Of rocks and motivation
Less than a day after I posted about procrastination as a big rock, Steve posted an article about motivation thresholds. I think he answered the question I didn’t even know how to ask.
Now I just need to find the motivation to re-read his article a few more times until it starts to sink in.
One part of the article that made me laugh out loud, though, was this: “What do you find so motivating that you’d even ignore a growling stomach for hours just to stay with it?” Heh. My answer is, just about anything! Getting started is the hard part, but once I’m started on something that I find interesting, hyperfocus takes over, and time, hunger, thirst, sleep, and other human beings all cease to exist.
So now I’m curious. I had thought that getting absorbed in a task was a fairly universal trait among geeks. Steve is clearly a geek (both as a former programmer and as a relentless optimizer), yet apparently he usually notices when he gets hungry. So it’s not as universal as I had assumed.
What about you? Do you consider yourself a geek? Do you sometimes get so absorbed in things that you forget to eat?
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:46 am
All the time….more than half of my effort on a new project is just getting started and once started I seldom want to stop. Stopping, to me means I may not be able to pick up where I left off, and may waste time backtracking etc.