The hidden ingredient of successful projects

Despite coding thousands of lines in architecturally complex projects, why would a small Python script be more meaningful to me? All because of a secret ingredient.

Early in my career, I coded a 10-line script that helped my late dad organise his medication. Although I've created software orders of magnitude more complex, that simple script has a special place. It's because it had a helpful purpose. It helped my dad in a manner clearly visible to me.

Whenever I have a meaningful purpose driving me, I don't get tired. I don't crib about the difficulty of the task. Nor do I keep looking at my watch, trying to make time fly.

Without purpose, all creative endeavours become "additive," so all we do is create complexity. But with a meaningful purpose, there is now an incentive to simplify. Haven't we all felt good when we replaced a 2000-line program with a one-liner in bash?