> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.
There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.
Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:
> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."
The post resonates with me as an OSS user and a contributor. Many a brave souls have taken to forking the project to fix the bugs but those forked projects almost always suffer from a discoverability problem. I have tried making fixes and tried forking projects only to discover that someone else has done it better elsewhere.
I've been burned by this problem often enough that I wrote a Chrome extension which would _tell_ me if there are any notable forks of the project I'm currently looking at on GitHub: https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks </self-plug>.
> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.
There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.
Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:
> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."