Strong-minded people buckle down and they work hard to overcome life's many hurdles, finding a sense of accomplishment by surpassing their expectations.
When you buckle down to study for a test, finish a homework assignment, or slog your way through a textbook chapter, you're in Robot Mode. You're doing the work.
He did a great version of BASIC, but then never could buckle down and write the floating-point BASIC we needed, so we ended up later having to make a deal with Microsoft.