Why Can I Never Finish What I Start?
The Pattern
You start things. Many things. The energy at the beginning is real, genuine, sometimes electric. Then comes the middle. The middle is where it gets hard and also where it gets real. The thing is no longer potential. It is becoming actual, with actual flaws and actual limitations and an actual gap between what it is and what you imagined it would be. And then something quiets. You lose interest, or get busy, or start a new thing. The unfinished work accumulates as evidence. Not of laziness. Of a specific kind of fear: the fear of what completing would require. Completion means it could be seen. Seen means it could be judged. And the judgment of something real you made is far more dangerous than the judgment of something you never quite finished.
Origins & Context
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic addresses the phenomenon of creative work that stops before completion as the meeting of the creative impulse with the fear of what making something real means. The idea is safe. The finished object is exposed.
Brenee Brown in Daring Greatly connects this to vulnerability: the creative act is one of the most vulnerable human experiences because it puts the interior life into a visible form. The incomplete work is protected from critique. The finished work is not.
Silvano Arieti in Creativity: The Magic Synthesis notes that perfectionism is one of the most reliable destroyers of creative completion. The internal critic, which is most activated by work approaching its public form, creates the conditions under which completion becomes impossible.
You are not lazy. You are afraid of what finishing means. The incomplete work is protected from the verdict. The finished work is not.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the collection: the drawer or folder or hard drive of started things. Chapters, projects, business plans, creative works that made it to a certain point and stopped.
It shows up as the excitement at the new idea as a relief from the stuckness of the current one. The new thing promises to be the one that works, the one that does not get complicated or imperfect the way the current one has.
It shows up as the perfectionism that increases as the work approaches completion. In the beginning, imperfection is acceptable because it is a draft. As completion nears, the standards rise and the gap between the work and the imagined standard widens.
It shows up as the finishing that happens in private and the showing that never happens. Some people do finish things. They just never show them. The incompletion is not in the making but in the making visible.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as: Fear of completion as vulnerability exposure (Brene Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert) — the defensive halting of creative work at the point where it would become visible and therefore subject to judgment.
Perfectionism as creative inhibition (Silvano Arieti) — the rising internal standards that make completion feel impossible by increasing the gap between the work and the imagined ideal.
Creative avoidance — the pattern of starting new projects as a way of escaping the difficulty and vulnerability of completing existing ones.
Vulnerability hangover in creative work — the discomfort and protective withdrawal that follows the exposure of creative work, which can preemptively prevent completion.
Related entries: Perfectionism, Self-Sabotage, Worthiness, Authentic Self, Shame.
Nikita's Note
The unfinished work is not evidence of laziness. It is evidence of a very precise kind of care.
The thing you cannot finish matters to you. That is why you cannot finish it. If it did not matter, the imperfection would not be threatening. The stopping is protection of something real.
The question to ask at the point of stopping is not why am I failing but what am I afraid would happen if this were complete. The answer to that question is where the work actually is.
From the work
You are not lazy. You are afraid of what finishing means. The incomplete work is protected from the verdict. The finished work is not.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.