I agree that knowing yourself is important. It's no use forcing yourself to do things you clearly don't enjoy. However, I want to share a motivational hack with

I agree that knowing yourself is important. It's no use forcing yourself to do things you clearly don't enjoy. However, I want to share a motivational hack with you. I have a bad back. By far the best treatment I got is regular exercise. Later, because of vanity, and because I was always a skinny nerd, I started adding exercises that weren't exactly critical. Okay, I acquired "runner's knee", so it was initially squats. But there's no strict need for push-ups, cycling, pull-ups. I do those for vanity. I like the way I look compared to my peers, even much younger ones. I sweat like hell during some exercises, like when I do 5 sets of squats 3 times a week. But I manage to pull through. ...and... at some point I realized, if I have (or just developed) enough willpower to persist with these often exhausting exercises, why can't I apply the same persistence to practicing programming ? It turns out... I can. Working out HARD is difficult. So is programming. Working out taught me to not get discouraged doing things I know have merit. To keep trying, and use different approaches if the last one didn't work. There's a bit of overlap between working out and programming. It helped that the other alternative I have is software testing. Reading through the ISTQB materials, and writing some tests I realized this stuff bores me almost to tears. Software testing is important and useful, yes. But it's also a lot of copy&paste work, boilerplates, and you're discouraged from using creative code. Do Repeat Yourself. I make many errors when using copy&paste in code, because monotony puts me to sleep. I forget to update some variable name. Some programming languages, like Rust, have compilers picky enough to reduce the need for software testing. And at the end of the day, you're looking for holes in someone else's work, and the skills you pick up can't be later used in a fun side project. The bottom line: regular exercise can change your perspective. Realizing other alternatives are boring can change your perspective.