For me it was hardly achievable project. I was thinking it is just impossible and I need to fail with dignity :)
After achieving the prototype it was tested... absolutely world record ever in rock cutting!!!
Despite my peers still didn't believe for my mind it was a breakthrough... I did always believe in myself a little bit, but the fantastic unexpected result gave me the most motivation ever.
You have to love the whole process to be able to keep going - the journey can be really beautiful or really dark at different times and you need to believe in what you are doing for its own sake. Research has to be a passion, not just a job. You want to be successful but you also want to fail sometimes in order to sharpen your mind and to motivate you to keep trying - if you succeed too much, you get complacent and start to feel like it does not present enough of a challenge to be worth your time and love.
The best feelings for me come from generating a new idea and quickly writing it down before I forget the details. After the whole process, the occasional rewards help keep me motivated as well - praise from colleagues is great, as is the occasional major dopamine hit you get from a journal acceptance letter (which I got yesterday).
The stage that hits you hard, it is most enriching; for example, during my research process, when data collection became so much difficult for me due to many reasons; but, if I look back, then I learned a lot through interaction with people during interviews for my qualitative study; and I liked data collection the most.
To me the real motivation is the belief that your research can make a difference either in advancing the subject area being researched, in having a positive impact on the industry, the environment or society.
Well the word "research" is itself a motivation. I personally feel satisfaction is key parameter which led to all as you mentioned - Some people derive motivations from new ideas, others from success and good results, others from failure and others from successful work.
Thank you Tomasz Rybak , Albert E. Patterson , Nazia Asad , Messaoud Saïdani , Manish Kumar Dubey , Hamidreza Javidrad very much for sharing interesting experiences and opinions
When performing research, what motivates me most is to raise, say, "irritating" questions or doubts. What I call irritating questions has a double meaning. I think that a question is irritating when its answser advances knowledge and leads us to a better knowlelge of the unknown. In a metaphorical sense, irritating questions are just irritating because they challenge established and widely accepted truths, the status quo or the mainstream. Of course, "sacred cows" in any domain of knowlegde, the satus quo and the mainstream do not like irritating and new questions and doubts because they challenge, say, their authoritarian power in the sense that they think of themselves as if they were the owners of the truth. Galileo was as a telling example of someone who raised irritating questions (will it be that the geocentric theory is wrong?) and, say, irritated those (e.g., Church) who did not want to accpet that they were wrong and that the geocentric theory should be replaced by thet heliocentric theory. As see it, one's ability to raise irritating doubts and questions lies at the heart of all great minds, scientists and thinkers. Of couree, I feel good and motivated when in the research process I see that the results I get are compatible with the questions, propositions and hypothesis I raised.