I read an excellent piece by Maalvika: being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage, and one particular quote stopped me in my tracks:

When you imagine achieving something, the same neural reward circuits fire as when you actually achieve it. This creates what neuroscientists call “goal substitution” — your brain begins to treat planning as accomplishing. The planning feels so satisfying because, neurologically, it is satisfying. You’re getting a real high from an imaginary achievement.

I stopped and re-read that first sentence five times. It explains so much about how I approach personal projects, how I dream up endless technical solutions to problems and always seem to have too many projects in progress. They will solve so much if I can just finish them. Which rarely happens. I start new personal projects all the time while old projects are left in half-finished state, or not even half-finished, many just started and quickly abandoned. Coders will recognize this: there’s a point in every technical project where you’re stuck figuring out dependency issues, real-life complications that your initial design didn’t account for, infrastructure problems, or other not-so-fun parts of the very fun project you had fully mapped out in your mind.

This Substack post really hit home, reminding me that Perfect is the Enemy of Good and that pushing through those painful blockers is the real journey. New level unlocked.