What’s the Difference?
I came across an interesting post online pointing out what it means to be motivated and to be disciplined – what would you rather have more of? Can motivation even be measured? It’s nice to start a project and have a great deal of motivation to get going, but it’s your discipline that keeps the project from coming to an end. To have discipline, in my own definition, means to consistently do things to progress your goals each day or during the time you set aside to reach your goals. The graph below from Alex Maese via Twitter, shows an accurate representation of motivation vs discipline (or in this graphs’ case, Habits).
Motivation
Motivation only lasts so long and is too sporadic. I have a general underlying motivation to create apps to one day make a career out of people using my apps. My spurts of motivation can come from many different avenues such as a long day of work – envisioning a better life for myself, doing what I want to do, wanting to be more financially free – hoping to get to a point where my apps could be my main stream (and large stream) of income. These scenarios are fleeing moments that do help to get my brain working aligned with what I should be doing, but that’s where you need to be disciplined.
Discipline
In terms of programming, I feel like one of the best traits to have is discipline. There are so many things to learn in this field, so much work to be done and not a lot of time in a day. Sometimes it is a struggle because there are so many distractions around us that are vying for our attention and knowing that once you sit down and start to program, that will probably be the thing you are doing for the next 3+ hours. That can be a tough mental hurdle to get over! Knowing that programming is going to take up so much of your time and effort and thinking about all the problems that your are going to face, all the google queries and stack overflow tabs you are going to accumulate just to inevitably go to bed with that lingering issue still in the back of your mind. Rest assured, if this is the path to your programming journey that is meant to be, at least you are going through it and putting the hours in that are needed to see the light at the end of the tunnel, or in other words, your application coming to life.
Where Does that Leave Us?
Motivation can be the integral piece needed to begin a project, but you need to be disciplined if you want your project to succeed. There are going to be many moments where the process is not very exciting, where certain functions that are necessary just seem like mindless busy work, but this adds up and is part of the whole process. Use your motivation to your advantage to not lose sight of your goals. Keep working that discipline muscle of yours and make it your strongest attribute, you will see your dreams come to fruition.
