Hey all! After 70,000 hits and 2 1/2 years, I have kind of lost my motivation to turk. Has anyone else been through this? I used to jump for joy and be all excited when I would have $80-100 days and would be consistent with it because of how happy it made me. Now I am more like "I hope I hit $40 soon so I can do something else." If you have been through this, how did you get your motivation back?

*Sorry for my terrible grammar :)

 

I have been missing for a long while. I have decided this is my New Years Resolution to Turk daily not when I could fit it in. It could be just for an hour, but I am determined to put this first daily. I am starting early and hope by New Year's Day, it will be a habit. I am very fortunate I have the opportunity to work at home, from my laptop in bed while in my pjs, in the kitchen when I am cooking, etc. The alternative of getting a job outside the home doesn't appeal to me one bit at my age 50+. I've always hated office politics and I am not afraid to speak my mind, so, working from home is perfect for me. I hope you can get your spark back soon. If you can live with making $40 daily, then shoot for that and enjoy life. Good luck to you and welcome.

 

A bit of skill with introspection and metacognition is needed, so that you can look within yourself and understand your own past and current motivators.

It seems to me that although you made good progress and landed well above what most Turkers are capable of, you hit a plateau. People generally don't get excited by anything they've grown accustomed to. That's why lottery winners have surprisingly-high rates of depression, and it's one of the reasons why people throw away perfectly-good marriages. Status isn't what gets the juices flowing - potential and progress are.

There's a quiet world of Turkers out there who earn more than $80-$100/day, and there are some who expand on their mTurk-related skills to build bigger things (i.e., @ChrisTurk and his creation and operation of the site you're on right now). So it might help you simply to recognize that your own personal ceiling is not an absolute ceiling across the mTurk world. In spite of your years of experience, there are obviously still quite a few things to learn and do.

I'm very biased in this matter, but in the absence of any other particular direction, I suggest using mTurk as a platform to learn web programming. I'm coming out with my own course to help Turkers learn code in the next couple of months. If this path piques your interest but you'd prefer to get started right away, Colt Steele has a great course that eases people into web development with no prior experience.

mTurk is also a sampler of sorts for all types of online work. Many of these (i.e., transcription) are jobs where you can improve your skills and earn consistently more than you would on the mTurk platform. So that's a path to consider, as well. If you're enterprising enough, speak to requesters on a personal level, and do great work, you might be able to make a name for yourself and sway some of them to hire you outside of the platform at a higher wage. Fiverr is another place where you can really make a name for yourself if you set out to manifest your potential.