Excellence is a habit, but so is failure

The habit to form is “making wise choices”. We dramatize and complicate this mostly because it is stimulating to do so, which gets reinforced via confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. We also seem to enjoy moralizing what is “wise” for other people more than keeping our attention where it belongs.

It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you’ll be thankful you did XYZ when you’re at the end of your life. Sometimes that’s going to be a “yes”, even for “unwise” choices, but most people who actually engage with this will find that most of the honest answers are “no”.

It’s not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.

> And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework.

Why not build a framework? At this point, you might be a subject-matter expert of frameworks!

You know what you like and how you want to use it.

> When you’re obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10.

You have to lose 10 at some point. The way you're putting it, it looks like losing weight would be some kind of drastic sprint with a finish line. I don't think it can happen that way. You have to lose weight and continuing changing your habit to lose 10 more, and the others 10 after, until it stabilises at healthy weight, then you start your healthy life, but it's not a finish line, the effort continues by fighting unhealthy habit for the rest of your life.

> This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending.

Or it's just that reality lurks somewhere and that hidden complexity will arise making the effort unsatisfying with roadblock happening too early.

Most people that achieve their pet project scope it into a narrow solution that don't address general problems. If your interest is the general problem, your solution is likely to be hard and complex, and narrowing it make it uninteresting.

Each experience is different, but since I stopped caring about half baked solution to general hard problems (New Web UI Framework ! Implementation automation !) and stopped daydreaming about building a solution, but merely thinking of the problem itself, I stopped plateauing and resumed a steady progress in my relationship with tech.

And my experience is that the idea you can just "tell yourself to avoid it" is basically baloney.

Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't dreadful.

---

My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job keeps me stationary.

Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried several times over those 12 years, never with long term success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and added that.

That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though... that's pretty easy and nice.

So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease, always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just enjoyable and refreshing.

12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that wouldn't dig the hole deeper.

I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small enjoyable activity with very low activation cost.

Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable) activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex: jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a different pleasurable activity to pick.