I think the tricky part is keeping that sense of "awake and alive" as you get to the forefront of a problem, which might involve a different set of tasks than t

I think the tricky part is keeping that sense of "awake and alive" as you get to the forefront of a problem, which might involve a different set of tasks than those that originally attracted you. For example, playing chess is fun for me at the tactical level, but learning openings isn't fun, so maybe I'll never get good. PG might have the same problem: making programming languages is fun, but studying the current state of programming language design is less fun, so the results (Arc, Bel) don't go very far.