Motivation?
June 1st, 2007 by John Hok
Lately I’ve found myself being less and less motivated. Not just to blog but to do other things as well. I’ve lacked motivation to do homework, study, design, program, and blog. Is this normal? I’m going into University next year and the last thing I need is a lack of motivation. University is a pretty big change because in terms of guidance I believe that they leave that mostly up to you to decide. If you don’t want to study, I’m sure they could care less right? After all you’ve already paid the big bucks for tuition.
That’s not the only thing that I’m worried about though. My lack of motivation has lead me to delay projects for my sites and just to stop working on them. Building sites and working on them has been something that I used to always enjoy. So why do I lack the motivation to work on them even though I enjoy doing it? I have no idea.
People get motivation through different means. Through my experience as a webmaster I’ll list some of the sources of motivation that I have experienced.
First for me it was the simple pleasure of being able to see the final product of a site I’ve just built. Seeing how all those long hours and countless nights of work brought together something like a website.
The second source of motivation for me then became the pleasure of watching the site and community grow. To watch it evolve into what it is and to see how much the site has been able to help visitors. Just to see what people have to say about the site gave me the motivation to continue doing the things I did to please others.
Then I discovered money. I saw the potential of making money with websites. Not necessarily just selling products, but just through different streams of revenue. Primarily through advertisements and sponsorships. I saw just how much potential websites had to make money and I capitalized on this for a period. This motivated me to create more and more websites. But with quantity, were these necessarily quality websites? Looking back, I have to admit most of them weren’t. I made one big “hit” and that is Imusion Studio. Imusion has been my most precious site as a webmaster. Imusion was built off the users and not the money originally. Is this what drove it’s success in the early days? Probably. After I discovered motivation through money I neglected Imusion and things started to slow down drastically on the site even though I was making money.
Now the site is sitting at an all time low of daily visitors at around 300+ a day. Most of the traffic is through organic sources still like Google and other search engines but the community is just no longer there. Before I discovered motivation through money, I may have not been making as much money, but I certainly enjoyed building the community and watching it grow. It achieved a daily average of 2000+ unique visitors at that time when the motivation to work on the site was to purely please the visitors and users.
I don’t know really what the point of this post was but it was just to outline different things. If you find something useful out of it, than good for you. If not, than oh well, I’m sure it was a semi-interesting read and something you might be able to apply to your own webmaster ventures in the future. Also I’d be interested in hearing what you use for motiviation whether it be for work, school, or just your daily life! Please share your thoughts.
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4 Comments
John,
I know something about lacking the motivation to blog, especially on some days. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re 18 and you have had more webmaster success than people who have been doing it for years.
As far as the education is concerned, you need to get that degree. It’s great to be able to fallback on it and something no one can take away from you — believe me. On average, people who have degrees earn 40% more than those who don’t over a lifetime.
Roy
Maybe you just have to try something new. Take up a sport or a new hobby. We all have the blues sometimes. Just take it easy
Kat
You guys are probably right.
Thanks. I guess I just need to clear my mind from all this for a bit. Take a break and just enjoy other things.
Hi! Roy and kyutbabe are right. Actually, I was very down last week due to some blogging disasters, but I realized that if I don’t pull myself up, nothing will happen. Perhaps you only need to take a break and prioritize things.