bballbackus

I'm a 17 year old self-taught programmer, and I'm very interested in creating a start up when I'm older. My problem is that I seem to alternate between two states of mind. Some days, I'm very passionate about programming and excited to build new things and come up with new ideas. Other days, I am only interested in satisfying myself in the present and fall back to useless pastimes like video games. When I look at HN, I see people that are able to maintain the passionate and dedicated mindset that allows them to put in as much work as is required to do things like create an impressive startup or build an interesting webapp in a weekend.

I believe that the distinguishing factor between a lazy mindset and a proactive mindset is simply mental energy. If you're tired or lazy you're not going to get stuff done. So far Adderall has been successful at consistently inducing this proactive mindset, but I don't want to rely on it because it is not sustainable for a number of reasons.

Seeing as I have a mathematical mind, I view the solution to this problem as a game of in and out. If I alter a routine in my life, then my mental energy will increase/decrease. What are your examples, big picture or specific, of how you maintain a proactive mindset?

I assume most people will say eat well, sleep well, and exercise regularly, so unless you have specific insight or past examples of these, please try to give other answers.

People often say that gmail is arguably the best email webclient [1]. I realize that it offers decent storage and anti-spam, but I find it hard to believe that both of these features are so much better than all their competitors.

I've been using Gmail for many years now, so I don't really remember other services. To me, gmail seems cluttered and clunky.

What about Gmail makes it the best?

[1] "Gmail is arguably the best web-based email client out there"

via http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/greplins-chrome-extension-now-makes-gmail-search-infinitely-better/