Persistence Journal


  • ~1998 - When playing through GoldenEye the first time, I got stuck on the Control level and got so frustrated that I ended up not playing the game for a while (a month or more) before coming back to it. What I should have done instead was to start working on the other levels on the other difficulty settings.
  • 2016.11.15 - Yesterday I was dealing with an annoying SQL issue, and it took me just about all day to get it fixed. But eventually I figured out what the issue was. It was a pretty amazing feeling when it actually finally worked; I was surprised that my persistence had actually paid off. Hopefully I'll be able to carry this over to other things!
  • 2017.08.13 - One trick I've noticed is that if you have a reflexive way to procrastinate, like opening up a tab to a fun website, one thing you can do to help yourself stop doing it is to change the process necessary to begin the activity, so that you can no longer do the activity "unconsciously", but instead your higher-level brain gets "turned on", and at that point you can catch yourself and go, "oh, wait, I don't want to do this".
    • What I did was to just put all my fun bookmarks in a particular folder, and move that folder to a new location within some other folder.