Intrapersonal comparisons: you might be doing it wrong.

Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation.

A variant of this exercise is taking any handicap you might have and wildly exaggerating it. I suffer from mild Carpal Tunnel (or something masquerading as CT) which makes progress in programming slow. When I feel down about this fact I imagine how hard programming would be without hands.

You have recreated the ancient Stoic mind-hack called negative visualization. The phrase is googleable, if you want to find out more.

On an tangential note - my and my mother's wrist pain dramatically reduced after replacing the regular mouse with a ball mouse. I felt additional benefits when I got a touch screen laptop which largely eliminated mousing. My mother's wrist pain additionally reduced after regularly doing negative-pull-ups. (I did the pull ups too, but didn't notice any pain reduction - although my grip strength seemed to returned to what it was pre-pain and possibly higher.)

Also, they sell funny keyboards now that radically alter typing ergonomics (some even divide the keyboard into two parts so you can put hands far apart) which I've never used, but want to try to get rid of the last little vestigial twinges of pain I sometimes get.

Maybe you've tried everything, but if you have not my experience leads me to believe that wrist pain (especially due to excessive programming) is one of those things where if you really try multiple workarounds, you can eventually eliminate or mitigate it, and it's very much worth doing considering how much wrist pain disincentives work.

(Counterpoint - my wrist pain flared up when I was in college and doing a lot of assignments at once on a little laptop, and was so acute that the ulnar styloid was red and warm to touch when I started frantically trying ways to fix it, so this might just be regression to the mean and/or minor reductions in computer use since then)

I knew someone in college without hands. He was still able to type and use a mouse with his wrists. He even had a cellphone. Practice can fix a lot of shortcomings.

"Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation."

Isaac Levi one of the founders of formal epistemology does something similar called "Mild Contractions". From the title of one of his books

"Mild Contraction: Evaluating Loss of Information Due to Loss of Belief". His epistemology constructed from decision theory is very advanced if not the most advanced.

http://www.amazon.com/Mild-Contraction-Evaluating-Information-Belief-ebook/dp/B00DZO8P4G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424401748&sr=1-1&keywords=mild+contraction

I noticed a similar tendency in myself a while back - whenever I saw somebody who was both succesful and young, I'd do a mental calculus in my head to see if I could "catch up", and I'd get bummed if I couldn't (similar to you comparing yourself to a you that had more advantages).

I adopted a similar mindset of "wow, if they can do it that fast, look how much time I have to become successful" - essentially seeing that yes, I could get much further faster if I used their techniques.

I suffer from mild Carpal Tunnel (or something masquerading as CT) which makes progress in programming slow. When I feel down about this fact I imagine how hard programming would be without hands.

This book solved my crippling carpal tunnel syndrome, FWIW.