I also struggle with this, but I think the most important breakthrough I had was that my workflow is ultimately cyclical and practice-driven, and not project-driven.
That is, I may allocate parts of my free time to "doing programming" but the precise nature of it is not that relevant. Some programming is easy and valuable, other programming is dreadfully difficult and fixes a minor bug. I do not know which I will encounter when I "do programming" but I treat it as a course of exercise and try to make something happen during that block of time.
Likewise the act of creating shouldn't wear you down. The personal project is the place where you have the best chance of growing and getting out of your comfort zone, and achieving this growth may mean countering the impulse to immediately chase a project idea with a business plan.
A business is also a kind of machinery - a machinery made of people, their roles and relationships and usage of time and space. It means having two projects, not one, and presuming to allocate your time to "the business" and reap the tangible rewards of it. But in doing that you can kill your motivation since the two projects in combination will quickly start engaging skills you don't have and possibly aren't ready to learn.
When you get to that point, and your attitude to the work becomes "someone needs to pay me to do this," you may want to stop, because then you're engaging with the problem space at the same level as anyone else chasing after money. Good work can be done by mercenaries, but that doesn't mean you're able to "just turn it on" and work on the business because of a hypothetical prospect. You have to have some ability to keep faith in it if you want to last through the "despair" periods, and that limits what you can work on solo. Two or three people working on it can keep their momentum and power through a considerably higher degree of misery - hence your statement about having an easier time at the office.
And that brings me back to the "cycles of practice" idea. It's not that you will never succeed solo, it's that you need to develop a better understanding of yourself and what keeps you in for the long run. The idea may be a good one, but you also need to be the person who can execute on the idea. It's worth continuing your education when and where you can find it - take classes you didn't consider and read books you never thought about - to try to scout out your territory better.
That is, I may allocate parts of my free time to "doing programming" but the precise nature of it is not that relevant. Some programming is easy and valuable, other programming is dreadfully difficult and fixes a minor bug. I do not know which I will encounter when I "do programming" but I treat it as a course of exercise and try to make something happen during that block of time.
Likewise the act of creating shouldn't wear you down. The personal project is the place where you have the best chance of growing and getting out of your comfort zone, and achieving this growth may mean countering the impulse to immediately chase a project idea with a business plan.
A business is also a kind of machinery - a machinery made of people, their roles and relationships and usage of time and space. It means having two projects, not one, and presuming to allocate your time to "the business" and reap the tangible rewards of it. But in doing that you can kill your motivation since the two projects in combination will quickly start engaging skills you don't have and possibly aren't ready to learn.
When you get to that point, and your attitude to the work becomes "someone needs to pay me to do this," you may want to stop, because then you're engaging with the problem space at the same level as anyone else chasing after money. Good work can be done by mercenaries, but that doesn't mean you're able to "just turn it on" and work on the business because of a hypothetical prospect. You have to have some ability to keep faith in it if you want to last through the "despair" periods, and that limits what you can work on solo. Two or three people working on it can keep their momentum and power through a considerably higher degree of misery - hence your statement about having an easier time at the office.
And that brings me back to the "cycles of practice" idea. It's not that you will never succeed solo, it's that you need to develop a better understanding of yourself and what keeps you in for the long run. The idea may be a good one, but you also need to be the person who can execute on the idea. It's worth continuing your education when and where you can find it - take classes you didn't consider and read books you never thought about - to try to scout out your territory better.