It was a tough pill to swallow, but I eventually came to terms with time not completely equaling merit. That reason is probably the main driving force pushing me to stop what I am currently doing. In favor of finding something else better to do with my time.

The deciding factor was when I took a moment to examine my life as an outsider looking in. Watching a stranger tote around their consecutive days and years of experience like it was the medal of honor, is a bit silly in my opinion. "Look at me and how many days I have spent consecutively working projects. Bet you did not know that I did that all in my free time, did you? Spending every waking day of my life for almost the last 5 years needing to make sure I devoted more than 2 hours a day to checking this little box that says I did something. I have got almost 8 years of experience, just so you know."

Those words feel hollow, like they have no substance backing them. What I have come to realize is the fact that your past is not that important. It is about who you are today. The past is just a trail of pictures leading up to the present version of you. Your past will always exist and everybody has one. This is good news for people who want to start fresh and leave there past behind. Though it stings for people (including myself) who expect to have gotten something out of their past.

The biggest problem that I currently have, at the moment, is trying to answer this following question. So what?

I have dedicated time the last consecutive 1,587 days to deliberate and purposeful practice. Six days a week were spent with the intent of fully focusing on the task at hand. Meaning, I did not just show up and do the work. Each minute was treated with respect, and I tried to get the most out of each working session. The other day of the week, is where I prevented myself from fully putting in the effort. Essentially keeping myself hungry for more or digesting the entire week. That way when the next day rolls in I would be ready and back for more.

The fact that I have to spell this out, means that this is a poor way for me to show my merit. This is something that if we were to meet in person, you would be able to see the effects of all my decisions of the past. There I do not feel like I need to explain the value that I had gotten from my journey, the results speak for themselves.

If I did not give any of that backstory, it would almost be the same wheelhouse as, "I have 29 years of experience drinking liquids." However, I would also neglect to mention, that even with all my experience, I still manage to breath in fluids from time to time. I have not put as much deliberate effort into become drinking water that I have been developing my career skills. Effort such as, increasing my throughput by: rejecting social media, internet, and the news. Sharpening my focus by training to not pick up my phone and check for updates every five minutes. Trying to get the most sleep, so I can come back the next day and knock it out of the park. Also, a bunch of other things, but I think you get the point.

Yet, the best I can hope from any mention of duration as merit, would be skepticism. Sure, I might have done what I said I have accomplished. However, you will not know that fact until you find yourself in my presence. Then I can prove to you that the activities which I accomplished in that time frame greatly increased my value.

I have been searching for the meaning behind performing arduous tasks. At least with exercise the answer is easy. The more I work out, the better I feel as time goes on. Since I have been on both sides of the spectrum, sedentary and active, being active feels leagues better. I still have not bought into getting ridiculously large muscles or becoming super lean. The point achieving those feats seems to be lost when seeing what they cost. All that gets you is the ability to lift heavy things and to get more attention from others. All for the low price of draining the satisfaction of workouts and/or health. "Me make big weight go up and down. Me need attention from others to validate many times spent doing most difficult task." I say this as though I do not flex in the mirror or walk around shirtless. "Me big hypocrite, me try make excuse for why muscles not big or defined as others."

Sunk Cost

Let me start off by saying I have beef with how I have seen the sunk cost fallacy being used. It has been thrown around as an excuse for just giving up on something that needed a bit more attention to fix. Therefore, I immediately labeled it as a handy tool quitters use to justify giving up.

It is an easy card to play, just when things start to get tough, you have a convenient excuse to abandon hope. When the project started, the excitement was there and the motivation tank was filled to the brim. Things where easy at the start. However, as time passed getting started and continuing to work on tasks became more difficult. At this point, the struggle bus started to leave the station. This feeling of so called "burnout" begins to sink in. The pivotal moment arrives where the value of the original goal is weighed against the cost of continuing. The road ahead seems like it goes on forever. A glimmer of hope, an easy way out, the Sunk Cost Fallacy card. The time has already been spent, and cannot be given back. It really was not about the destination, it was the things that we learned along the way. Relief comes quickly as the rationalization for giving up has been reached.

That is 💩, motivation is 💩, and for the most part, using the sunk cost fallacy like that is 💩. Motivation is not what finishes the job. Sure, it comes into play when the job starts, but it leaves a quarter of the way through and expects you to take care of the rest. That is where discipline has to come in clean up motivation's mess and finish the task that was started. I learned never hope for motivation to be there in finish something. I feel bad for people who think they need more motivation to keep going. All they need to do is embrace the suck, tough it out for a while, and things eventually get better.

Almost all the projects that I started, I have completed. They all go through the same phases:

• This is exciting and neat to work on!
• Wow, this is a lot of work.
• This sucks, I want to do something else.
• Why am I still doing this?
• This still sucks, but it is getting better.
• Alright, the end is near.
• Back to being happy, because I am almost done.
• Complete project.
• Question current life choices
• Repeat.

It is the middle phases that require the most effort to get through, and where giving up is most appealing. I found that success comes more often if before starting a project, I make sure that this is something I really want to do. Does this bring great meaning? That answer has to be really strong and convincing, because that will remain the answer to, "Why am I abusing myself to get this done?" This is where adopting essentialism helps, because I mainly start making something I already enjoy, better. I am not chasing 10 things at once and my mission statement is clear.

In fact, I specifically saved this post for a later time in the project, because I knew that motivation bastard would leave me. Here I am, I have spent a solid 3 weeks of doing nothing but writing posts about my life, ignoring other interesting tasks. Currently, I want to ignore this entire project, and procrastinate by adding more Anime Girls to my software tools (which I already did after completing my first draft of this project). However, I will not allow myself to do that. Accomplishing this task of documenting my ultramarathon will offer me something even better. The freedom to move onto the next chapter in my life. I want to move on, but I will not let myself do that. I have invested too much at this point to just give up, hope for the best, and not tell this story. See were this sounds like to be an argument for sunk costs? While, I currently cannot relax until I have put a nice little bow on my project. That does not mean there is not any value in what I am doing currently. I am currently:

• Getting better at writing and communicating.
• Learning more about myself.
• Giving myself a sense of purpose.

I will turn out better in the end and all it cost me was the only thing I cannot get more of, time.

Falling for the trap

There has only ever been one project that I started to work on and continued to do so even though it lost its meaning and sense of purpose. In the end, it was done just to say, "I did it." I had no desire for the expected outcome and ended up despising the whole thing in the end.

Most of this was due to the attitude I had adopted and explained in the last section. Not saying that the attitude is bad, more that it is really important to figure out the goal and the answer to "So what?" before starting. I fell into this trap because the so what answer was lost and the project continued.

This memoir of my ultramarathon, is not the first attempt of me trying to give up my streak of dedicated work. Somehow I had convinced myself that tracking my time by always making sure that I am writing code and committing it every day, was a good idea. This was limiting to the amount of activities that could be worked on over time. Therefore, I thought it was better to track the time spent on tasks worked on throughout the day. Then linking how those tasks directed to a goal that I wanted to accomplish.

A solid 6 months was spent working to get an MVP (minimum viable product) deployed out to the cloud. Then in could start to take steps in the right direction. This effort yielded a website, a backend server, and a mobile app. Until the MVP was ready, half of my free time, 2 hours a day, was dedicated to building out this application.

This was not the part that made me never want to see this project again. Though I do have vivid memories of asking myself, "Why am I doing this?" The road to getting the MVP complete was long. This was sure to be the answer to being free to do whatever I wanted to do with my time. Once the application suite became usable the next phase began.

The app was built, such that I could time the duration every event of my life. If what I was doing changed, the app would be told I was working on something else now. Every inflection point in my daily life needed to be documented. If I started to work out I would let the app know, "hey I am working out now." When that activity completed, I would switch the transitioning task.

This process continued, and I got to see what my life looked like at a glance. Every small detail was categorized. I am a creature of routine and have very strong habits. Essentially making my life's timeline looks the same week in and week out. Sure, there are some deviations between the points of inflection, but overall it remains the same.

I remember feeling underwhelmed when was looking through almost 7 months of continuous data about my life. There was not anything impressive, about these data points, the fact that I needed to explain what they meant to others, proved that. It was just time spent on activities that only meant something to me. Yeah sure, I spent thousands of hours dedicated to fully focused work, but that is all it said. There was no answer to so what, it was just a data point. That is the point that I should have stopped and moved on. Instead, I decided that I needed 1 Year of full data, then I could maybe get something out of this life invasive time sink.

The days would crawl by and would be counting the days until I reached an entire year. In the end, once I reached a year, it would take me a couple of weeks until I could convince myself, that I needed to halt. The feeling of turning off the servers, and the opportunity to get my head-space back was sweet. It was also something I realized, I should have done sooner. However, I fell into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy. This was the only project which I was not glad I finished or started. Sure I gained some skills, I learned things, was able to apply them in my professional projects, but at what cost? Was it worth it? Nope.

It would take me many months after stopping, to relinquish the habit of reaching for my phone to change my timed task any time I did something different. I was a slave to this habit, and its lingering effects still had its impacts. Though I am a bit bitter about what I made myself do, it was an important lesson on figuring out what truly is important in life. I do not want to spend my time on something that I see no value in, nor hope to get value out of something after it lost meaning.

In fact, this is probably the last time that this project will provide anything meaningful. Sure I have all of my activity data, but I do not care that it exists. I do not want to spend the time working with it, and creating anything interesting with it so that others may see. When I attempt to try, every fiber of my being wants me to stop, so I do. I think this is the last thing that project will provide. It has given me an opportunity to tell a story about when and how not to get stuck doing something that has lost meaning.

Until I am able to find an answer to the "so what" question about the inherent merit of time spent on activities done in the past, this project will remain archived. Just showing durations of time spent does not feel like it provides any story worth telling without me having to explain why it is valuable. If I ever figure out that out, it might mean that I can get something out of that data. However, I am not going to try hard, because I have already come to terms with letting it go.

Finishing the Ultramarathon

The reason that my ultramarathon needs to finish is a different story than that of my sunk cost project. Sure, there have been times when I have regretted starting a process that I have not been able to stop. Even when I was on vacation, I was still writing and committing code thousands of feet in the sky.

I am unsure if it is just because of Stockholm syndrome, but right now I am clinging to this daily habit. I am comfortable with what I am working on for the past years. It has gotten to the point where I am feeling complacent. Nothing is pushing the status quo.

The hunger to feed my curiosity still exists, but I cannot find anything interesting to consume. I want the chance to be able to look for a new opportunity to come across. However, the way things are right now, when I get free time I quickly fill it up with work that I am either familiar with or wanted to complete beforehand.

This is comfortable, but the margins for growth are shrinking. Sure, I am getting better at the things I am already good at however diminishing returns is coming into play. The increases in skill are growing but at a slower rate.

I do not harbor any resentment to my current habit, it is the warm cozy room when the outside is bitterly cold. I want to stay, but that also stunts my rate of growth. I need to leave my comfort zone. That cannot be done if I am stuck everyday doing the same tasks that I have grown comfortable with. By design, I cannot direct my focus at more than one thing at a time. Therefore, if I do not allow myself to focus on moving on then I may never reach the next level.

I want to enter the next chapter of my life and right now this is what is holding me back.