RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – Feed Your Fire by Ray Wenderlich

The Case of the Mysteriously Missing Motivation

The weird thing was, I knew that when I started as an indie iOS developer, I was so excited and so motivated. I knew this is what I wanted to do, and this is where I was meant to be. But now, I felt like that initial spark of motivation had disappeared, and was nowhere to be found. I kept hoping I’d wake up one day and that my motivation would magically pop up again, but it never did. It was the case of the mysteriously missing motivation.

This was a pretty low period of my life – unmotivated, unproductive, and don’t forget – cheap.

However this experience of hitting rock bottom taught me something important. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for my mysteriously missing motivation to show up knocking on my door – because it never would. Unfortunately, your motivational fire isn’t something that just spontaneously combusts all by itself – you have to take control, and build it and nurture it, just like you feed a fire.

Feed Your Fire

Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways of feeding my motivational fire, and I’ve found 3 techniques that have always worked for me that I’d like to share with you today. Without these, I never would have accomplished any of my goals, and would probably still be waiting around for my motivation to come knocking.

Start Small

The first thing technique that helped me was to Start Small.

Sometimes, the reason why we avoid working on a project is that it seems too huge or overwhelming. The trick is, rather than thinking about how big the project is, instead think about the smallest possible next step to get started.

This technique of starting small is like giving your motivational fire some kindling – a nice small task is easy to burn, and gets the rest of the fire going.

Here’s how it looks in practice: when I didn’t feel like working, I would say, “OK – all you have to do is just work on this for one hour”, or “just fix this one bug.” Or on days that were really bad, I’d say, “All you have to do is open Xcode.”

The cool thing is most of the time when I did this, I ended up working far more than the initial small task I promised myself, because I got “in the zone”. It turns out the hardest part of working on something is overcoming your initial resistance, so by making the initial step small, it makes that resistance easier to overcome.

Get External Motivation

The second thing technique that helped me was to get External Motivation.

When I was working on this app, I was an indie iOS developer, working all by myself, literally living in my mother-in-law’s basement. I had no co-workers, I had no deadlines, and I had no boss saying “Yeah if you could finish the app, that’d be great”.

At first I thought this was pretty awesome. However, in practice this caused major issues with my motivation. For example, I found that since no-one was counting on me to deliver features at any particular time, it made it easier to avoid working on the app entirely, or to work at a slow pace.

When you know that somebody is counting on you to get a project done, and you don’t want to let them down, that’s what I call external motivation. I’ve found that often it’s a lot harder to let somebody else down than it is to let your own self down.

That’s kinda terrible if you think about it, but it’s often true – and that’s why external motivation is so powerful. In fact, I believe external motivation is so strong that it’s like firewood – it’s the core fuel that you need to going through the duration of a long project. You can’t really have a fire without firewood.

Luckily, this is one of the easiest parts of motivation to control. To build in some external motivation for your project, you just need to find someone who will hold you accountable. Ask a friend or relative to watch over you, or publicly declare what you are doing and share progress so you know the world is watching.

In my case, I found this website called stickk.com (with two K’s) where you can set up a goal – say working on Battle Map 2 each day, and set up a stake – say $20 – and finally you set up an impartial referee who will check whether you’ve accomplished your goal or not. I picked Vicki’s twin sister, Andrea, to be my referree. If I accomplished my goal, I got my $20 back, otherwise Andrea got it.

Every day Andrea would check in with me, just hoping to hear that she’d be getting $20.

And then, she’d use the money she won to buy movie tickets, glasses of wine, dinners out at restaurants, and send me gloating pictures!

Well, you guys already know how cheap I am, so this worked great with me :] But all jokes aside it wasn’t really the money that helped me here – it was knowing that somebody was checking up on me, and I’d have to explain to them if I ended up slacking off. Having some external motivation was some much-needed firewood to keep the fire burning.

Do Your Most Important Task First

The third technique that helped me was to do your Most Important Task first. This is one of the most useful tricks I’ve learned over the years – so powerful that I think of it like throwing gasoline on a fire. It guarantees dramatic results that are extremely satisfying and will jump-start your motivational fire every time you do it.

Every day, figure out what your most important task is for that day – say working on Battle Map 2 for 4 hours – and then do that first thing. And I mean first thing – especially before email or checking Twitter, which can be horrible time sinks.

That way, after you finish your most important task for that day, you can rest assured that you’ve made progress toward your #1 goal. If you make progress on something every day, it will eventually get done. It’s a mathematical certainty.

Out of the three tricks we’ve covered so far, this is the one that really pushed me over the edge and got me going. By working on the app for a few hours a day before anything else, I started seeing some noticeable progreess, I started to gain some momentum, I started feeling good again, soon I started feeling excited, and before I had completed the project and launched the app.