Mikhail Kolesnik

― Chris Bradford, The Way of the Warrior
Over the years of working as a programmer i found only two things which are really important for me as for professional: self-motivation and practice. Everything else is aftermath and ensuing consequences.

It sound obvious, but without permanent practice, you’ll be more of thinkers and notionalists, than crafters. You always play like you practice, because it’s in human nature to follow well-known paths, cut same corners and have the same reactions to external and internal stimulus. It works in all levels, starting from physical reactions (remember that poor frog, on biology lessons, which pulls up as a response to pain?), throughout everyday behavior, and to much more complex behavioral factors, as your programming style.

When i realized that, i started my practice with a very simple exercise: reading one random Wikipedia article per day. Right in the morning, when i’m still in bed, even before checking emails and reading throughout another pack of super-important articles about upcoming iPhone X, i’m reading about Climate change and potatoes, Craig telescope or Girl boxers instead. I’m trying to be concentrated, and regularly it takes 3-5 minutes.



What’s so special about this? First of all, reading (and understanding of what you are currently reading) stimulates your brain to wake up. Good Wikipedia article could act as a cup of coffee. Good point. Secondly, it’s very interesting, useful and sometimes could be even life-saving (this is another story) to know about things. Yes, even about girl undies. But the main reason is: after the reading you’d likely realize how things work. What could be more useful for me, as for programmer, to stimulate myself for a deeper and 100% understanding of some magic function, tangled library or Ruby gem (yes, you are right, maybe not asking rhetorical questions)? The other, little bit more advanced exercise i started few years ago, is reading about everything i cannot tell for sure how it works internally. Mostly about physics, chemistry and psychology. You know, our world is full of everyday magic, and it will be very easy to find something you completely don’t understand from inside. Just look around.

Now i know how sun cream works, how they prepare red caviar for selling (Attention! Knowledge about industrial ways of food preparation could be dangerous, and it can cause long-term anorexia!) or how exactly capacitive screen reacts on touches.

But what is more important during that process, is that i’m constantly, day after day, practicing myself, forming behavior pattern and trying to keep my brain sharp and hungry for deeper exploration of things in my job. Now it is a habit, to never stop exploring.

It’s not very easy, and you should be moderate, or you’ll face with another problem of mankind — procrastination, which is kind of buzzword nowadays.


And my best weapon against procrastination is motivation (be sure you are not in the endless loop, procrastinating by reading about procrastination).

I’m sure you remember the days when you make things work only by your will, because you were deadly sure you are doing everything right. And as a hobby cross-country bike rider, i know situations when and if, you are not sure in advance you’ll hop over this root, likely you’ll fall. And only after you stand up, shake off the dust, you’d realize about this root, or stone was SO big, it was even neither bigger, not smaller than others you overcame before. Just an obvious obstacle, like millions of others on the road.

So, what was wrong? You lost your trust in yourself, and this is why you lost your goal. And motivation is exactly about having both.

When you have true believe in something, when you have a clear goal you don’t have to motivate yourself, because now you are moving forward very fast, with the speed of your imagination, which is unlimited. No time to explain! Get in the car!


For myself i found another exercise to stimulate such a mood: writing down of my goals, my desired outcome, filtering and sorting, and then putting them together on timeline. I found that it turns that most of the time my brain plays a little trick on me, making me believe about i do know what i want, but in fact, i don’t. It’s because our brain tries to avoid uncomfortable states and doing of hard work: thinking, estimating making non-abstract plans, it makes us believe we already know everything we need. And sometimes your real goal could be achieved much faster than imaginary goal constructed by your brain. Writing it down, as physical act, allows me to spot all important goals, to have more precisely vision, and sometimes even to find conflicting targets.

This is how my goal-card looks like:


You have to be very specific, very true with yourself and ‘positive-way-of-thinking’ as much as possible here. Only this way you’ll keep motivational reasons. We’ll discuss correlated techniques for goal-cards in the next article.

One another way to motivate yourself on it’s early steps of productivity increase, is prize-technique. Everything is simple here: first you do your job, then you play XBOX (tennis, hang out with friends, buying small geeky present, as ant-farm or microscope, for yourself). Only in this order. This is the tricky part, and i’m sure you know why: it works, but only limited amount of time and in a very limited number of situations. Think of this kind of motivation as of force-majeure and don’t practice it too often.

And the third way for self-motivation is reading about other’s experience. Five or six years ago i read Stephen King’s ‘On writing’ book, and it was epiphanatic reading, because i realized how close it is to the things i’m doing every day programming software products. This winter i found another motivating reading from Haruki Murakami's ‘What i talk about when i talk about running’. Even if you are not big fan of marathon runnings it worth reading, because basically it’s not about running at all. You’ll be surprised, and likely you’d be motivated.

For myself, if i need to shake off the dust and stand up after motivational fall really quick, i always have a copy of Peter Seibel’s ‘Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming’ and Linus Torvald’s ‘Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary’ books. Both of them works on me like a cistern of a Red Bull, mixed with adrenaline + 12V car battery connected directly to my nipples (woops).

As the last idea i found on my way of self-motivation is: you have to find a really good hobby for yourself, and it should not be connected to your main job activity. We’ll talk about this, about removing of distractions, time-boxing techniques and other things very soon.

Stay tuned and keep yourself sharp every day!