There’s a thread on WickedFire right now about motivation, and what keeps each of us burning [typically from both ends, given that the demographic there is comprised of young entrepreneurs].
I’m not stacking papers like most of the guys in that thread, but I decided to contribute anyway; I summed up my world view pretty succinctly, I thought, and I’d like to repost it here –
I do it for Burning Man.I went to the desert two years ago and, during a particularly lucid acid trip, saw myself as a monkey for the first time. I realized that as a monkey, my primary goal is happiness, and my primary advantage over other species is my ability to build things, and that I should use this advantage to increase my happiness. I realized that there are lots of things I can build in my life, including software and businesses and relationships, but that art is my #1 priority. I want to express myself by building: dreaming, designing and implementing things that I think are both awesome and unique.
I believe that the scale and extend of the art I can produce directly correlates to how much money I make during the rest of the year, so, combined with my general desire to simply “build incredible things”, I have a very strong motivation to build amazing software, and to work my ass off year round. I want to be RICH, not so I can inundate myself with material crap, but so that I can afford myself the time and resources to channel my creations into reality, free of the current debt crunch I’m in and without limiting my supply of materials and tools.
So, my mission: I want to spend 51 weeks a year working hard to make monies by building software I can be proud of, with the evidence of my success materialized in the form of my imagination’s craziest creations, and to spend 1 week a year in the desert drinking and dancing and lighting my art on fire just to watch it burn. It’s only been 2 years since I’ve pretty much made this my world view, but so far it’s kept me motivated pretty intensely.