How writing (and any creative activity, for that matter) is similar to a marathon.

Frank Chimero in a new post (Running Towards) where he likens writing to running a marathon:

In the effort of trying to make something good, we will not look good. Making is messy business, and from the outside, it frequently looks like toiling. So, like our business, we will be a mess, both inside and out. Unkept hair, sloppy apartment, and a general knot in our guts because there is a big thing not yet done. We will wear our pain on our faces, and mop the sweat from our brow. The thud of our feet hitting the pavement will jolt up through our legs and shake our shoulders. Our cheeks will tremble with each step.

We will hurt, but, oddly, to run well, we must relax. So we should relax. We will not care how we look. Running long distances has an aesthetic ugliness, and yet, also simultaneously has a beauty to the endeavor. There is a grace of appearances and a grace of effort, but the two may never meet. The runners that worry if they look good are the ones that usually lose. We choose to run, hurt, and look ugly. We celebrate this.

Never compromise on investing in software quality improvement (Facebook Engineering blog)

A reminder from the Facebook Engineering blog that we cannot compromise on quality improvements in software development:

The conclusion of all this is that I think we need to divorce our impressions of the current state of affairs from our evaluation of the productivity of investing time and energy into improvements. Our impressions are likely to always be negative (seriously, forever), and we will probably almost always feel things are getting worse (when in fact they are probably not, or are heavily offset by simultaneous improvements).

We certainly do make bad decisions from time to time, and those are fixable. But where we really do lose the whole game is if we compromise on investing in improvement because it feels too futile or difficult or we'd rather blame everyone else, and that is a greater psychological challenge than a technical one.