What motivates you?

I like to find out everything about Discoverer, Application Server, SQL and so on. Because of this, I like to have some quiet time to myself to figure things out, to do my what-if analysis, and to try out all those little ideas that popped into my mind since the last time I had some quiet time. This ability to have such leeway in my work really motivates me, but does it make me a geek? Probably. However, what motivates me might not be the same as what motivates you.

A very interesting article entitled Top 10 ways to motivate geeks (link) was posted today on The Retrospector blog. I think the author hits on most of the important ways, but not necessarily in the right order for me. Number 6, though, is an interesting concept because I for one do like to pick up meaningless items at conferences. I can't be the only one either because everyone I saw leaving the recent Collaborate and Kaleidoscope conferences, in Nashville and Washington respectively, had bags crammed with goodies.

So what motivates you? Feel free to take a look at the article and add a posting.

Incidentally, I uncovered another article entitled Top 10 ways to demotivate geeks (link) which also makes for interesting reading.