Essays

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

Starting things is not a discipline. Almost anyone can start a novel, a business, a garden, a diet, on a burst of enthusiasm that asks nothing of them yet. Finishing is where the actual character of a person shows up, usually somewhere around the point where the enthusiasm has run out and only the work is left. I've come to think finishing is less about willpower and more about what you've decided the project is for. If a project exists to make you feel like a person who does interesting things, it will die the moment it stops feeling interesting, which is most of the middle of it. If it exists because you actually want the finished thing to exist in the world, the boring middle becomes just a toll you pay, not a referendum on whether to continue. This is not an argument against starting things loosely, or abandoning genuinely bad ideas. It's an argument for noticing, honestly, which kind of quitting you're doing — the wise kind, or the kind that happens every single time, right after the interesting part ends.