&gt;How does one acquire the &quot;iron will&quot; mindset you talked about?<p>First of all, you need to be comfortable using source control to the point where you can kill a bunch of code then find it and merge it back in months and hundreds of revisions later.<p>Experience and education will give you the ability to recognize when you have bloat.<p>You may need lots of bad experiences and a memory long enough to remember the pain of dealing with bloat and cruft.<p>The will power portion is what makes you do the right thing when you do recognize it, if you have a strong will you won&#x27;t need to learn the hard way repeatedly. Coffee helps with this, if you feel yourself slacking, drink more coffee drink stronger coffee. If you still can&#x27;t do it, look into getting an ADHD perscription (i&#x27;ve got one).