I find that I can force myself to do a task that I extremely dislike, that is discipline. But an important prerequisite is motivation.
Case in point: I could force myself to improve upon a real-time bidding algorithm, resulting in more winning bids and targeted advertisements to appear on a largely captive and passive audience. Perhaps aspects of the bidding system could be improved to use less CPU cycles, memory, saving cost on the infrastructure to run it. I could get into the finer details of the time-complexity of every operation.
But why should I be expending my effort, a part of my lifetime, on helping to sell something people don't need? To the benefit of big corporate brands while they pay me a pittance of their enormous profits? A major problem with this "screw motivation" philosophy is that it encourages more mindless work in favor of the status quo. The quintessential codemonkey churning out code as if that is its purpose to follow orders from above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
Another misconception the author has is that someone has to be in the right emotional state to be motivated to do something, to which I reply emphatically FUCK NO. Things don't just get done out of an emotional urge to do things. I am not always feeling enthusiastic about my side projects but I am highly motivated to do them even if it involves dry reading of technical specs. With lots of discipline and little motivation I could plod through the boring parts and forget about what I was trying to do (and this is what I feel most schools optimize for).
Case in point: I could force myself to improve upon a real-time bidding algorithm, resulting in more winning bids and targeted advertisements to appear on a largely captive and passive audience. Perhaps aspects of the bidding system could be improved to use less CPU cycles, memory, saving cost on the infrastructure to run it. I could get into the finer details of the time-complexity of every operation.
But why should I be expending my effort, a part of my lifetime, on helping to sell something people don't need? To the benefit of big corporate brands while they pay me a pittance of their enormous profits? A major problem with this "screw motivation" philosophy is that it encourages more mindless work in favor of the status quo. The quintessential codemonkey churning out code as if that is its purpose to follow orders from above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
Another misconception the author has is that someone has to be in the right emotional state to be motivated to do something, to which I reply emphatically FUCK NO. Things don't just get done out of an emotional urge to do things. I am not always feeling enthusiastic about my side projects but I am highly motivated to do them even if it involves dry reading of technical specs. With lots of discipline and little motivation I could plod through the boring parts and forget about what I was trying to do (and this is what I feel most schools optimize for).