When you first start off programming (or any other skill based activity), you don't know what you don't know. That is, when starting a project you don't realiz

When you first start off programming (or any other skill based activity), you don't know what you don't know. That is, when starting a project you don't realize at the beginning how much effort goes into every subsection to bring the project to completion. Then, once you get a few projects done, you start building up skill. So what was hard then starts becoming easier -- which opens up the door to new things that are hard now, but were impossible earlier. However you are able to still approach each project, because past experience taught you that you are getting better at the craft with each project. Which has a motivating factor (similar how watching your fitness stats is motivation to keep going to the gym, or being to play more complicated pieces on an instrument is motivation to keep practicing). So what happens with programming, or fitness activities, or playing an instrument, is that after a period of time your skills start to level off. You don't get measurable more skill each time you practice, so that removes one of the motivation factors. And you "know" that you will make some mistakes that you keep making (hitting the wrong note on a piano, going down a wrong design path requiring scrapping a big chunk of code that you've worked on for several days, etc). That anticipation of failure is a de-motivation factor. And on top of that, even if you know you won't make much of a mistake, since you are doing "the same thing" you've done hundreds of times (ran the same mile, played the same song, wrote the same boilerplate), it gets extremely boring. So the trick is to find acceptance that this may be the natural course of how things work. The human brain craves novelty, but you can also find comfort in familiarity also. Just treat programming like you would other things in life, that is a means to an end, and not the end itself. Think of other chores you do daily, such as the daily drive into the office, cooking dinner, showering / personal grooming (how many kids hate remembering to brush their teeth, and how eventually it just becomes a part of your daily habit).