The "why" most certainly comes first, but we have a funny tendency to move the "why" around. Someone may choose to become a welder because he wants to get paid,

The "why" most certainly comes first, but we have a funny tendency to move the "why" around. Someone may choose to become a welder because he wants to get paid, then to move out of his parents' house, then to get married. There's a type of "API-ization" of all existence. 15 people can do the exact same thing with nearly opposite objectives and all be a "team" (such as what we see large-scale in politics) or have the exact same "why" with 15 ways to do it and be "disunified" (i.e., the Linux community). The secret to staying motivated, which nonrandomstring pointed to, is finding a way to bundle all those fluctuating "why's" together toward 1 purpose. It makes you manic and obsessive, but determined and implacable on a death march to a glorious prize. My discouragement was likely because I needed sleep and wasn't de-stressing correctly, then applying it wrongly to what I love doing.