How to get out it's not gonna worth it attitude?

2 points by christopherDam 10 years ago | 3 comments

Whenever I try to start like a new side project or something interesting idea. I found so many people has already done it. Their are really good repos on github and blogs. After searching for while I always loose interest on that as I am not doing something new.

I have really bad attitude that it does not gonna worth it and I stop and loose that project. Today while searching my past notes I found really good ideas which if I had started I can learned so much from them.

I really want to get out of this attitude it not gonna worth it if I find other people already done it. I am now thinking that by duplicating that work you can learn more.

Please advice what should I do and what you do if you find other people already done? How do you motivate yourself to do it? Do you leave the idea or implement it if you can learn from that?

11thEarlOfMar 10 years ago |

I would start by considering my motivation. It seems that it is important for you to do something new, rather than re-creating something that has already been done. Is that because you want to be self-affirmed as an innovator? Or gain approval from colleagues?

Or is it because you want to sell your work and you think you have less chance if others have already done it?

Figure out what your motives are. Then decide whether those are the motives you really want. Once you've confirmed that your motives are 'pure you', set your goals for the projects to be in line with your motives.

To continue with the examples above, if you want affirmation as an innovator, spend much more time determining how innovative your idea is before diving into it. Include talking to developer friends and knowledgeable persons you know.

If you want to sell your work, figure out what is out there already, what people are charging for it and importantly, how much demand is there? If you find it is a crowded market, it could be that a) there is a large demand for it and people pay well for it or b) it is a simple thing to build and an obvious idea, so a lot of devs build it.

If you mainly want to grow your skill set, look for work that is already out there and which you find intriguing. Use the project to find out how it works.

christopherDam 10 years ago | |

Thanks!! I want to learn and grow my skill set that is my prime motivation. But I feel little bit uninterested if work I am doing is already available. What is your motivation if you are starting a new project or something?

malux85 10 years ago |

How about scaling? If you find something has already been done, then why not try making it bigger and better - yeah there's a library that can crawl a webpage, but how about crawling every webpage?

Yeah there's a library to recognise faces, but what about building a very quick search engine on top of it? What about one that can automatically spot celebs?

Yeah there's a library that can do substring matching using clever algorithms, but can you make it work in parallel across a cluster, can you achieve linear speedups?

Pick something that you find cool, then make it 1000 times bigger! :D