You know, I just might. The "don't get frustrated" pill seems more in line with my preferences than a "be willing to play hurt" pill. The last time I tried - well, "was pushed into" is more accurate than "tried" - filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.

Incidentally, I'm a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.

Another note: I've generally found that, when I "work hard" at something, I'm usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months' worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as "lazy." I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don't trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)

The only emotion that I've found that really motivates me to do things I don't normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I'll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to "design" digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.