Finishing

Finishing is my greatest creative challenge. It’s easy to start something new while the daydream is still more real than reality. Once it becomes real, the art is subject to disenchanting criticism and disappointment. The art has become work. 

Perfectionism brings on my reluctance to finish things. Once it’s done it’s done. I can’t take it all back and fix it anymore.

Perfectionism and impatience make an especially deadly combination. Perfectionism sees everything that could be reworked while impatience abandons the work halfway through perfectionism’s list of demands. The vision of what I could do if I was just a little better at my craft keeps me jumping constantly from project to project. Each project starts with the aim to improve enough to REALLY make good work. Then doubt creeps in, I realize I won’t be able to fulfill the vision, and I abandon it for something else. Everything is too precious. Too precious to finish and too precious to share. 

Maybe I need “perfectionism is the root of all kinds of evils” cross-stitched on a pillow…

Finishing is a habit. What you repeatedly do gets repeated. If I only ever make half-finished projects, leaving them half-finished will only get easier. Momentum moves in both directions. To get finished work, I need to practice finishing. 

Everyone and their mother has read and recommended Atomic Habits by James Clear. He outlines four principles of building a habit: make it obvious, make it easy, make it attractive, and make it satisfying. I focus most on how to make it easy. I also like the word simple. If I want to write consistently, I need to set a goal I can consistently hit. Not create a complicated set of hoops to jump through and burn out on two weeks later. Can I draw for 6 minutes? Can I write 50 words? Gradually building consistency will get me farther than a two-hour blog post on a whim. This solves the problem of impatience. Patience needs to be trained. 

For perfectionism, I use the question “What would it look like if it is easy?” from Tim Farris and apply it to the final product. This helps me define what done means. To make writing a blog post easy, maybe I write it under 500 words, or I set a 30-minute time limit. Keep it simple.