In this episode Mike and Matt discuss motivation in it's many forms, and how it affects working on variety of projects.
Segment 1 - Types of Motivation
- Different types of motivation range from the tinkerer all the way to the passionate
- Being in any of these camps generally dictates how much effort, and time, that you’ll put into a field that you’re checking out
- In terms of web development & design, having a different level of motivation will no doubt determine where you fall within the field - maybe you’ll make a single website for fun, or maybe pursue a career
- One thing of note, these classifications of motivation are from our own experiences and ideas, they aren’t some sort of “official” classification of any kind
- Passionate
- When you’re passionate about something you’ll typically take it more seriously and do in-depth research to learn new things
- This type of motivation may steer your career decisions, or help you set up a side hustle of some kind
- For the web field, this generally means you won’t be using your “local” website builder like Squarespace, but rather diving in head first to the code, determining what tools you’d like to use and how to use them efficiently
- “Forced”
- Sometimes you’re figuratively “forced” into a doing something due to outside pressures, such as financial situation, or availability of work
- When this happens you may take your work seriously, however, you’ll be taking it more seriously and efficiently than someone who wants to be there, because generally you’ll want to get in there and just get the work done
- Often times people get trapped into these types of situations due to the outside pressures never alleviating, or more that suddenly pile on, leaving you trying to find methods to get out of the field
- Bringing this into the web industry, sometimes people will be “forced” to do professional web work, either full time, or by being in an associated tech field that suddenly requires web work. Generally this type of work will be rushed in some way, having tasks done in the quickest way possible - often leaving a lesser quality product
- Hobbyist
- Hobbyists are people that like to do a variety of things, and get into them all the way, stopping just before getting professional.
- There are of course varying degrees of hobbyists, but generally, they could technically operate in the professional realm given a small amount of training
- Bringing this again to the web industry, hobbyists will generally not focus on one tool, language, or segment of the industry, but rather fan out and use a bunch of different tools ranging from site builders like Squarespace, then dabble in some code - getting a full range of experience to build some sites that they’re interested in, sometimes these lead to a side hustle if they’re successful
- Tinkerer
- Tinkerers are one step below hobbyists, and are generally just interested in a field in some remote way
- They’ll do a variety of “light duties” within their interest, things such as reading some material, or maybe dabbling slightly within the field itself, stopping well short of investing any sort of money, or serious time, into learning a given field
- When it comes to the web industry, these people often need a single website for something they’re working on, they’ll read up on different site builders online and then just use a template so they can get to work - this of this as more of a blogger that doesn’t want to deal with their website, but instead their work is their writing itself, so they familiarize themselves with the path of least resistance to get a website up and running and that’s it
Segment 2 - What Motivates Us
- Pure Enjoyment for coding
- Creating something from scratch
- Looking at examples of other people's work and striving to achieve something similar
- Looking through sites and trying to find motivation for your work
- Having someone or a group request something that you could make
- Small amount of adrenalin from fixing difficult issues
- Being part of the coding community
- Having people reach out to you for help or opinion
- Keeping up/learning new technology
Segment 3 - Motivation Blockers
- To many projects on the go making it difficult to focus on one
- Prioritize and use task management applications like Asana
- Running into a problem that takes several days to solve
- Take a step back from the problem and maybe try to complete a smaller easier task
- Difficult clients
- This is a tough one but try to understand where your client is coming from and if you can relate to their issues
- Programmers envy
- There will always be people that are better than you but also people that are still trying to catch up to your level. It is important to learn how to focus just on yourself
- Procrastination
- Just start something, start with smaller more accomplishable tasks and build up to the harder and longer ones.
- Links
Web News - Scams
- Scams are becoming more frequent and more complex
- There isn’t a day that goes by that some sort of scam hits our email inboxes, often times being screened out by the spam filter, however, with complexity growing these scams often get through that level of defense, leaving the user to further filter out their inbox
- In addition to email scams, there’s phone scams, and even in-person ones that people have to avoid
- One thing that we’ve found is that email scams are getting harder and harder to notice - the one tell-all used to be an incorrect “from” address but even that is now being spoofed to look legitimate
- The other day I received a properly branded Cyber Monday email from what looked like the real amazon email, but it only lead to a website that was trying to get me to sign up
- The worst most recent one is someone impersonating us in an email - basically one of our clients will receive an email that says it’s from us when it’s not, and asks to download an attachment - meanwhile we’ll receive the same thing, an email that looks like it’s from our client also trying to get us to download an attachment
- We’ve even had a brand new business credit card compromised whilst it was still in a safe at home
- What are you thoughts on scams? Have you fallen for any? What can be done about this?
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