Overused topic: How to stick with something long-term, or 'self-discipline'? (Update: with curiosity)

Things that make your brain produce unpleasant hormones cannot be sustained long-term. If willpower could suppress hormones for a long time, millions of years of evolution would be wasted. For example, most people with depression cannot fight hormones long-term by willpower alone and need medication to regulate them.

So if you want to stick with something long-term, you need to make your brain secrete more dopamine and reduce the secretion of hormones that make you unhappy. Choose a less painful way to achieve your goal and reward yourself after completing daily tasks.

For example, memorizing 30 new words a day is painful, so learn English by watching YouTube videos you’re interested in and reading English books you like.

To learn data structures, if you don’t want to attend school lectures, and Zhejiang University’s lectures leave you confused, and Zuo Chengyun’s tutorial is over 100 hours, you might find CS61B suits you well. After completing today’s plan, reward yourself with an hour of relaxation at night. In the long run, studying these courses can help me get my ideal job in the future; each completed lesson brings me one step closer to the goal, which is also a form of reward.

To learn Git, if you can’t get through the official documentation, look for other tutorials until you find one that suits you.

If you want to lose fat, you don’t necessarily have to eat chicken breast; you can eat skinless chicken thighs.

Update: When studying, you should adopt a curious mindset. How did computer scientists invent data structures like binary trees, red-black trees, and heaps from the two basic structures of arrays and linked lists? How did C/Java become machine code made of only 0s and 1s, and how does the CPU understand machine code?