Time and Pressure
"Everybody knows" diamonds are made when coal is subjected to "time and pressure".
This is one way to think of the job of parenting. It’s also a good way to think of any long-term project worth doing.
Pressure is energy.
Time is…time.
I don’t (often) get to choose how much time I spend on anything. And I don’t get to choose how much energy I’ll have left for personal projects after obligations are done.
The only thing I can pick is where I direct those two resources.
Actually, sometimes I don’t even get to pick that. Sometimes even personal projects are reactions to events (like when online service providers turn evil and you need to drop them).
But everything eventually succumbs to enough time and pressure:
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Writing a novel
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Building a big piece of software
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Understanding a difficult concept
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Building up a good relationship with someone
Of course, this assumes you’re doing that thing correctly, but, there’s another item to add to the list:
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Learning how to correctly do the thing you’re trying to do
The meta-skills are just another to-do and they are also gained through effort.
Back to projects.