How do you keep yourself motivated?

I usually listen to motivational playlists on Spotify when I'm down

Yes I feel this pain all the time. My drive goes up and down.

I allow myself some rest - tell myself that I'll do absolutely nothing work-related today so that I have energy tomorrow. Sometimes the other way round - I'll work hard right now and will get the results needed so that I can read something not work-related in the evening. I recharge during the weekends and when I am active physically. So when I know there's yoga, dance class of vocal class I'll have to miss if I don't do something, it helps me get things done.

As a bootstrapped founder, I look at my dwindling bank account as motivation. I also look at my family and remember that I'm doing this for them. For some reason, negativity is a great motivator for me personally.

Being with my family recharges me

I find the best solution is to remove yourself from what you normally do. Escaping to exercise, meet up with someone, or do something creative are my outlets. I have recently taken to meditation and highly recommend it. All of these outlets give you a sense of grounding and have a recharging effect. When complete, I find myself ready to press forward.

I've been doing the thing where I have 1 main goal for each day. Makes things more manageable. And often I find that one goal turns into three goals, and they all get accomplished. I also am into reminding myself what I'm grateful for every morning. Even just one thing.

I have done a lot of research on this via my passion project www.magic-middle.com where I interview CEO's and sports coaches. There are many right answers, but my favorite is managing MOMENTUM. It goes up and down but there is always a little nugget of progress, you just need to call attention to it. For example, today we hit a snag with a key part of our product, but that also brought some clarity to the root cause of the issue we had been seeing for a week now. It was frustrating and felt like progress was not being made. With the team all on a video call, I brought a calming attitude and focused on re-iterating what I was hearing to make sense of a complex situation. Then I found another aspect of our company that made huge progress right at this same time. That was not only motivating, it brought energy and momentum to the frustrating thing we were working on.

Running has helped! Whenever i find that I cannot solve a problem or I lose steam, I try to get a run in and that helps bring me back.

Just get feedback from the people you are doing your work for. Take their smile, take the shared passion, and listen. Take it as compliment that they share, work, critic your ideas. That is where I get my motivation from, every day. And believe me, I already got a lot of days behind me :-) but more to come. It is not the understanding that shapes us; it is experience. Go for it!