The single best motivator for me is remembering that I'm going to die one day. I think often about the commencement speech Steve Jobs made in 2005. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.<p>Here's a link: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA</a><p>I still allow myself time to relax/slack off, but if I had intended to only watch a few episodes before getting down to working on something I'm passionate about, and then have the urge to just do the easy thing and keep watching instead of doing whatever I'd planned to do, I remember that my time is slowly running out and if I don't take steps to achieve my dreams now, then I will likely never achieve them before there's no time left.<p>This applies to everything in life, not just work. Travel, falling in love, learning new things--you name it--everything is affected by how limited your time is. Time and your body (there's a direct relationship between them) are the most limited resources you have, and even if you strike it rich you can never rewind the clock. This is what motivates me more than anything else to get shit done. On a related note, once you realize just how limited your time is, you realize how pointless it is to live your life for other people or be constrained by dogma. Anyway, at this point I'm just rehashing the speech, and Jobs says all this much better than I do. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it. If you have seen it, go watch it again and listen very carefully to what he says.