Here’s the thing, you do these things more for self maintenance rather than for it to feel good. Brush your teeth and floss now so they don’t rot when you’re older. And that comes faster than you think. Like I was eating dinner at my neighbor’s house on his 60th birthday and he was dealing with painful root canals. (But my sister had to deal with those in her teens)

Homework SUCKS, but it teaches you discipline for yourself. Doing parts you don’t quite enjoy just to get the job done. Which is insanely important for every single work ethic you do in your future. I know so many 3d artists who are incredible, but have the attention span worse than rats. So they don’t go anywhere and constantly need to be told to stay focused.

A clean room is a clean mind. Having a messy room to wake up to is fine at first. But it can tend to get worse and spread throughout the rest of the house over time and 1 small task each day turns into a mountainous multi-day cleanup. (My mother is a hoarder of projects and stuff. 2 rooms completely unusable in the house and she leaves her tools all over the place without making a habit of putting stuff back. I never know where anything is)

It’s the same for food. You eat the damn vegetables now to get a palette for them or you will suffer obesity by fast food or whatever. Which leads to lack of energy and always feeling fatigued. (Which I’m currently dealing with and only now just got to liking Broccoli. I’m 29)

As someone who decided to only live for things that I actually care about and even made my own job as a 3d animator, maintenance and discipline show up in places you don’t expect and you’ll be thankful you built it up beforehand. The things that make me feel good are my choices in what I work on, the dream that I strive for, and the fact that I carry a sense of quality and discipline at some points to be able to be more ambitious than others because I will carry out tough tasks rather than avoid them even when they don’t make me feel rewarded.

Lastly let’s talk about the schedule. Super important to even have one despite friends being all, “Let’s go out late at night til 4am”. Let’s see their attention span when they’re older. Well the schedule helps you get food in your body that you might forget to do because you’re so focused, or even overly eat. Sleep is incredibly important, but you know something is wrong when you wake up and already feel tired. You may break the schedule to however you want after school, which is really nice, but if you create your own job in art then you’ll have to apply one to yourself or weeks or months will fly by and you’re stuck on the same project without focus.

Also, take notes YOUR way. Forget standardized notes. Just write down whatever helps you remember things in the way you do. School usually forces tests without notes, but all work and even important conversations outside of school is all about taking notes and rereading them. Learn any way you can to enjoy that part! I have my own Discord server for all kinds of notes I take that get categorized. I also have a fast notes page in my phone’s home screen because my memory is just bad. And that’s OK, because I take great notes!