How to motivate yourself to work on your side hustle

If you're anything like me you have a side hustle. You work on it when you can, you enjoy it - its your hobby. But if you're anything like me then there's also this thing called life that can "get in the way".
Now, this is normal and it doesn't mean you aren't doing well in the other parts of your life. Once in a while you get randomly inspired to "do something"... maybe you watched some clip posted on Facebook, or the latest Gary Vaynerchuk rant and you decide to do something about it. For me that was to start with a post on this blog, with some intention to do some follow up work, and then blog about the follow up work.
Blog gets posted, you decide to do the follow up work where you can, nothing substantial finishes ergo no follow up post. Looking at my history I posted more regularly during 2014 and 2015, 2016 was a hiatus and in 2017 is a singular post. This post was one of "those" moments.

Motivation as a boost

Now, trying to motivate yourself in terms of hyping you up to get into your flow and get stuff done is quite a google-able task. This form of motivation as a boost may be the stage you are dealing with currently and may well be all you need to get back into it. For me, this happens in cycles and this is normal for most people and goes with the regular ebb and flow of life. The problem is when you have gone through this cycle several times and the boost motivation has got you progressing a whole lot of things over time, but you haven't finished any of them.

At this point you may think you're looking for an even bigger boost but what you are looking for is actually not more of a boost, it's quite the opposite in fact, you need to strip things down and go back to original purpose.

Motivation for life purpose

This may seem daunting, but trying to find motivation towards your life purpose does not necessarily mean you have to have found your life's purpose - that could take a lifetime to find - but whatever your life purpose ends up being you need to know how to get motivation from it and use that motivation towards it. So we need to scale things back a bit here, perhaps it may not be your root life purpose, but it could be understanding the true purpose for your side hustle anyways.
This is where you could say its for your family, or you want to achieve x, or be as good as y person. That's not super motivating (if it is stop here and GO). But once you are here there's 2 paths to go down. 1: Emotional and 2: Functional.

Let me break that down real quick.

Emotional assessment of the true purpose for your side hustle

Explore a few things in your head (depending on what you chose as the reason for your side hustle) maybe its for yourself or a loved one or a random, regardless, consider both never in your life ever achieving that goal, then take it further and imagine it being worse. Now also imagine the life where you did achieve this goal, then take it further and imagine achieving it instantly, at a reasonable time and at an extremely long time frame (without it being unattainable).

Thanks... so what was the point of this?

Well, at best, you have gone deep enough to validate your reasons and quell your excuses for now, at least enough to go back to "motivation as a boost" and finding your nearest inspirational video, watch it and take some action... and at worst you have confirmed the level of seriousness and or criticality of this goal.

If the criticality or seriousness is not too high then this would explain why the emotional motivator was not enough. Lets now continue on to the functional approach to assessing the true purpose for your side hustle.

Functional assessment of the true purpose for your side hustle

What does this even mean? Well, what you want to do here is reverse engineer from the "why" how you would achieve that. Do you end up back at your actions being the original side hustle? For example, you decide to work on an app as a side hustle, you've now defined that the true purpose for your side hustle is to give yourself some financial freedom.

Start from this point and logically think out the steps that lead you back to working on an app as a side hustle. If it aligns this is where you become specific and think about it in such detail that you can break it down to individual tasks that need to get done to progress to the goal. For the example it could be selecting the color theme of the logo.

Hopefully this does one of 2 things at this point. First you have broken down things to where you could spend the next day selecting the color theme of the logo and have peace that you are actually doing something that helps achieve the goal and feels super easy, leading onto gaining some momentum and motivation. OR it lets you re define your side hustle and takes you back to square one, breaking your motivation cycle.

Bringing it back

So does any of what I have said so far made sense to you? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't feel free to discuss. This is one of those things that are an ongoing life battle with no wrong or right answers as long as it works for you in the end.

How I'll be specifically applying this and the area which I will be focusing on is my side hustle as an app developer. I've decided now to focus back on 10UP 2.0 and build out full functionality for it using Unity 5. This will be both an Android and iPhone release (and hopefully more!)

My why is for multiple reasons: 

1. to develop more skills and expand my experience as an app developer and an engineer
2. complete a game I found fun so that my future kids can enjoy it
3. generate additional income to provide some financial freedom for my wife and family

Lastly, I would also like to help other upcoming engineers out, sharing my knowledge and discussing current engineering issues and trends. This is why I have made the decision to commit to SarioDev and am now the proud owner of the domain sariodev.com

I will use the development of 10Up as a kind of muse for the blog and discuss more and more topics on the back of this project.

Accountability is good, documenting is good, and practicing communication skills is another positive part of developing as an engineer.

So with that, I wish you all good luck in your careers and get back on your side hustle

Rejected Basketball App ready for NBA Playoffs

Here's the latest update of  the Rejected Basketball App. After spending some time developing and learning Unity 5 I've finally got in some physics to make the game work. I'm quite impressed with the ability to export to multiple platforms and I've now tested on both iPhone and Android.

So far I've built some sprites, used the splicer got in a backboard and a ring, tracking for the ball going through the hoop for scoring. I've got in colliders for counting blocks made by the player and the jumping of the main character. I got in some basic animations for the basketball, the main character sprite, the net for the ball swishing through.

If you see the screenshot of the game above, its coming together, but I would like to bring the crowd alive. My next post I'll share how I'm going to do this.

Next up I'm going to revamp all the graphics. Which is becoming more important as I start to promote the Rejected App. Check out the Facebook Page.

If you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Building Mobile Apps with Unity 5

The next addition to the SarioDev Apps suite is coming soon and this time, this app will have a game engine behind it to bring a better game experience.

After learning mobile development in iOS, Android and Windows it's come to a point where time consumption becomes more and more prevalent. In this case I need a solution with one code base that is compatible with all the platforms I want to target.

So enter Unity 5. I decided on Unity 5 because of 3 simple reasons; firstly, it's currently free! (Unless I make over $100k with app in fiscal year - here's hoping), next it can deploy to all platforms and lastly I can develop in C#.

I've started learning with the following tutorial titled "cloney bird" - which I've found very useful.

I'll be updating here with some graphics and progress. If I use any other tutorials I'll include it as well.

For the curious, if you've made it this far, the next app will be titled "Shot Blocker" and will be initially available on Android.

IN 5 Coming to iPhone

Tomorrow marks the day when development of IN 5 for iPhone begins !
Definitely looking forward to it. But how did I finally get to the stage where I was ready to start developing it?

After previously reviewing the possibility of learning Swift I decided to just start building with Objective-C. As I've started learning XCODE and using the Apple side of development I'm starting to build some level of familiarity with it. Of course my experience has primarily been in C# for Windows Platform and Java for Android. The development approach is more similar in these 2 in comparison with iPhone.

What I must say is that I have adapted to the storyboard approach and segue/view controllers etc and as IN 5 is a minimalist app I should have no problems building the skeleton. The design and theme are built in the Android version so IN 5 should be coming soon.

If you don't know what IN 5 is you can check it out here on SarioDev Apps site and if you have an Android device you can download it on the Android Play Store.

Happy developing all!

Apple's Swift. Good timing for SarioDev Apps to adopt?

Apple announced their new programming language Swift to replace Objective C.

I was seeing some developers unhappy about this but to consider the situation for SarioDev Apps, one factor for no iOS apps as yet (among others) was learning objective C.

After reading the article released by The Next Web it got me thinking that this could be a great opportunity to bring 10Up or IN5 to the iPhone.

Perhaps it's good that I hadn't started development on iOS yet.

Anyone else have thoughts on Swift and Apples move to change?

As reported by The Next Web,

Here’s what developers think about Apple’s new Swift programming language http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/06/03/developers-apples-swift-huge-potential/