I am beginning to realize what motivates most of my pursuits is an interest organizing information. Most projects I start are tools that help organize and present information.
I like the shiny new tool (even if it's ancient it may be new to me). I like to play with it, see what it can do, what it can't do, and then try to make something with it. Right now, I'm playing with Bash builtins, experimenting with the idea of a handle with a persistent state that can be accessed and modified to do things you might not otherwise do in a Bash script.