Why Can’t You Finish Anything?
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My house contains a vaguely defined room—a parlor-like space that was created by a renovation decades ago. After my son was born, it served as a playroom, full of baby and toddler toys. Then it became a nook where, late at night, my wife and I could listen to music and read. That equilibrium held until the Legos and board games arrived; their incursion was the beginning of the end. Today, the room hosts complex Lego sets in various states of completion, along with shelves of semi-functional robots and baskets of knitting filled with sweater fragments. I’ve set up a laptop on a folding table to work on a book that’s overdue; it’s next to a couple of synthesizers on which I noodle. On the floor, big storage bins are part of a perennial effort to clean things up. We call it the blue room, because that’s how it’s painted—but actually it’s a room for unfinished stuff.
Why can’t you finish anything? That’s the question I ask myself whenever I sit down at that folding table to write. It’s perfectly fine, of course, for projects to be incomplete; it takes time to do pretty much anything of value. And a pile of half-done projects doesn’t have to be oppressive—in a certain frame of mind, it can even be an inspiring testament to your ambition and imagination. Eventually, though, a line gets crossed. The not-yet-finished becomes simply the unfinished. Novels pile up in a drawer; gizmos in medias res become nests of parts and wires. Dynamism fades, and stasis settles in. Whatever your project was, it now sits there, a weight, a rebuke.
There are many reasons for things ending up unfinished. In one common pattern, the skills needed to wrap something up turn out to be quite different from the ones needed to do the bulk of the work; you’ve done a lot, but simply don’t know how to do what’s left. (You can write and perform a song on the guitar—but can you record and arrange multiple parts on a computer?) In another, a self-critical impulse takes hold, and what seemed good at first is suddenly embarrassing. Stamina can be an issue: perhaps you just get tired or bored before you see things through. And it’s also possible to be a victim of your own success. Franz Schubert began writing his Eighth Symphony—the “Unfinished” Symphony—in 1822, when he was twenty-five; when he died, six years later, he’d finalized only two of the customary four movements. Some musicologists think Schubert struggled to finish the symphony because the first two movements were so good. You can outdo yourself and get stuck.
Some people, though, despite such obstacles, seem to be expert finishers. My brother, who is a radiologist by day, also enjoys woodworking, and his house is full of completed pieces of furniture, not piles of unvarnished lumber; he also tinkers with cars, and consistently reassembles whatever he takes apart. When I visited the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, at his house in Maine, I was astonished by the sheer number of projects he had finished: not just the expected philosophical books and articles but also elaborate whittles (a realistic apple, say, which came apart into slices, stem, and core) and practical contraptions (a “lobster crane,” designed to facilitate the cooking of lobster over an outdoor fire). We’d all like to be like that. Why can’t we more easily follow our inspired impulses all the way to the end?
One obvious way to finish things is to seek out an external structure. It’s true that my book is overdue—and yet, being overdue is actually a blessed state, since it depends on the existence of a deadline. Because there is a real editor waiting for my manuscript, the book is not-yet-finished, rather than unfinished. (My plan, in fact, is to finish it this week.)
We’ve all tried to impose deadlines on ourselves. It’s easy enough to scrawl one next to an item on your to-do list, or to enter one into whatever app you use to organize your life. Oddly, this is an almost philosophical act, inasmuch as it forces you to confront the nature of reality. The difference between a real deadline, imposed for legitimate reasons from without, and a fake one, conjured from within, is like the difference between eating brunch and seeing it on Instagram. To create a real deadline, you must generate real accountability. This is by no means impossible: a monthly book-club meeting might be real enough to help you finish more books. But the more complex, ambitious, idiosyncratic, or optional your undertaking, the harder it can be to find a real reason to do it.
It can be useful to attack the issue analytically—to try to figure out, on a rational basis, why you can’t move forward. But this often requires accepting the fundamental irrationality of the wrapping-up process. In many cases, everything gets reversed. Whatever used to be fun (coding your first game, say) is replaced by something that’s not (debugging your code). Options you worked hard to create for yourself (you took so many beautiful photographs!) turn out to be burdens that must be discarded (your photo book can have only forty pages). If you sought to escape rigid perfectionism, you must now tighten every nut and bolt. If you were once inspired, you must become grimly determined. Just as you can hate-watch a show, so you can hate-finish a project, getting it done so that you can banish it from your life.
Amid all this unpleasantness, it can be helpful to think of finishing as bringing two parts of yourself into communication. The finishing half must give feedback to the starting half, and vice versa. I’ve experienced this most recently while noodling on my synthesizers. For a long time, I found that I could write simple songs but not complex ones; the problem was that I didn’t know enough music theory to achieve complexity. After I started learning theory, the creative first part of my songwriting improved immediately—and yet this threw the detail-oriented finishing part into disarray. When I sketched out an interesting song in an unusual scale—Mixolydian Flat 6, which is major on the bottom and minor on top—I neglected to take careful notes about my melody and chords. I found myself floundering as I attempted to nail down the concluding section, when the opening motifs would return in altered form.
It wasn’t fun. Still, the experience taught me to work with the end in mind, and now the front and back halves of my process are in better synch. Next time, it’ll be easier. The old woodworking adage suggests measuring twice to cut once—there’s even a Russian version that argues for measuring seven times. But you won’t find out what you need to measure unless you do some cutting.
Suppose you make finishing a priority. Instead of planning to clean out your basement—an unfinishable task if there ever was one—you decide to fill one trash bag per week. Rather than trying to write a book of poems, you commit to a daily haiku. You’re only starting tasks that you’re certain to complete; you’ve made big projects small, and so removed the risk. In the worst case, if you give up, you’ll have a tidier basement and a clutch of haiku. Many productivity gurus advise breaking big projects up into small steps, but this takes the idea further: if you can rethink what you do such that every task is easily finishable, then nothing will ever go unfinished.
In some cases, whether something is finished is all in your mind. “Composition 1960 #7,” a piece of music by the minimalist La Monte Young, consists of a score with two notes and the instruction “to be held for a long time.” If you adopt a minimalist approach, then you can simply declare that the unfinished is finished. That’s what I’ve been doing in the blue room. Yes, the robots are half built—but my son’s interests have advanced. Now he’s working on more complicated robot kits. The old robots aren’t done, but the learning is.
Maybe, from this perspective, you actually are one of those people who finishes things: you’ve gotten what you needed, and moved on. But is finishing by fiat actually finishing for real? Not always. Finishing things the hard way is often valuable precisely because it’s weird in ways you can’t anticipate. Wrapping up any particular project can require learning things that are non-transferable, and acquiring skills for which you didn’t sign up. There might be a sense in which finishing, in general, is a skill you can build. But what you’re really developing is patience with the twists and turns. ♦