how do you personally commit to things you set out to do? what keeps you going, and honest?

My response would be faith in God, and that tends to be looked down uppon for some reason, so I'm gonna have to explain it in different terms.

Think of it as service to some undentified cosmic order. There's good and bad, but you have a choice. Well, the world is fucked, but I can be useful, and I choose to be, so I unfuck what I can manage to unfuck, and that shit keeps me going alright.

Probably the enjoyment of putting the work into something and seeing progress, no matter how little.

With that mentality you can do shit for years and years.

blah blah motivation blah blah will to do better blah blah blah

Money. That's it.

Set out to do even smaller steps and squeezing dopamine from completing them in a row!

@jestdotty Day-to-day chores, mostly. Whatever, however small, that needs doing.

On a larger scale, I want to write code that makes me hate programming a little less. Whatever comes out good, I share. Nothing grandiose, but if it makes my job slightly easier, then *maybe* it can help.

Some examples:

- I fucking hate zlib's clunky interface, so I wrote a wrapper class for it.

- Regexes, despite their usefulness, can go fuck themselves in the ass. I made a bunch of functions to generate them, and now it's not so bad.

- Writing syntax files for an editor is a piece of shit experience, but I made a small system to handle it.

- I hated having to deal with GLSL shaders, now I smack them around with my fancy-pants preprocessor.

- Wrote a bunch of Blender utils and scripts to deal with similar petty annoyances that used to age me a decade every time I had to deal with it's stupid Python API.

One step at a time each day, I hate my job a *little* bit less; way better than nothing.

Pure determination and willpower. Overcoming doubt and outsiders trying to persuade you to go into a different direction. Only you know what path you choose to go and where it will lead. Follow that and ignore everything and everyone else besides God of course.

And if it's your passion. Follow it

According to David Goggins, motivation is good but never lasts. Discipline it is

@jestdotty Hard to answer that without getting a little bit too "Come to Jesus"-esy. But I'm not a christian, so I'll give it a try:

The foremost question is one of humility.

I'm accepting whichever *good* I can do as my purpose. I used the word "service" because it's not about me or my personal fulfillment, but rather serving the will of the universe, that has placed me in this position with these capabilities, and given me a choice on how to use both.

One can strive to do better with time and that's only righteous, so first strive for patience. I'm not pure nor holy by any stretch of either word, so I'd be out of line if I were to preach much more than that. But this is what I believe.

@jestdotty That's a philosophical debate with no definitive answer.

Having good intentions is one thing, whatever results from it is another. You can't fully divorce the two, but every person can only be responsible for what *they* knowingly, deliberately do. And this includes willful ignorance or inaction.

I like to play this game called "the world is complicated", where I have to question myself and what I think I know every now and then. It's not a fun game, but it's a good game.