oclyke's blog

Just be done with it.

Do you know a creative who starts a lot of projects but never finishes them. Is it you? I have been the embodiment of that archetype all my life.

Today I am vowing to finish everything I start.

Shocking, is it? Let me tell you what I really mean; but first allow me to sympathize with my fellow {procrastinators, dabblers, serial-starters, dilettantes, neophiles}.

compassion

Usually this shortcoming is not due to a lack of talent or capability ā€“ arguably it may even be due to a surplus of the same. Passion and enthusiasm amplifies the appeal of a myriad of possibilities all the while the difficulty and mystery of a project fade as the final vision grows closer.

A predilection for learning is the motive force driving people who plough new fields even as last season's harvest wastes on the vine.

clarity

As virtuous as a broad education may be there can certainly be too much of a good thing.

Would you try meth?1

Doing something new is to scholarship as juicing is to muscular hypertrophy.

Okay, I am being hyperbolic. The point is that doing something new feels really good to someone who loves learning because the learning curve is often relatively "steep" near the beginning of any endeavor.2 What may be a deterrent for some is the reward for a philomath. These people must be exceptionally careful when traveling near the youtube-wikipedia singularity.

Like a person in the grips of addiction a strong dilettante may forget to do things which are important or even vital to their wellbeing such as eating, drinking, or documenting their projects in a blog so that people will know that they've been hard at work.

We have identified a cause of the manic creative's behaviour now let us take pains not to allow it as an excuse. There is, in fact, quite a lot at stake.

consequences

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

ā€“ William Shakespeare

Pursuing many projects has a lot of consequences. Here are just a few:

Yes, as Shakespeare so elegantly said, there are both good and bad sides to being a jack of all trades. People who start many projects are likely, but not necessarily, talented in many disciplines. I for one intend not to relinquish my place at that table; however I do plan to make a social call among friends dining in the hall of masters.3 Pursuing many projects is not the problem, rather the issue is with no finishing them.

Here are some more consequences, this time for not finishing the projects which you start:

My friend Luke and I were discussing this topic and he said that not finishing a project is a way to ā€œhedge your bets," meaning that it is a way to avoid judgement. As long as a project is incomplete it can be perfect in the mind. The creator can always defend the project with promises of what it will be like in the future.

Ultimately all that matters is the result.

commitment

I solemnly swear, to nobody other than myself, that I will finish what I start.

The magic of this is not that I will suddenly become a hyper-effective workaholic who is crushing out projects at a mind-bending inhuman pace, nor is it that I will cower in paralysis afraid to take on the responsibility of doing anything. More than anything this will act as a forcing function; a buffer to slow me down before diving headlong into something.

I will have to become damn good at determining what is and is not worth doing.

  1. Partially in jest as I believe in responsible drug use by adults. Dr. Carl Hart's ā€œDrug Use for Grown-Upsā€ is a good starting point if you want to know more.↩

  2. Combining the Pareto Principle with Tom Cargill's humorous ninety-ninety rule we can determine a philomath's enjoyment, E, throughout the course of a project. E is steepest in the first 40 percent of Cargill's time (which corresponds to the first 20 percent of Pareto's effort), drops precipitously in the pareto-cargill transition, and plateaus from 90 percent to 180 percent of time (45 percent to 100 percent effort).↩

  3. 3M once found that employees with ā€œT-shaped skillsā€ were over-represented in their top performers. Besides being of the mildly obnoxious ā€œbig company discovers obvious thingā€ prototype there is something interesting to talk about here. If one's state of learning can be represented in the form of a game of Tetris, where skills lie across the top and one's expertise in that skill is the number of blocks beneath it then what does a perfect game look like? Let's assume that the perfect game is one with all the squares filled in. (There are obvious reasons why this is not realistic, such as that people may actually wish to have a life, or that for all we know it may no longer be possible for a un-altered human mind to encompass the body of all human knowledge.) What, then, is the best path to take to that goal? The path which one takes when they project-hop is that of filling up all the squares at the lowest level first. An academic specialist, such as a neurosurgeon or a theoretical physicist, would laugh at this approach. Not only because (if the number of subjects is infinite) it will be impossible to move past the first level, but also because there is tangible value in going depth-first. After all, a pure mathematician's greatest accomplishment in their field can be to extend the body of human knowledge. So, to wrap up this absurdly long footnote, let's say that I am a firm believer in the balance of depth and breadth.↩

  4. My friend Dilip related to me the concept of ā€œpersistence vs. resilienceā€ from a particular study. The concept is that some people exhibit a high tolerance for delayed satisfaction; they can persist at a task even when the end goal is far. Some people exhibit resilience ā€“ they are able to get back up when they are knocked down. The study made an inverse correlation between the two traits in a group of students, potentially attributable to very interesting socioeconomic factors. For the purposes of this discussion it is enough to know that persistence and resilience are not mutually exclusive.↩

  5. People might think that you just fucked around.↩