Staying motivated to face difficult problems can be a challenge for lots of us. Although it can also be challenging to stay motivated if the task is too easy.
First thing I will mention is that my understanding is that your brain has a finite amount of energy/processing power available over the day or within a certain period. So if you can reduce some mental or physical energy expenditure from other things (for example, commuting takes a lot out of me personally) you may have more energy available for hard problems.
Another thing is that there are specific skills/strategies that are useful for solving hard problems. The biggest one is decomposing problems into smaller tasks. And I guess that OOP is now still unpopular these days with various groups, but object-oriented design has been a big help for me in terms of breaking larger problems down into subproblems and organizing information. That is a skill that you can practice and get better at.
The most basic way to decompose things is just to start typing a list of everything you need to do at a high level. Anywhere you can think of a smaller substep, fill that in.
Then when you are having trouble getting motivated, try to find one of the subtasks that you know how to do from your outline, tackle that, and hopefully that will give you momentum for a more challenging subtask.
Another strategy is just to make sure you are taking advantage of Google and all of the existing solutions out there.
And another thing, as far as the brain's available powers, having fuel is important. So things like skipping breakfast seem very questionable if you need to do heavy mental work in the morning. Coffee can help you get started a bit sometimes.
First thing I will mention is that my understanding is that your brain has a finite amount of energy/processing power available over the day or within a certain period. So if you can reduce some mental or physical energy expenditure from other things (for example, commuting takes a lot out of me personally) you may have more energy available for hard problems.
Another thing is that there are specific skills/strategies that are useful for solving hard problems. The biggest one is decomposing problems into smaller tasks. And I guess that OOP is now still unpopular these days with various groups, but object-oriented design has been a big help for me in terms of breaking larger problems down into subproblems and organizing information. That is a skill that you can practice and get better at.
The most basic way to decompose things is just to start typing a list of everything you need to do at a high level. Anywhere you can think of a smaller substep, fill that in.
Then when you are having trouble getting motivated, try to find one of the subtasks that you know how to do from your outline, tackle that, and hopefully that will give you momentum for a more challenging subtask.
Another strategy is just to make sure you are taking advantage of Google and all of the existing solutions out there.
And another thing, as far as the brain's available powers, having fuel is important. So things like skipping breakfast seem very questionable if you need to do heavy mental work in the morning. Coffee can help you get started a bit sometimes.