Spending a month or two doing really scrupulous test-driven development, perhaps? I don't personally like TDD as an end in and of itself, but I love it as a sor

Spending a month or two doing really scrupulous test-driven development, perhaps? I don't personally like TDD as an end in and of itself, but I love it as a sort of kata-like practice to help ingrain good habits. In this case, where I see it potentially helping is that the tests give you a very clear, objective way of deciding when the code is done, and it's time to stop futzing with it. Though you would have to be careful about remembering that the "refactor" phase is about refactoring for maintainability, not performance. I don't know what the tooling situation is like in Rust, but another one is to try and be really scrupulous about never making a change whose purpose is performance without first profiling the code, so that you can objectively measure the impact of the change. You don't need to do this forever, either. But, if your experience is anything like my own, I'm guessing that a lot of what motivates you is the feeling that you've done something of tangible value when you optimize the code. Actually seeing some hard numbers might change your feelings a bit. It's a lot easier to feel good about, "I spent an afternoon making the code more efficient," than it is to feel good about, "I spent an afternoon reducing the time it takes this program to execute from 50ms to 49ms."