As soon as you get comfortable, you start to accumulate bad habits. Start to degrade.
I know a lot of people who are looking for that sweet spot, where not trying and not competing anymore is acceptable. A stress free environment where you are entitled to a package of privileges because of your accumulated efforts. Working almost completely from muscle memory and just coast through the rest of existence.
Everyone should be comfortable with struggle and not try to avoid it. That is the only way you get good at dealing with it and staying good at dealing with it.
All the previous sentences, sound like some t-shirt bastions generated from self help books, but they are still accurate.
I have a lot of bad habits I get into if I don´t have a goal. If I don´t have a particular use for my faculties, they will just go into some autopilot and some random biology makes decision for me.
I have been working on implementing some rather complicated things for my project. Solving problems in an exhaustive way where I can´t really use a lot of ready made libraries to speed up the solution for me. A lot of indexed and compact data structures, minimum memory footprints, sacrificing simple algorithms for complicated ones to minimise the overall work load, but still trying to keep things readable and understandable. Most of the way through all of the current work, but I am still a bit reserved with the last remaining implementation I have to deal with. Betting my creativity and obsessive personality on its glorious outcome.
Which everyone should be doing, and I should keep doing.
My work routine is not really a routine these days. Random hours at night, but working towards minor routine in the morning. Planning to wake up around 5 am, to use the 2.5 – 3 hours before the day job and life routines to focus purely on my project. This was the first morning after christmas vacation so I did not manage to get my lazy ass out of bed until around 6:30, when my girlfriend reminded me. Will take a few days to get into this particular formula.
In other news, I applied for a grant last fall and I did not get any money, but I did get good feedback from the institution about what was lacking in my project description. The business plan was not convincing in their mind and I was a little too optimistic about the financial returns. I did not get rejected in terms of not fulfilling their requirements, but I just did not score high enough to get the grant. Nice of them to tell me what I need fixing to increase the odds of getting money from them. This happens on a bi-annual basis. So, I will be applying again in a months time, since they accept applications in February and September.
Anyway, I need to get to my day job routine and solve some programming problems.
Tata
V 