Motivation, desire to be succesful, discipline. It is something that puzzles me.

When I came out of middle school, my teachers adviced my parents to send me to special education, for people with mild retardedness or severe learning disorders/delays.

Now, 20 years later, I am doing a degree in physics at a top 50 university, and not quite excelling, but doing quite good.

And when I compare myself now to back then and look at my fellow students, it is still a mystery.

Some people just do things for their own sake. Some people are highly talented and have a drive that makes them stack work on top of work. Others are just high achievers. They have done well at anything they tried, so they keep trying to be very good at anything new, as it is normal for them.

There is one girl in particular that mystifies me in that respect. I have deep feelings for her and analyse her every move. But she skips almost anything that is not compulsary. She is very busy in student life/clubs/sonorities and she volenteers in her home town. I don't know what she does with all her time when she skips class. I doubt she is just hanging around, procrastinating. She has this luxurity because she is a genius that needs 1/5 of the effort most people in this physics program need.

But now she is working in her own time, full work days, in the middle of summer. What motivates her? Why she skip so many interesting classes, forcing her to risk a re-exam, when she can just pass it by being genius by just attending the lecture and paying attention half the time. And when I talk to most of my other students, they are beat-down by all the hard stuff they have to master. A lot of the passion about the subject is gone. Not for her. She seems to keep her motivation strong by not using it.

Then there's students who attent every class, fail everything. They must be in self-doubt, in panic-mode. They try their best, and fail. So when they try harder, and fail again, they know even more that this is because they are not smart enough.

I myself feel that my energy is also finite. I can still do it, but it is harder to focus and harder to keep being a high-achiever. I feel I am walking on my toes. But others are in cruise control, it seems. I have to go 3 years more, then 4 years PhD, then 2 to 4 years post-doc, then beg for my first real job, any job, when I am aged 45.
I also feel that I hyper-focus on academics too much and that when I nuture different interests, my academic performance may drop really far really quickly.
I feel like I am achieving above my worth through autism-linked hyperfocus. Without it, most of my classmates are smarter than me, and 10 years younger, and most have better soft skills with 10 years less life experience.

So yeah, it is hard. In the eyes of my fellow students, I am breezing through. But I have come such a long way, and I can't explain where motivation comes from.
I always felt that for most people it came from fear, and greed for money and/or prestige. And I lack, or lacked, both.

I always felt that if I can't be a winner, I won't be a loser when I don't try to be a winner. But now I believe you don't have the freedom to decide that.

Thing is, you say you beat yourself up about it. If you weren't even doing that, then it's truly hopeless. You may be able to reshape your thinking pattern in some way that you don't beat up yourself about it later, because you do care, but use the energy at the right time to get the work done.