Damn, I feel good
Many years ago, I read the book (and listened to the audio recording) The Goal 
(Goldratt and Cox), a fascinating business book written as a first person story. There are many lessons to be learned from The Goal and its companion tomes by Goldratt. For me, however, the most important lesson is the rule of the goal itself. Stated simply:
Any action that does not take you towards your goal automatically takes you away from goal.
Recently, I forgot this lesson. I could make many excuses. But I won’t. I simply screwed up - big time.
Since I don’t have an employer, and I’m not contracting at the moment, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home (I, very luckily, have a wife who can support me for a short amount of time while I’m not generating a paycheck.) Since we needed some work done on our house, I decided to be cheap and do the work myself.
Bad Idea!
Every time I went to spend time on my spartup ideas, I would fret about the half-finished house-work. And every time I would start to work on the house, I would get very frustrated about doing boring stuff and about how I wasn’t making any progress on my startup project. The result was a viscous downward spiral of unhappiness, frustration, and depression.
I took a psychic kick in the head from my wife to open up my eyes, and remind me of the lesson of the goal. Making the decision to spend the money to have others do the house work (floors, electrical, etc.) and for me to focus on my startup ideas was like drinking 10 cups of espresso in a single sitting.
I’m amazed at my own change of attitude and motivation since I’ve made that decision. I now feel supercharged, and am chomping at the bit to get started. In fact, one of my biggest problems is that I’m now overflowing with ideas that have merit, and I have to choose among the many.
Damn, I feel good!