Motivation: When recently taking a "personality assessment", the results confirmed what I had always thought. It reports that my three motivational factors are as follows:

Money.

Challenge.

Freedom.

Dilbertization: Don't get me wrong, I love Dilbert, as do most people in technology-related fields. However, I don't love Dilbert enough to want to live like Dilbert. Prime examples:

"The Magic Box": I've sat through countless meetings (which are bad enough to begin with), listening to how I should create a magic box. This box should be able to do anything the user asks of it, even if it isn't known at design time. If anyone wants to add more features to the "magic box", they should be able to do so within the GUI itself -- even though these features aren't known yet. On top of this, the "magic box" should be totally self-supporting -- It should require 0 maintenance for anything. No matter what happens, including changes to the file system, operating system, or server, the box should automatically be able to adapt to whatever has changed, and continue running.

"I told you so": There have been many instances in which people have made suggestions as to how the code-specific portions of the application should execute (From those who would never have to use the code,mind you). I've had many suggestions which were bad, and at the time explained why they were bad, only to still be stuck coding it out anyway. After it's done, they realize the warnings I had given were true, and decide to scrap the idea after all (After my time has been wasted drafting something I knew wouldn't work to begin with). A prime example of this is someone who recently made a suggestion that I store the executable files within a database, instead of on the file system like every other rational individual. I've explained that the code needs to be ran very frequently, and that every time it would need to be ran, it would have to be extracted from the database, a directory created for it, the file stored within the directory, executed, and then the file and directory removed from the file system (as opposed to leaving it stored in the file system, and executing when needed). Although my point was taken, I'm still in the process of drafting out this idea, "and if it's as slow as we think we'll ditch it."