Keeping Motivated

What do you do to keep yourself motivated in chess / chess studies?!

Personally I go to a chess club every week and I strive to get to the top of the club. I may never get there... there always seems to be at least one who is better, but that's my goal. I have another goal -- to win the club championship. Again, I may never get there, but that is another goal of mine.

So my answer is basically "keep focus on the goal"... or set one and then focus on it. If you really want that goal, you get motivated to improve/study.

What keeps you going?

Thank you so much BQ! That's enlightening.
I'll need to cut down on rated games even for a short while as I know it's the rating thing that's demotivating me. I'll spend more on studies than play.

Also, I'm itching to open Silman's HTRYC 4th Ed, so I need to finish Amateur's Mind asap, lest they'll both gather dust in the shelf (my habit!).

These things I guess overwhelm me to the point of self destruct.

For some reason this thread 'motivated' me more:
https://icsdiscussion.forumotion.net/t58-are-we-all-old-and-male.

I hope they'll all doin ok and bring back the noise here along with BQ!

You have to let go of rating concerns. If you play to increase your rating, you will play badly. This is what happened to me anyway. I used to think about rating too much and it caused me to be over-stressed and I played really bad.

There is only one good motivation for playing chess.

To have fun!!

Enjoy the game for the fun of it! Ignore the rating, it will take care of itself. Just play the game and enjoy it. If you can't do that, you shouldn't really bother with chess imo.