I consume St. John's Wort and L-Carnitine and I use a sun lamp. For the creative side, I ensure that I work at least 15 minutes a day on a creative project outside of work hours. At work, I strive to improve the overall quality of my environment. Remember that if you dress well and act confidently, people become remarkably deferential (i.e. even though your role may not technically have any decision-making power, if you are confident and reliable, people may start to look to you for your opinion on decisions, and so on).

L-carnitine for "sourceless" depression

Otherwise you need to rethink your career choices. Good luck man!

What you are learning is that money does not buy you happiness. Clearly you accepted a job you really did not want for the security and the salary.

I can think of 3 options in your case. 1)keep your job and find fulfillment doing something else on the weekends and free time such as hitting a hobbie hard. 2)Keep your job and figure out how to get to the top. This option means you'll have to become a master at social skills. Learning more techie stuff will not help you. Top decision makers are NOT the most technology savvy but they are the best at managing people and getting the most out of the team. 3) Start finding the job you want. It might be less money or not as safe but at least it's something you enjoy.

"I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction."

That's what we all want but you won't get it unless you are willing to take some big chances. So decide what to do and do it. You can't start at the top but you can get there and find all 3. You might fail but there's a possibility of hitting it big. If you go this route make sure you make a plan and decide now how to deal with adversity.

Good Luck!

>I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction.

Consider giving up the big money requirement and your options will open up significantly. At companies like Google and Facebook where you get the good pay, there are very few roles that get to work on the super interesting problems so they are hard to get. Most likely you will end up working on data migration tools, front end interfaces for existing systems, account life cycle tooling, etc that may be interesting at first, but they aren't that satisfactory in the long run because you'll realize you're a very small cog that can be easily replaced.

If you give up big money and join a startup (even mid sized), your impact can be a lot more tangible and satisfying. Programming for government/industry research can also be pretty satisfying but the pay is much lower (e.g. I worked for an academic consortium on HPC networks and really felt like I was improving tooling for cutting edge science).

Management Summary

"I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction"

Hold yoga poses long. Take strong patent medicine herbs. Knitting. Volunteering at an animal shelter. Cold showers. Realistic goals on the bench press. Scuba diving.

The answer has become clear.

Go for the money.

You're not motivated because you did not get what you wanted (leadership position) and you identify yourself as being superior to those whom are in your position (dumb, working on useless things).

Motivate yourself by either pulling up those around you or leave for what you really want to do.

Start playing music. (This is not a snarky comment, try it)