Can't get motivated. Help?
nostrademons: When I have motivational difficulties, I've found that they usually stem from one of two root causes:1.) I subconsciously know that what I'm doing is pointless and so my subconscious won't let me waste any more time on it.2.) I'm lacking one or more skills to make the project happen, but don't consciously realize it, and need to spend time burning in the necessary skills before I can return to "the big job".In either case, the solution's the same: work on something else for a while.  That's what I'd recommend for you.As for war stories of defeat and then emerging triumphant, I've got a couple...My first big project that I initiated myself was supposed to be a quick PHP rewrite of a large Harry Potter fanfiction site.  I was in college, had worked for a year as a programmer beforehand, and thought it'd take six months.  When I started digging into it, I realized I had no idea how to architect a big webapp and a whole bunch of little corner cases that were about to make my job really different.  Unlike you, though, I couldn't give up: other people were depending on me, and we'd already announced the rewrite to our ~40,000 users (lesson learned: never preannounce software).  I finally finished more than 3 years later, after I'd graduated, having banged out a couple of other PHP webapps in the meantime for my college.When I was doing Diffle.com, I got to the point where I had to convert my cofounder's Photoshop mockups to HTML/CSS and bogged down.  I'd never done the front-end of a website before; I'd always had other people do the HTML and hand it to me to turn into templates.  So I shelved it for a couple weeks, launched another website with a dead-simple layout, and then came back to it.  After having launched something else, I found my CSS issues were much easier to resolve.