Improving Yourself is Easy
zachholman.com
zachholman.com
It's good to set goals and meet them, but there are qualitative differences between the experience of completing a major project with substantial uncertainty and a lot of pressure vs. "2009: Make it to a Ruby conference".
Drawing the conclusion that "everyone's vague, important motivations are more a matter of willpower than anything else" is making some pretty major assumptions about the modesty of everyone's motivations.
The lesson he learned from this is likely to lead to larger and larger goals - and I'm willing to bet 10 to 1 that he ends up accomplishing a lot over the next ten years as a result of the "little" steps he has taken already.
Good job!
But everyone has those vague, important motivations in their lives that are more a matter of willpower than anything else. Those are the meaningful goals. Those are the "easy" goals.
Now if you can just learn how to break seemingly unachievable goals into easy goals, you'll be all set.
(Terry Pratchett, Truckers. I read this when I was 6 years old but it always stuck with me.)
Often enough it is that you don't understand the problem well enough. But sometimes you just can't seem to find the proper sub-problems. I have had this experience while doing research work.
And if somebody things "that never happens to me", I kindly ask you to take a look at the the Collatz conjecture [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture].