Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship.In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on.Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind working all day.So I let it go. I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but I'll have fun making them. And then it'll feel nice using them. And then I'll work on whatever excites me.Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up!