Distance Kills Love
I know what you're thinking. You think I'm referring to the love between two people. While this concept does apply to human relationships, it's not the only instance.
When you're working on a project or developing a skill/habit, consistently showing up is much more important than the amount of progress you make. The more time you spend away from your endeavor, the less love you have for it. This is a universal truth that applies to many areas of life.
One example is religion. When you consistently pray or engage in learning about your faith, your commitment to it increases. You become more involved, love it more, follow it better, and it's always on your mind. But once you start skipping one or two prayers, it turns into skipping a day or two, and before you know it, you haven't prayed in a week.
Another example is building a skill such as coding. You took the first CS50 class and loved it. It felt like the best class you had ever taken. But soon, after a few classes, it gets a bit tough. You become less enthusiastic with each new class and more reluctant to pursue it. If you stop spending time regularly on it, it just falls into the backlog of your life, and you will never finish it. It becomes another endeavor you started but didn't consistently show up for, especially in times you hated it, and it goes into the cemetery of started and never finished endeavors.
Most importantly, it applies to projects. When you first start working on something, you're very excited. You spend all your free time on it, you're passionate about it, and you genuinely enjoy the process. But as other things come up in your life, you might find it increasingly difficult to show love to your project. You spend less and less time on it, become less committed, and might even kill it. From my own observations and learnings, most projects die this way. Love for them fades away and that absence of love suffocates them.
So when you start something new, whether it's a project, a hobby, a skill, a relationship, or anything else, make sure to consistently show up. You might not enjoy it every time you do, but in the long run, it serves to survival of whatever you're pursuing. Remember, you didn't come this far just to come this far.
@javohirakramov