I found my motivation to frequently depend much more on external factors than the task itself. For example, I worked on Math for essentially every waking hour at Berkeley (and completed all the Master’s courses when I was 19 as a result), and I worked on programming/data science tasks 80 hours/week at one job. But I’ve had very similar types of tasks in different environments and found it quite difficult to put it anything near the same number of hours.
I’ve found that my motivation seems to be constraint-based: if I feel like I’m getting enough sleep, enough socialization, enough food etc. then I find it very easy to work a lot. But if any one of these is lacking then my motivation plummets. In particular, all the environments where I worked exceptionally hard were ones where I was surrounded by people who felt like part of “my tribe”: simply being around people whom I like isn’t enough.
I found my motivation to frequently depend much more on external factors than the task itself. For example, I worked on Math for essentially every waking hour at Berkeley (and completed all the Master’s courses when I was 19 as a result), and I worked on programming/data science tasks 80 hours/week at one job. But I’ve had very similar types of tasks in different environments and found it quite difficult to put it anything near the same number of hours.
I’ve found that my motivation seems to be constraint-based: if I feel like I’m getting enough sleep, enough socialization, enough food etc. then I find it very easy to work a lot. But if any one of these is lacking then my motivation plummets. In particular, all the environments where I worked exceptionally hard were ones where I was surrounded by people who felt like part of “my tribe”: simply being around people whom I like isn’t enough.