- 18 Dec, 2025 *
Every now and then people will post advice on how to win that is just "keep going". This isn’t false, but it never seems to explain how and why to keep going which is actually the meat of their advice.
How and why do we keep doing things so consistently that we build something valuable?
We can focus on the eventual returns we might receive from our actions and their instrumental value to us. We win because what we do gets us what we need, but is not itself what we need. Attention, respect, resources that come with other people valuing our work. Some people can laser in on this and it seems to sustain them, but it can a…
- 18 Dec, 2025 *
Every now and then people will post advice on how to win that is just "keep going". This isn’t false, but it never seems to explain how and why to keep going which is actually the meat of their advice.
How and why do we keep doing things so consistently that we build something valuable?
We can focus on the eventual returns we might receive from our actions and their instrumental value to us. We win because what we do gets us what we need, but is not itself what we need. Attention, respect, resources that come with other people valuing our work. Some people can laser in on this and it seems to sustain them, but it can also hollow out the substance of what you’re doing and reduce it to "please others in X domain". 1.
We can focus on doing things that are immediately valuable to us in some way. Making things we can use. Making things our families and friends can use. Making things that give us joy, power, and safety in immediate ways can take transaction-focus out of the cycle of creativity and tighten the feedback loop of giving an activity substance and value. 1.
We can focus on the joy we receive in a process, and we can make the process joyous even if it is also painful. We can do things that make us move and think in ways that nourish us, so that the results are less important than the process we experience and how it affects us. This might be the foundational skill for the other two, and is what allows us to "keep going" even when the cost of going is high or when we don’t receive much in return from others for doing so. If a process doesn’t nourish us, we may be starved of what we need and burn out even if it gives us a solid return in attention or power. How do we know if a process nourishes us? We do it and we are not starved by it. We use that to learn what we need and be more fully nourished.
I’ve had a disabling chronic illness my entire adult life and most of my adolescence. I’ve never been able to compete well for resources, so focusing on 1. has never worked well for me. I’ve had some success on social media in the past, but it got to a point where I felt like I had to do only that thing and couldn’t learn other skills and I felt starved as a machine that generates content alone. 2. is getting easier for me these days, but sometimes I’ve only had 3. Sometimes all I’ve been able to do is focus on the core processes of living, simply not to be starved while alive. It gave me no resources, no attention, and no external power, but it did make consciousness tolerable.
Sometimes that’s winning enough. Sometimes all other forms of winning are impractical without it.