I got my first Spider-Man Miles Morales trophy November 25, 2023.
I got the Platinum May 17, 2025.
Eighteen months. I dropped that game three or four times.
I'd pick it up, play for a weekend, put it down for three months.
Pick it up again when the guilt hit. Rinse and repeat until every district was cleared, every hideout done, every suit unlocked.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to build this newsletter for almost two years.
The task is the same every week.
Sit down.
Write.
Hit publish.
That's the whole mechanic. But I've fallen off more times than I can count, and every time I came back, the drafts from the last attempt were still there. Unfinished. Unpublished. A graveyard.
Same person. Same capacity. Two different results.
I finally sat down and asked myself why.
The game had a path.
Every trophy was listed. Every hideout was marked. The game told me exactly what I needed to do: go here, do this, repeat. I didn't have to figure out the win condition. Someone else built it for me. I just had to execute.
The newsletter had none of that.
I was writing to the void. I was my own feedback loop. Nobody saw the drafts because I never let anybody see them.
I told myself I wanted this to work, but I shadowed my own content. And the "why" kept shifting.
One week I was making content for entertainment. The next I was trying to educate. I couldn't figure out how to mix my topics together in a way that made sense, so I abandoned drafts mid-sentence and told myself I'd come back with clarity.
The clarity never came because I never gave it a reason to.
I wasn't consistent with Spider-Man either. I dropped it for months at a time. But I was devoted. I kept coming back. I refused to let the save file rot.
The difference was the tutorial.
Most games teach you the controls before they throw you into the world.
They show you the systems. The win conditions. Then you play, and if you want the Platinum, you grind.
I respected this with a video game.
I didn't with the newsletter.
I jumped straight to grinding without giving myself any runway to learn the mechanics.
Between every perceived failure, I'd stop and reflect. I'd ask what went wrong and try again. I learned what this project is NOT, even if I couldn't tell you exactly what it IS. That's more than I had two years ago.
I know I'm not the only one who's done this. You've probably got your own graveyard somewhere. A project you started, dropped, picked back up, dropped again. A thing you told yourself you wanted but never gave yourself a tutorial for.
The self-help aisle will tell you the gap is discipline. It's not. The gap is whether you treat learning the mechanics as part of the work or jump straight to the grind without any idea what you're grinding toward.
I'm not more disciplined now. I just stopped playing the game without studying it first.
-Fish
