275. Finish What Matters (Forget the Rest)

<p>One thing I hear from a lot from readers of <a href= "https://kadavy.net/the-heart-to-start/"><em>The Heart to Start</em></a>, is that many people have no problem <em>starting</em> new projects. They instead struggle with <em>finishing</em> them. I can relate.</p> <p>Like many creative people, I once struggled to finish projects. I always had new ideas, I left books half-read, projects half-finished. I had done lots of creative work, and had little to show for it.</p> <p>Now I still always have new ideas, and I still leave books half-read and projects half-finished. But now, I have lots of finished projects to show for all the work I’ve done.</p> <p>What’s changed? I’ve learned to finish what matters, and forget the rest.</p> <h3>Embrace your inner Perceiver</h3> <p>A turning point in my own creative journey came when I learned to embrace my inner Perceiver. As much flak as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator gets for being pseudoscience, it’s still a useful lens for understanding your own tendencies. The concepts of Introversion and Extroversion have wide scientific support, but also useful I think are the concepts of “Perceiving” and “Judging.”</p> <p>If you watch in awe as one friend after another executes on ideas and achieves success, while you flounder, working on one idea after another, but never truly following through, your friends are probably “Js”, and you might be a “P.”</p> <p>This is the position I was in, until a friend at a party explained this dichotomy to me. Why was this other friend of ours so great at follow-through, while we both struggled to find our paths? This friend was a J. We were Ps.</p> <p>Another way of thinking about being a Perceiver is you’re someone who sees Possibilities. You can’t move forward with one idea, because you keep having other, better ideas. Meanwhile, your “Judging” friends find an idea, make the judgement to stick with it, and see it through.</p> <h3>Shiny objects aren’t shameful</h3> <p>Perceiving Possibilities is a necessary part of being creative. Fo