In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
— Abraham Lincoln
Our brain is aware of when we stop making progress towards a goal we care about. The feeling of frustration builds until it becomes so strong it essentially forces us to stop.
Then, to get rid of the emotion, we have to step back and reassess. And then either see if we should try a different approach to the problem, give up on the problem entirely, or triple-check that the same course of action is still worth pursuing and thus “re-energize” ourselves.
If we never felt frustrated, we’d keep attempting futile goals for so much longer. When you feel frustrated, the answer is never to just ignore the feeling and try to “power through”. It’s to step back and reassess at the first opportunity.
If you’re not gonna bother writing it yourself, I ain’t gonna bother reading it myself.