Today I came through a blog which explained through his programming journey from introduction to programming to landing a job at Google and I found it pretty motivating for a lot of people.
Having concrete reasons/guideline is immensely helpful so I am through this post trying to crowd-source a compilation of such motivational journey (not necessary for job though, journey to ICPC WF for example,etc). Comment links and i'll add the links here in the main section.
I am super glad that you found it motivating! :)
My Competitive Programming Journey To Google by Slow_But_Determined
"It’s like Competitive Programming helps your thinking of how a component in a software works and doing projects helps your thinking of how those components come together. Developing both types of thinking is critical." This got me lit awesome :D!