Everybody starts projects. Successful people finish them.
The ability to finish is the most important skill any creator, entrepreneur, or artist can develop and it’s often what separates those who succeed from those who don’t.
What we start is meaningless. What matters is what we finish.
You won’t be a good novelist if you don’t ever finish a novel.
Your innovative product can’t prove your entrepreneurial talent if you don’t build it.
You won’t develop a better body in 30 days if you stop trying after 10.
A finished creation — even if it’s terrible — is always more valuable to us than a potentially great unfinished creation.
Even if our final product doesn’t live up to our initial vision — and it likely won’t — it’s crucial to learn how to push through the insecurity, finish what we start, and put our creations into the world.
Because only when we finish something can we truly learn from it.
The lesson in writing a blog post isn’t found in the easy half you’ve written, it’s found in the half you struggle to write. But you can only discover that lesson if you actually finish the post.
When we fail to finish, we fall into a cycle of abandonment that impedes our development — we don’t learn lessons and jump from project to project without having anything to show for our time and effort.
Writing a dozen half-finished screenplays is effectively the same as writing zero screenplays.
(It’s even worse because we invested countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears to write those zero screenplays.)
How To Become A Finisher
The way to learn to finish projects is to make finishing the primary goal.
Not perfection, not the approval of others, not a sale — finishing.
When finishing becomes the primary goal of our work, we can take satisfaction from doing so and be driven by a goal that’s 100% in our control.
No matter who we are or what we do, NOBODY and NOTHING can stop us from finishing a project if we make it a priority. That’s empowering stuff.
It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from the masses because most people DON’T finish things.
Professionals finish. Wannabes don’t.
Finishing things also creates momentum to fuel our next work.
When we finish what we start, our skills improve, we become less critical of ourselves, and less creatively blocked.
We can’t make a living as a creator until we learn how to finish because we don’t get paid to start things, we get paid to finish them.
So the sooner we learn how to finish, the better.
One more thing…
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