I think it’s the riffs for me. learning a full song seemed very boring at the time, and it might be too complicated for a true beginner.
I believe that what creates the motivation has to be something catchy and relatively rapidly rewarding. like “WOW ! I can play something that sound like music already !”
Also I think that a song with very few variations could be a bridge from the riff to the full songs step.
I’ve narrowed it down to
coffee.
I drink coffee…
then about 15-30 minutes later I am like “Hey, let’s get the bass out”
so, biggest motivator is
coffee.
I had a room setup for practice. Now I have my bass in the living room next to the TV so when I’m a potato I can’t help but stare at my bass, which leads me to picking it up and plugging in.
Much more motivated to play when it’s at the front of my mind.
I have an amp in the living room too with phones plugged in the back.
As already said by others, playing full songs is the most motivating thing for me as well.
Riffs do a great job at getting the ball rolling and hyping you up, but playing full songs (no matter how easy) it’s what gives me the “damn, I’m actually doing it!”. B2B was a fantastic tool in that sense with bite-sized technical foundations and riffs to hype you up, giving you the confidence to then adventure into playing full songs, as Josh also suggests from time to time during the course.
To articulate a bit more, (and maybe it’s kinda of an obvious thing but) as a beginner (started in February), I find it extremely motivating and rewarding to go back to songs or riffs that I learned some time ago and realize how much easier they are now, or how much better they sound now simply because my technique has improved in the time being.
A prime example in B2B would be the obvious Billie Jean: veeeery hard at first, going back at it after few months makes you feel much more in control. Yay!
I think with the supervision of a teacher having these “controlled challenges” is a very nice way to keep the motivation high and to have a clear before/after when one gets the hang of it. Imho in a face-to-face or 1:1 setting this works even better, because the teacher can immediately give feedback and keep the student on the right track. The teacher can also suggest songs/riffs that are a “right” challenge for the student’s current skill level or for a specific technique aspect that the student wants to improve on, which can be an hard task to do all by yourself, especially as a beginner.
My bass teacher broke his lessons up into 3 parts & the practicing done at home between lessons was also divided into those 3 parts.
What Josh put together and his easy way of encouraging me to move through the material rather than trying to perfect each lesson worked at first. Then when I felt like I was actually learning something I wanted feedback. That is one thing you cannot really get in an online lesson.
I started in-person lessons by showing what I was having fun with from the online lessons and my instructor encouraged me to start learning whole songs and playing along with them. Once I saw I could do that I started progressing more quickly. In between, my instructor gave me some things I could do to become more familiar with the fret board and quickly identify all the notes.
Picking up the Bass nearly every day even if for only a few minutes makes a big difference.
Small goals towards larger goals was big for me. Josh does that very well in B2B course.
Riffs are always cool, too, or “bass grooves” in general. Do NOT drop Bach’s Cello Suite intro onto a new student lmao. I had a private tutor do this and it was hugely frustrating haha.
Now it’s like “This is fun” of course 
This sounds like a good teacher!
Mine too, I liked that strategy, especially when the theory blurs into the fun stuff.
Lots of responses so didn’t read all of them. For me it was learning a song that used something I was shown to play. Like octaves or basic blues walk.
He used to be a professor so that’s typical for an academic
Do these still happen? I’ve been following a guitar channel on YouTube for a couple of years now. The guy periodically posts a backing track and invites people to record a solo/jam. He then creates a montage of them (if they are more than about a min long, they usually get cut back). It’s up to #7 and I’ve done all but the 1st one. The first time I posted, I was really nervous and still get the jitters when recording, but it challenges me to move out of my comfort zone and learn new things - eg this time I used the whammy bar for the first time (it wasn’t my best take, but I couldn’t help but smile when I watched that bit).
Knowing what keeps a newby motivated is fantastic. One of my boys started to learn guitar at school and I was really hopeful I was going to have a jam buddy. The school left us to believe we needed to supply the guitar and assumed they would be using acoustic so that’s what we got him. Turns out they had 3/4 size electric and they were easier for him to play so he didn’t want to practice at home. They also insisted on getting them to try to play chords which I didn’t agree with (but didn’t tell him). There was no single note tunes/riffs so I tried to show him a couple, but for him “Dad isn’t a teacher so what would I know” (ouch). I think everyone finds chords challenging to begin with and the challenge was enough to make him not want to continue. At the time, I had owened a guitar for years, but never really played it consistently. I think my son seeing me not getting that far and the school only really playing chords was enough for him to stop.
He’s now pretty much obsessed with video games after all the extended lockdowns they did in Melbourne, Australia. He couldn’t visit friends so they’d just play online games together.
If I could encourage him to try again one day, it would be on electric guitar, with single note riffs (with some distortion and delay) and some power chords (with distortion). All played to some basic backing tracks. Then maybe he could try my bass and lay down some groves and maybe that would keep him interested. The other thing that might work, would be to find another child of similar age that is learning as well and maybe they could become jam buddies. As a teenager, I started to learn guitar and had two friends that had recently started as well. Unfortunately they both moved away and with it went my interest.
This is a great topic, I’m going to write down some of these ideas. I struggle for motivation and I’m often too tired when I have time to practice.
These do not still happen, but there should be a topic out there?
Here’s this:
I don’t have the bandwidth for taking submissions and editing them, but as an exercise to just play and hear what other people play, it was fun!
@Gio beat me to the answer. No, no longer happening (for now), but I am sure you can find the original tracks in the thread Gio mentioned, and then try for yourself to come up with bass lines to those tracks.
And perhaps someone might want to revive the idea. To make things a bit easier, one could just use drum tracks/loops (i.e., no chords) and maybe stipulate some “restrictions”, such as “use pentatonics”, “stay within the dorian scale” etc.
This, plus digging down into theory and reading music.