“The work we do works us.”
– Cynthia Morris
When should you give up on a project, and when should you persevere? The obvious answer is: it depends. It depends on a lot of things: time, energy, priorities, progress, cost, and much more. Perhaps most of all, it depends on personal history. Do you have a drawer of abandoned first drafts, a stack of not-quite-done artwork, a cupboard of works in progress that have been in progress for, ahem, quite a while while you’ve been drawn to shiny new projects? If so, it’s time to finish something.
Yes, sometimes the things we start don’t turn out to be what we thought they’d be. Something that seemed like a good fit before we really knew much about it unfolds into something that isn’t. Something we thought would be doable isn’t—at least not in the way we envisioned it. Sometimes realising the vision in our head requires more than we can, or are willing to, give. Sometimes it is wiser to give up, avoid the sunk cost fallacy, and quit while we’re ahead.
But even when these situations arise, we gain a lot from finishing—or at least finishing a particular stage of the creative process and reaching a natural point of completion.
It builds confidence
Creative work is hard, it’s uncertain, it’s full of problems to solve and things that aren’t quite right that we need to figure out. It rarely looks as good as the version in our head. And when we’re in the middle of these issues, it’s easy to give up and say that it’s going nowhere. But creative confidence doesn’t come from producing masterpieces, it comes from facing these problems and difficulties and figuring out ways to solve them. That problem-solving aspect of the work is uncomfortable, but it’s a skill we need to develop if we want to do good work. Sticking with a project when it gets hard and uncomfortable, showing ourselves that we can get through it and come out the other side, builds confidence. Dropping projects because they have become hard does the opposite.
It teaches us things we wouldn’t otherwise learn
There is also so much we can learn in that hard, uncertain bit. As a writer, I feel that my writing benefits most not from sitting down to write, but from editing what I’ve written. This is also one of my least favourite parts of the process. I want to be a good writer and having to face several hundred words of rubbish challenges that. What helps me learn, however, is figuring out why it is rubbish and how I can make it better. Will the finished product be good? I don’t know. But I think the process of seeing a creative cycle through, of starting, working through the sticky middle, and coming to some kind of natural finishing point, is necessary to get better.
It’s a gateway to (hopefully) better work
Seth Godin emphasises the importance of what he calls “shipping” early in our creative journeys. As he writes, “The job (of the early work) is to open the door for the next round of work.” We learn, we grow, we develop through starting, trying, finishing, then starting the process all over again.
Over to you: What do you need to finish? What can you do to make that happen this month?
