Finish things

The most important thing you can do in work and life is to build a habit of finishing things.

It’s easy to derail yourself and lose confidence when projects are halfway done. Your motivation ebbs, you encounter greater friction than expected, you find yourself drawn to something with greater promise.

But there are no rewards for ideas that could have been, for projects that languish in your drafts folder. Inversely, there are a great many rewards for finished projects, even those that failed to live up to their original vision.

To borrow an idea from exercise, you develop experience through the full range of motion, gaining exposure to the messy middle and final resolution of your projects, and not strengthening your already over-strengthened mental muscles in the brainstorming and aspiration parts.

By grinding through long projects, you become better at scoping and defining future work, and grow smarter at identifying the smallest functional unit of an idea. This is a principle I apply in reading: slogging through bad books makes you more thoughtful and considered when selecting future books (see How I read books).

You wind-up with something to show for your time, an artefact of your labours that can be handled, admired, and learned from. Even if it fell short of your expectations, it is likely to exceed the expectations of others. Few people ever finish things. Most live in a world of could-have-beens and maybe-one-days. You can be different.

So ship the smallest functional unit, create fast feedback loops, and build a stubborn, pig-headed instinct to clear your plate before moving on to anything else.