Not quite exactly about "lucrative yet monotonous", but The War of Art is definitely an extended meditation on "putting in the elbow grease". It's not a manual of techniques about how to get things done, but it is inspirational for getting out of your own way, shutting up, sitting down, and writing.

It's written by someone who mostly writes movies, but it applies to anyone who does anything remotely creative, where your project has a lot of uncertainty and many opportunities to stall or talk yourself into giving up.

Highly recommended.

Great book - I love that one, anyone who creates should read it (code, writing, art, marketing) - I agree!

Agree that it's a meditation/mantra-like book that can be read monthly to refocus.

hey thanks for suggesting this, based on what I've read so far it's extremely applicable to my situation and is the sort of thing I've been needing to read for a while. hopefully i can intuit the wisdom at this point in my life.

Persistence is a skill that needs to be trained just like all skills, intellectually gifted people tend to get little training in it because they learn stuff fast and thus don't get the usual amount of training in it like others, so what you need to do is pick a thing you want to do that's boring and then measure the time of how long you manage to do it in one day, then you reward yourself with something, next time you try to do it for longer than last time and if you manage that then you give yourself another reward. It's just a skill, it's hard to train but train it you must if you want to be good at it. There is nothing more to it sadly, its a simple problem with a boring simple solution, you just have to put in the hours and train that skill.

This was painfully visible during first year at university - all the gifted people who during high school didn't have to learn at home at all hit the wall. They simply couldn't manage like that anymore.

Many somehow switched and started learning/working on assignment, those who didn't didn't make it.

> Anyone know of a book that goes into this in detail?

As cheesy as it sounds, the best book I've found on this topic is Getting Things Done.

I struggle with a lot of the issues in this article, and resisted that kind of thinking for years, but learning how to break up the insane overload of ideas and things in my head and bring them into manageable chunks, living in an outside system, has really really helped.

Great recommendation and good to be reminded. Have been reading it here and there but need to finish it and get it done.

Check out "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas A. Limoncelli.

It is showing it's age technology wise, being published in 2005, but a lot of the fundamental principles still apply.

Sounds niche, but that could make it even more useful - will check it out!

I haven't read but just a summary of the book but even that was helpful in letting me reframe some of these issues that I struggle with.

https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil...

The key message that stuck with me was that the early stages of the mastery slope are exciting because of how much new knowledge we gain. However, most of life is spent in the plateaus, and learning to love the plateaus is key to finding persistence and self discipline.

Great recommendation, going to buy it.

From what I’ve read on it, seems to take a Zen-like approach, which I appreciate.

Try book "Mastery" by George Leonard.

https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery

Full text [pdf]:

http://index-of.co.uk/Social-Interactions/Mastery%20-%20The%...