For what it's worth, I've been attempting to switch the pathway in my mind about creativity and side projects from depression to rage/wrath. I've played the victim for so long that people really don't want to hear about it anymore. I've basically exhausted every opportunity for procrastination and ineffectualness and still find myself stagnant in my early 40s.

In my case, I wanted to build a gaming PC so I could learn Unity. I forced myself to do the research and find articles about which parts to buy and how to assemble them. I don't even want to think about how long that process took. Maybe 6 months? A year?

Finally I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably make a mistake, but I have some money saved which means that I could afford to. I broke down and bought all the parts one day a couple weeks ago:

https://techbuyersguru.com/1500-ultra-compact-mini-itx-gamin...

Note: get a normal 2.5" SSD (I got a 1 TB Crucial/Micron because they're based out of my town) because you need the M.2 port if you want to use an HTC Vive with their new wireless adapter:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2RP77A2...

I also upgraded to a Corsair 600 Watt power supply and paid $10 more for a Be Quiet! SILENT WINGS fan.

It turned out that all of my questions about where to plug in cables were answered by the manuals or labeled. You can use the included 8 pin to split 6+2 pin power supply cable on the GTX 2070 for example. Building a PC turned out to be easier than when I was repairing Macs at a previous job. I didn't have to mess with the BIOS, I only had to download ethernet and wifi drivers to USB stick for the motherboard after I installed Windows 10.

The point I'm trying to make is that all of the details above turned out not to matter. They only added a slight bit of money and time. In the face of the months I lost sweating over parts, they were inconsequential.

That's how all of the projects in my life have been. I'm classically trained for STEM where there is no room for error. I go to the ends of the Earth to make sure that there are no bugs. But it costs me heavily in terms of my own time and reserves of motivation.

So that's where the rage comes from. Think about all that waste, and that for the most part there is nobody to blame but yourself. Channel that into brutality, and wage war against the hangups and demotivational sessions where you talk yourself out of doing something. Discipline is a negative word and I don't like it, because people use it to make themselves sound better than you. I prefer words like wrath, because you can draw on neglected aspects of your psyche and feel untapped energy reserves. We're so far to one side of a healthy bell curve that it's good for us sometimes to draw from the other side.

If you want an exercise to feel this, do a plank right now on your elbows and toes, keeping your torso parallel with the floor. Start a timer on your phone and you'll feel an anxiety (like holding your breath too long) around the 30 or 45 second mark. When your stomach is about to fall, use rage to bring yourself up to parallel. Each time you begin to fall, roar silently in your own mind with profanity. Feel the endorphins course through your veins. Anyone can do a minute - but going beyond yourself you can do several times that.

Your strength emotion may not be rage (maybe it's gratitude, or forgiveness), but you can still find whatever it is and recruit it to force yourself to take a first step, even if it's devoting a period of time each day towards the first step of your goal. Do it every day for 2 weeks, even if you don't like how it feels, and you will find that channel in your brain become automatic (like part of your subconscious) and probably even forget it by the time the next step is needed.