#22 –Overcoming enthusiasm half-life

VS Code updates that break a key part of your editor workflow suck! Previously, opening and closing the integrated terminal was cmd + backtick, and Mark used to hit it constantly to switch back and forth between code and the terminal. In VS Code's monthly update, they silently changed that shortcut to switch between multiple VS Code windows. The result is constant frustration from hitting the shortcut out of habit and disrupting the recording of screencasts. Justin's wife has been intermittent fasting and has lost a lot of weight! Amazingly, she's only eating in the mornings rather than the evenings like most intermittent fasters. Justin's gonna give it a try. Mark's been thinking about an idea from an old TechZing episode—enthusiasm half-life. The people he's known who have tackled something difficult like learning Chinese or starting a business have fallen into one of two groups. Most people seem to start off full of enthusiasm, like a cannon ball shooting into the sky and then gradually lose motivation and crash into the ground. A few people have their own fuel and just put in a regular half hour or hour per day for years, but they're not the norm. The key for the majority was making meaningful progress before hitting their enthusiasm half-life. Getting to a win of some kind or another often brings more motivation! Justin is still working on getting more prospective female entrepreneurs to join Nugget (his training site / community). He's also considering opening up its slack group to free users as well as premium members. More discussion and more people sharing entrepreneurial ideas, advice and success stories is probably good for everyone. Justin has also hired a recent to start building a Roblox game! After digging into the development environment and getting a feel for what was possible and what the learning curve would be like, he impressed with the Flash-like development experience, the built-in Lua scripting, the assets and everything available. Making a simple game was easy! It was seriously tempted to build a commercial game himself, but thought better of adding yet another time commitment of that sort. Mentioned Roblox Studio Roboduel Lua programming language PEG.js Reactor.am Nugget Academy Alchemist Camp Phoenix Igniter Justin's goals for next time Stop eating at 2pm every day Refactor Nugget, open up the Slack, etc Mark's goals for next time Focus on the top of the line audience growth Create a backlog of topics for easy one-off tutorials Work on Igniter docs 5/7 good diet days Video version at https://youtu.be/eFksdBvVxyA Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/22 Recorded on 2020-07-15