Why it is so easy to get addicted to sport, and so hard to get addicted to your own work.
I don’t find it surprising at all that people get hooked on sport. Any sport. If you show up consistently, progress is almost guaranteed and, more importantly, visible. Every next session you can reasonably expect to be a little better than the last one. Running, lifting, cycling, whatever. Team sports are a slightly different story, but at the beginner-to-intermediate level the rule holds: consistency pays out, every time.
That is not how it works in business, or in building your own projects. There, being consistent is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The market shifts, the platform changes its rules, regulations move, the thing that worked last quarter stops working. You can do everything right and still get nothing back. There is no guarantee that the next “rep” makes you stronger.
Progress is the drug, not success.
I think the word that matters here is progress, not success. We are wired to respond to being rewarded for getting better at something. When the feedback loop says “you improved”, we naturally want to do the thing again. Sport delivers that signal on schedule. Your own projects deliver it randomly, and more often deliver the opposite.
And that, honestly, is what holds me back from my own stuff. Not the work itself. The fact that it rarely comes back with a clean win. The things I make are seldom great, and more often than not they fail quietly. So I keep asking where people find the motivation to just keep trying.
Three mornings a week, no problem.
Getting up at six three times a week for the gym costs me nothing. I feel better afterwards, I keep my body in some kind of shape, and I actually miss it when I skip. It doesn’t need motivation any more; it is hard to imagine my week without it.
What I am still looking for is the same anchor, or the same mindset, for building my own things. Because I am at the point in my life where I have concluded that a regular job will not surprise me any more. After many years in different companies it is mostly the same problems everywhere, solved in slightly different ways. The unexpected part, the part that could still be good, is on the side of the things I build myself. It just doesn’t hand out progress on schedule, and I have to learn to train without the scoreboard.