But he didn't renew his optimism or enthusiasm, unless I'm missing something. Rather, he just did the first one anyway, even though he wasn't enthused about it

But he didn't renew his optimism or enthusiasm, unless I'm missing something. Rather, he just did the first one anyway, even though he wasn't enthused about it. This is a lesson I have to learn over and over, because I want to do things I'm excited about doing. There's a lot of things, though, that I want to have done, and for things like that, there's typically no way to make them more exciting or to make me more optimistic about handling them -- I just have to start. Once I've started, continuing is far easier, for whatever reason. When I programmed mostly for myself (that is, with no set schedule other than a dimly seen deadline), I had quite a lot of trouble getting started, and so I developed a trick to help with that: at the end of the day, I'd make sure to leave some small, quickly-accomplished thing undone, to have something to do when I started again. Sometimes I'd also write a note on how to do it, if it seemed like I might forget. Over months, though, this turned into a problem itself, since I would spend lots of time during the day coming up with tasks that I could do the next day to start, and then I would use that as an excuse not to do them today, because, hey, what if I wasn't able to come up with anything else to start on easily tomorrow? I might lose the whole next day! Eventually, this got to the point where I'd spend weeks doing only one or two small tasks in the morning, and then being afraid to start on anything bigger lest I not have something easy to start on the next day. Of course, this defeated the purpose... Actually accomplishing things, whether coding, or writing, or cleaning up email, or just cleaning the house, is something that you have to just do. You might be able to trick yourself into doing a little more of it, but if you focus on the trick, you aren't likely to build the habit of just doing things, which means that you'll easily stop doing them when something happens to make the trick less effective. People for whom the trick(s) really seem to work have moved into a psychological realm where they have the habit of getting things done; the trick is no longer really the point, I'd guess.