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Finish What Matters is now live
Finish What Matters is now available on Amazon Kindle and paperback, Audible Audiobook, and in ebook and audiobook from other retailers. (Availability by ordering through your local bookstore is coming soon.)
If you’ve already read the book, please click on a star rating. If you know a podcaster or other creator who you think would be interested in featuring the book, please pass it on.
Since you’re reading my blog, humor me as I start with the personal note that it’s hard to believe this book is finally finished and out there.
This is the third – final – book in the Getting Art Done trilogy. It started nine years ago with a 30-day email challenge. I intended to write one book. That became three.
This is also my fifth book, and today is the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of my first. A major book every three years is a satisfying pace, even if some individual books take six – such as this one.
I’ve learned so much writing these books, and I hope you can learn the same reading them.
This one in particular was the biggest surprise. I thought it would be the easiest to write, but it was the hardest.
I thought that since I have finished projects, I would be merely sharing what I knew, but it turned out I still had a lot to learn.
That word, matters, haunted me throughout. You can’t spend a decade writing three books about creative procrastination without wondering if that very act is one of creative procrastination in itself.
In some way, I have to admit that it was.
If I knew all the things in these books, I probably wouldn’t write them again. Which is pretty circular, and shouldn’t be a bad sign – I don’t want to write a book if I’m not going to learn something.
But going forward I think I’m better equipped to do creative work even more deeply from my core. This book led to me publishing my first fiction. When I searched myself, I found that was something that really mattered.
I’ll also never think the same about:
- Balancing my Leonardo and Raphael
- Defining finish lines
- Discerning between Shiny Object Syndrome and following a shiny object strategy
- Being clear with myself whether I’m playing sure bets or wildcards
- Carefully allocating my resources according to my barbell strategy
- Using the BESS methods of breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding to turn small projects into bigger ones
- Deliberately coming up for air, after a period of exploration, to define a plan of execution
- Identifying and defending hills I’m willing to die on
- Cultivating devastating focus for that last 10%
This book is shaping my thoughts as I consider what to finish in the next ten years.
With each book, I push myself in new ways, and I’ve never made leaps like with this one.
Compared to Mind Management, I now have:
- 6 more years writing experience
- A Zettelkasten of 50,000 notes from my reading and thinking
- The fruits of a month-long research trip to Italy
- A cabin in the mountains, where I’ve been separated from distractions
- One year of daily one-hour meditation
- Somatic release during my meditation sessions
- The leverage of LLMs for deeper research and a more thorough revision process
- Interviews with dozens of real creatives at all levels
- An upgraded audiobook studio, world-class audiobook producer
I put all I’ve got into this. This is as close to my vision as I could possibly come.
This will be one data point on the effectiveness of having conviction about what is right in a domain where there is no right answer, making an unreasonable investment in the clarity of that idiosyncratic sense of quality, and daring to choose as heroes those who found their own way of measuring the meaning of the word “matters.”
I was thrilled to get praise from a couple authors I admire who read an early copy:
Finish What Matters is a practical guide to becoming the scientist of your own motivation, full of useful experiments that help you break free from rigid frameworks and find your own balance between exploration and execution. A thoughtful invitation to embrace the unpredictable nature of creativity, and discover your own way of bringing meaningful ideas to life. —Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments.
Most books tell you to finish what you start. David Kadavy asks the more important question: Is it worth finishing? Finish What Matters is a smart, original, and practical guide to balancing curiosity with execution so your best ideas actually make it into the world. —Nir Eyal, New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Belief
So buy this book, because if you’ve ever liked anything I wrote, I promise this the most engaging and mind-expanding thing I’ve ever written. I really believe you’ll find something on almost every page that will change how you think about and see what’s worth doing in this world that’s changing faster than ever.
But even if you’re pretty sure you have nothing left to learn about deciding what ideas are worth following and actually making them happen, please consider buying anyway. Anyone who has been reading my income reports knows this book also took much more out of me than I had expected financially. I seriously cannot afford to keep doing this – even from Colombia – if you do not buy this book.
If you’re asking where to buy it, Amazon Kindle is the preference. There’s no other place where each purchase does more to generate additional purchases from new readers.
(Availability in paperback on other retailers and through your local bookstore is coming soon. I’m awaiting some delays beyond my control through the distributor, IngramSpark.)
I felt profound appreciation as I was typesetting the acknowledgements and saw the names of people who have been reading even since before Design for Hackers, or who I recognized from the Getting Art Done email list when I did the challenge nine years ago. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the Preview Edition, let me interview them, took my survey, or who has simply been a reader for a long time. Even if this ends up being my last book, it’s been an amazing ride and I couldn’t have done it without you.
Please buy the shit out of Finish What Matters on Amazon and everywhere else.
