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LM: #382: Quitting is a gift to your future self
It almost never seems like a good idea to quit a project. If you never finish, you never unlock the rewards that await.
But in creativity especially, quitting is a gift to your future self.
It’s hard to see that when you’re in the muck of something that’s not working. All you see is what’s in front of you – the many details you could keep trying to salvage.
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You can’t see what it’s costing you because the alternative hasn’t had a chance to present itself.
The seed of an idea takes time to sprout and grow roots. It needs to get quite large before you’re bothering to dodge it with the lawnmower. You can’t even see it when your primary goal is still cutting the grass.
Mark Twain had a good approach to this: If a book wasn’t working out, he’d leave it be. That was easier to do because, as he explained,
There has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyard hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun…The minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived through a couple of years’ restful idleness.
Maybe the most valuable thing I’ve learned writing Finish What Matters (now available for pre-order) is that a big part of finishing is knowing when to quit.
Quitting is a gift to your future self. You can’t unwrap it until what’s inside has had a chance to grow.
Aphorism: “It’s when you are not doing much of anything that you are accomplishing most.” —Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Cool: Whispr Flow is really, really, really good speech-to-text.
Best,
David
