A key thing for motivation is finding a way to see benefits right away.

Now that we've got people volunteering on GiveGetWin, I've become super sensitive to it. Sometimes we all put in a bit of work to get a new provider/deal up, and it's really exciting -- but for whatever reason, launching it gets pushed back a while.

I see that that sets people's morale and happiness back quite a bit.

It's like, "oh, I did all that work, and nothing came of it" -- whereas that's not really the case, because usually the same work gets used a couple weeks later when we do get underway, but the mind doesn't work like that.

I wasn't sensitive enough to this before, even though it impacts me too. When I see benefits right away, I'm more likely to stay engaged and on-track. When they're very delayed, motivation tends to be lower. This, even if you're aware of the phenomenon and generally try to be far-sighted.

Due to loss aversion, people tend to be much more sensitive to losses than gains. Much moreso.

So, it can be interesting to model how people react to losses and potential losses and contrast that to how they react to gains and potential gains.

The first thing we can look at are incremental progressive results -- that's adding 30 minutes of focused work to your day on the most important project you've got in your life, vs. adding in eating a stack of candy bars in one sitting a couple times a week.

With either of those actions, you don't see much big change immediately. But the person who regularly chips away at important projects winds up with a huge stack of interesting things they've done and further opportunities to do more, plus greater pride in their work and enhanced quality of life. Whereas going through a stack of candy bars doesn't hurt so much immediately, but leads to lower energy and more lethargy and worse overall health and feeling over time.

People are quite bad at this. Hence, most people don't devote regular time to an important project that they're passionate about. And the obesity rates in the developed world are rising rapidly.

Noah Gibbs is an author, speaker, lead developer at OnLive, paid Rails expert for Carnegie Mellon, and author of lots of Ruby on Rails software. To promote his GiveGetWin deal, Noah sat down with me to share some incredible insights about working with deep knowledge, how empathy and understanding the user/customer is the path to success in business, and covering many other important insights. If you're a programmer, you'll love Noah's perspective and insights. If you're not a programmer, this might be one of the more insightful interviews you read about why people do programming, and about thriving in a technical skill and business in general.

Building Ruby Castles In The Clouds by Noah Gibbs, as told to Sebastian Marshall

I grew up in the middle of nowhere in East Texas, with nothing there but a state penitentiary. So I had a lot of time with a computer. No internet. Just my Apple II computer, and long stretches of time. They say you need long stretches of uninterrupted time to program.

I had that.

I program because… programming is building castles in the cloud. Concepts on top of concepts. Except that the computer is there to check you -- it's all mental and conceptual, until you find out whether it works or not.

If you're just starting to try to sell, negotiate, recruit, or do anything of high significant with people you don't already have a warm introduction to, at some point you're going to get hit with a barrage of objections and "cross-examination."

You'll very likely fumble the first time or two it happens, and might get demoralized.

Don't.

It's a tremendously good sign. When people are very seriously interested, they hit you with questions from all sorts of angles related to risk and details you haven't thought through before. You might not have great answers on the fly, and you might lose whatever deal or sale or input you're looking for.

But it's actually a tremendous milestone. It means you get real tangible points to work on and get better answers to. And it means people are interested in what you're doing.

Learning about negotiation is one of those culture-shocking things. You start seeing underlying patterns and trends in life.

It can be painful for a while, when you see all the things that went poorly, that you did wrong, or techniques and tactics that were used against you in the past.

It can also be pretty damn exciting, because then you start to feel armed and equipped. A lot of things in life are negotiable, far more than most people think. And the vast majority of negotiation gives you options to have pleasant interactions that both sides walk away feeling good from, especially if you're savvy about it.

But some negotiation techniques that work effectively aren't really honorable under most conceptions of honor, aren't good to the other side, and... yet can be highly effective.

One of those that goes by many different names is the "nibble" or the "chisel" -- as soon as you have agreement in principle, or even a contract signed already, they'll push to get a bit more, and more, and more.

I remember being shocked one day at a comment on Hacker News that cited a study saying the most common successful conclusion to depression.

To give you a hint, it wasn't any particular medication or therapy.

Rather, the most common way depression ends is through "spontaneous recovery" -- where a person gets better for no seemingly particular reason, the mix of thoughts and chemicals having run their course.

I'm nursing a minor tenderness in my elbow right now. Tweaked it lifting weights. I know it'll heal in a few days, so I just plan around doing lower body work and maybe doing more cardio or crunches for a few days. There's no need to obsess over it, it'll be better in a few days.

But how often do we take that same approach when something is holding us down mentally? Perhaps in a particularly bad procrastination cycle, or feeling uncreative and uninspired, not doing great work, or something along those lines?

Focus.

Focus is absolutely essential, and lack of focus is one of the largest things that holds people back. Sometimes it makes sense to go through unfocused periods and experiment a lot, but once you can get laser-focused on a single area, you can get immense amounts done on that.

So okay, let's say you get the focus epiphany and want to get there, but you've got 10 things going on.

Now what?

Well, you might want to let 7 or 8 of those 10 areas burn while you get only the most important handled and closed out.

Whenever you try to understand how a situation unfolded, it gets filtered through your own beliefs and biases.

This is equally true when you're trying to figure out what happened during the Roman Republic, if you're trying to make sense of what's happening with a particular part of the economy, or if you're analyzing a conflict you got into with another individual last week.

Even if you've got the exact same facts, you'll focus on them to different extents and assign them different weights. It's an easy way to score a laugh when you point out a fundamentalist who is so committed to a position that they ignore entire sets of facts inconvenient to them, but we all do a lesser version of that all the time.

It's hard -- really, really, really hard -- to even get somewhat outside of your narrative and to understand something from another person's point of view. Even fully bearing this in mind, and trying to do it, it's still near impossible.

But it's worth trying to do, anyways. It's worth constantly remembering. Your story about what happened is heavily filtered. Maybe it's more right than the other person's -- you obviously think it is, which is why it's your story -- but their story would make a lot of sense if you were them.

It's nice to buy things that are durable, even if they're more expensive.

I bought a couple pairs of jeans about six months ago in China. They were cheap and looked perfectly fine, and were just as comfortable as any other jeans, but they just don't have underlying quality of materials, construction, and workmanship to last a long time. They're already both starting to fall apart.

Meanwhile, you might pick up designer jeans that cost 5x as much as inexpensive clothing, but they'll potentially last you 3-5 years. 

While a lot of branding doesn't add value, the nice thing about brands is that they have a reputation to live up to that they've invested quite heavily in. When you buy no-name products from people you're unlikely to do a further transaction with who also don't have an underlying pride in their workmanship -- you're going to get stuff that falls apart fast.

When you look at the cost pro-rated over an item's lifetime, often the more expensive goods offer better value. It's useful to look for things that aren't too subject to fashion cycles and get a solid version that'll last you a half decade or more.