Becoming a Finisher

When I was younger, I used to flit between interests and rarely finished what I started. Starting as a kid with half-built tree forts, it later became half-finished business ideas and half-finished products. I was great at starting things, but never finishing them.

I got so frustrated at myself for this lack of finishing, that I decided to build a new habit: finishing everything I started. That meant finishing books I thought were boring. That meant finishing thirty-day trials, when I had already decided I wasn’t going to continue the habit. That meant finishing projects that were already obsolete.

And it worked. I probably complete 80-90% of the projects I set out with, including ones that are lengthy and challenging. It’s not because I’m consistently motivated to do them (there were plenty of moments I wanted to quit during the MIT Challenge or Year Without English) but because I have a habit of finishing what I start.

What’s Worth Finishing

The problem is, trying to finish everything is a recipe for stubbornness, not success. Applied too literally, a finisher would never quit his job or sell her business. A finisher would slog through dull, uninspired books, leaving countless better volumes untouched.

While it might seem like you can avoid these problems by reasoning on a case-by-case basis, that undermines the whole idea of a habit of finishing what you start. If you could reason case-by-case, then you’d have an excuse to give up on a project you had started just because you were no longer motivated to do it.

Instead, I believe the solution is to view all activities you undertake as being of two different types: experiments and commitments. Before you start any activity that will last more than a day, decide whether it should be mentally categorized as an experiment or commitment before going further.

Experiments are okay to quit. The goal of the experiment is to not be afraid to try something out, so you want to lower the barriers to getting started. If you later don’t feel like doing it, you can stop, no guilt or stress.

Commitments need to be carried out to the very end. The goal of a commitment is to not break your finisher’s habit. Unless it becomes impossible to finish your commitment, you continue going forward with it.

If you build these two mental categories, then you now have an easy way of forcing yourself to stick to a project until the end: decide whether it’s an experiment or commitment, in advance, and if you do decide it’s a commitment, start building the habit of finishing them without exception.

I recommend starting with only mentally labeling commitments of short time periods to start. Committing to year-long or multi-year processes has significant weaknesses because the amount of new information you’ll have will likely render the decision process that created the commitment out of date. Instead, a good commitment length is a couple weeks or a month where you’re not allowed to back out.

Sometimes a project will be an experiment on some time scales and a commitment on others. When I wanted to learn Chinese, I didn’t commit to fluency–just to three months. That was part of a larger experiment to see whether I wanted to put in the years of work to get to an advanced level. Similarly, you can construe projects of consisting of short-term commitments which must be reached, followed by points where you can step back and evaluate whether the project is worth continuing.

Creating this split does two things:

1. It gives you the power to finish things that matter to you, regardless of whether you’re always motivated to work on them.

2. It makes you much more cautious about entering into commitments. Because you take them seriously, you don’t start big projects without due diligence. That means you often do smaller experiments beforehand to scope out the commitment before taking it on. This makes your eventual commitments more successful, in the long run.