Meta Monday - August 12th
Motivation is hard to come by. Ideas constantly come and go, but some carry more weight than others. It's important to be able to harness that inspiration. Even a plan isn't enough. A goal of having something done eventually is as useful as a dream. Until there is something people can see, it's just another thought in your head.
You need to make things for people to truly experience your ideas.
Having a plan is good, but until you make something out of it, it's difficult to keep that motivational fire burning. You stay inspired by getting results. A large plan, such as making a game, doesn't give you feedback until it's complete. Breaking down tasks is the best way to keep that flow going. The first thing I do when trying to get something done is break it down. I write a list of tasks that I can accomplish within hours. By tackling those, every few hours you get the reward of completing something towards your dream, bringing it into the reality of a goal. Physically checking off items from your list makes you feel the progress you've made, and provides you with results to show other people.
That last bit is incredibly important. Your mind has all sorts of ways of accepting or denying your own work, but the response of someone else is real motivation. Like completing a quest it a game, it's that small drip of dopamine that encourages you to push forward. It breaks down that single reward of completing your yearlong project into daily successes. It's these small achievements that give you the motivation to actually get it done.
Creativity and Getting Started – the Kuma approach
So I love working on new things. It’s not that I get bored of the old things, or that I don’t want to finish them, it is more that I get so into my latest thoughts and plans that I tend to leave projects by the wayside. Fortunately, having lived with myself for this long, I have managed to achieve synergy between what I want to do and how much time I am likely to spend on any one thing. The key? Really intensive bursts and days of doing it all. Basically when I have an idea that I want to work on (generally something with writing) I will work on it really intensely for a whole day. I won’t do other things, I won’t let myself be distracted and I will spend literally the entire day on that one thing. Even when I’m taking a shower or making a sandwich I’ll dictate notes into my iPhone or use the foggy shower-stall glass to draw diagrams of how things interact. At the end of the day I take a look at what I’ve done and decide how in love with the idea I am. If the answer is “yes” then I’ll work on it more the next day and the next until the answer is “no”. Once that happens I set the project aside for a while to pick it up again later when I’ve been inspired by something around me.
Part of what I love about working with Too DX is that Auston seems to be the opposite of me – he has 40 ideas in the air at once and he bounces between them all the time. That gives me two things: first is a lot of good ideas to fall in love with and work really hard on and second is a practical way to transition from really intense work periods to normal life – I just talk with him about our next project!
