OT: Help with motivation

[graham samuel]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:56:05 -0500, Thomas McGrath III 
<3mcgrath at adelphia.net> wrote:
>
> Hello listers,
>
> I hope this is not too far off topic.
>
> I have been having problems getting myself motivated. I have a possible
> customer for a few ideas I have and he said as soon as I'm ready that
> he will try and sell them for me. I even have a lot of ideas for this
> project. But I can't seem to get started. I have been sitting here for
> weeks reading this list every day and opening up REV but still can't
> start.
>
> Any helpful ideas on how to jump start a project?

I'm coming a bit late to this - I hope you agree that the quality of 
the advice you've had so far has been outstanding!

My contribution is to say that I've also had much the same problem, 
particularly recently: I have a project that was going very well, with 
a (very tolerant) client waiting for me to finish, and I just went 
totally off the boil and did almost anything else - including moving 
house and having a major operation - to avoid getting back to work. I'm 
back in harness now, and I believe I know what started the block - I 
have a series of things I know I have to do, like my tax return, which 
like many people, I put off as long as possible (maybe I have 'tax 
return block', too). The effect of this is that my internal To Do list 
gets blocked in proportion to the attractiveness of the items on it. 
The great black monster of the tax return (or whatever) sits at the top 
of the list and challenges me: "if you aren't going to deal with ME, 
then I'm going to make sure you feel so guilty that you won't deal with 
the things you actually want to do." So the block was caused by a 
couple of these 'must-do' monsters. I did all the going-for-a-walk 
things, cleared my head (this was after MONTHS of displacement 
behaviour) and tackled the monsters; and now I find I can work on 
RunRev again. What was wrong was that I like doing RunRev projects too 
much!

Just my take on the thing. Hope your path gets clearer very soon now.

Graham
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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK and France