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I am bad at a lot of things, which is why I ended up making horny games for money and not working an office job or being a teacher or something normal. But three things I am, and always have been good at: organization, focus, and enduring pain over a long period of time. These have served me well in video game production. 

It isn't a trivial thing either: look at Itch, look at the "indie" game space in general. It's littered with gamejam titles, neat little toy projects, experiments, etc. And there's nothing wrong with experimenting, prototyping things etc, but eventually you have to commit and actually FINISH something, or you'll never get anywhere. And that's where I shine.

I'm not the best at art.

I'm not the best at game design, mechanics, etc.

I'm not even the best at writing.

But I am, absolutely, one of the best at FINISHING. May take a while, but I get there in the end, and the whole process is geared toward that end goal of ending up with a finished product. Steve Jobs was a douche, but he was also right about a lot, including this: Real artists ship. If you never finish, you have nothing.

In more practical terms though, how do I do it? How do I avoid feeling stale? I don't. I feel stale all the time. Real work, on a real project is like a long-term relationship: you're not in the honeymoon all the time. There's plenty of work to be finished that's mundane and has no bearing on whether you're thinking about her every moment of every day, or having passionate sex for hours until you pass out. Of course you still need SOME of that, or it's not really a relationship anymore, it's just an obligation. But part of both projects and relationships is being able to sense when there's something worth believing in there, some vital core, and then just continuing. When it's hard, when it's boring, when it's painful, when you're uninspired. How do I avoid distractions? How do you avoid cheating on someone? You believe more in the possibility of the bird in the hand than the one in the bush. Even if it's hard in the MOMENT, it'll be worth it OVER TIME. And I'm not some perfect person, I do see neat stuff some times that gives me ideas, and sometimes I manage to work those into the game as I'm working on it. But I'm not going to run off and do something else, because that won't go anywhere. It won't be satisfying. Satisfaction comes from commitment.

And not to be melodramatic, but I'm fairly used to dealing with pain in my life at this point, so I stopped trying to find uses of my time that are pain-free a long time ago. I just try to find things where that pain, that "blood and sweat" will actually purchase me something in return. There's a lot of suffering in working a fast food job, or a delivery job, or so many other things, but they're dead ends. You can endure that pain for decades and get basically nothing for it. The trick is to find the places in life where you can arbitrage your pain and suffering to your advantage, where the exchange rate is good. And build a set of steps you can climb, slowly but surely.