Spite Driven Development


There's many things that motivate us, and like tools from a toolbox, we pick the one that we find to be the most appropriate for the occasion.

Spite Driven Development can be a powerful motivator, as long as it's not the only one. SDD essentially works like this: someone slights us, and we resort to proving them wrong by (over)doing exactly the thing that they don't think we can do.
This is all fine, in the short term.



SDD comes with a few caveats:
  1. SDD can feed on resentment and feed resentment equally. Feeding our resentment uncontrollably is an excellent way to end up being miserable
  2. SDD leave us hollow when we've accomplished our mission, because it an external motivation. We won, now what? Maybe the other person moved on or does not care, or even worse they genuinely compliment us!
  3. if we don't succeed we might end up attaching our sense of worth or identity to the thing we are trying to accomplish. It's easy to see that this is not-a-good-thing™
Professionally, I've used SDD several times, always for a short time, and then went back to mastery as my motivation.

In personal life, I've used Habit 2 from the 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People and I have now adopted Farnam Street Annual Review.

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