A big part of the challenge of many of those other things is that, they're not "fun", the way coding is. Well, they can be, but programming is a job that is regularly enjoyable, and that's something rare.
I told myself for years that it would be "easy" to quit smoking, and in the end, it actually was. The hard part is that it just plain isn't fun. In a funny way, quitting smoking gave me more empathy for nontechnical work.
That's an interesting observation. My experience was different: I learned how to program a bit and found the process so mind-numbingly boring that I gave it up entirely. A developer friend once told me, "I don't have a good feel for a project until I've written the first 1,000 lines" which is literally the moment I decided to stop trying to be a real programmer.
As for quitting smoking our experience is different there too. But glad we both quit. :)
I'm glad you quit. Would be interested to hear your experience.
And yeah, I think for the most part people learn to find some kind of joy or at least entertainment in what they do for work. Or they learn to be miserable sustainably.
I told myself for years that it would be "easy" to quit smoking, and in the end, it actually was. The hard part is that it just plain isn't fun. In a funny way, quitting smoking gave me more empathy for nontechnical work.