[musically_ut]

Indirectly related to this is this beautiful paper which looks at what motivates people to continue playing versus quitting Chess: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1706530115#:~:text=We%....

> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.

There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.

Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:

> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."

[selykg]

I'm not a huge fan of the book Atomic Habits, but James Clear does talk about something similar around goals. Effectively, one of the problems he brings up with goals is that if your goal is to run a 5k and then you achieve that goal, you're sort of "done." Instead he talks about building systems, and changing what you see yourself as. I.e. in the case of a 5k, instead of running a 5k, change who you are such that you are a runner. Then the 5k "goal" doesn't put you in the position of "okay, now what? Guess I'm done." type of mentality.

I've always kind of liked this. I doubt it's unique to James Clear but it was the book I read that made it sort of click so I always go back to that part.

[sdwr]

Great angle!