The Importance of Completing Things

I‘m a great starter. I love to start things. It’s exciting, new and my energy is high.

I’m also a pretty decent finisher. Mostly because when you finish something then you get to start something new.

But it’s in the middle where I start to have issues.

In the middle, the novelty and excitement of a new thing has worn off, and the end is still a ways off. I find that where I sprint off at the beginning, in the middle I’m starting to drag my feet, trying to find the energy to keep moving forward.

Honestly, I just find middles a little boring. Which is why when I start something, I always make completion my goal. Otherwise I will start several things and never finish them. And then they will be sitting around, and I will never do anything with them.

When I commit to completing things, I grow during that activity because I have to take that thing from beginning to end, and endure all the parts in between. Also, at the end I have something to show for myself, even if it’s not very good. That’s a risk you take when you start something, though.

But the good news is, once you complete something and you start in on something new of the same sort, you now know the drill, and the second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) time around you have a better idea of what you are doing. And you improve.

But completion is instrumental in the improvement. I don’t think you are going to get the growth you want, without the completion.

If you know what NaNoWriMo is, you know that the goal is to write a novel in a month, which sounds crazy – and it is. But the whole point is to complete it, not to make it good quality, which seems like a really odd objective, but if you think about it, it’s not.

Many people never start the things that they want to do because they are afraid that it won’t be any good. So NaNoWriMo allows writers to go through the exercise of completing that novel that they’ve been thinking about, and lets them worry about quality later.

Because, probably, the kind of quality you are looking for won’t come for you on the first go-round. It will only come after completing a few things first.

And once you have a few completions under your belt, you won’t even notice the improvement that snuck up on you. 😉

photo credit: Carrie Scharf