About a month ago, I was waiting for my son’s flight at Sky Harbor Airport, and I was spending that time reading on Readwise a PDF that I don’t remember having collected but that I nevertheless enjoyed.
The PDF is a chapter titled “Learning to Work” by Virginia Valian from an anthology called Working it Out. The PDF is below, if you want it.
Here I’m quoting in full three paragraphs about unfinished projects (or half-baked ideas or undeveloped intentions, or whatever you wish to call them).
Unfinished projects also have a way of nagging at the back of the mind, even if one has decided that the enterprise was mistaken to begin with. In everything I have begun but not finished there was an idea that I thought was interesting and still think is interesting, even if its context was wrong, even if it itself was wrong. It’s hard to lay those ideas to rest until they’ve been worked out and either found hopeless or given formal expression.
It also becomes depressing to be unsure from the very beginning whether or not you’re actually going to do something with a new idea. If it’s just going to end up in a drawer along with a bunch of other half-alive ideas, it’s hard to get committed to it. Lack of commitment creates another problem; if you’re going to be committed to an idea, you’ll examine it very carefully at the outset to make sure it’s worth spending time on. Thus, you are quicker to get rid of an idea that is only superficially appealing. The uncommitted person ends up neither developing worthwhile ideas nor getting rid of worthless ones soon enough.
To me, then, one of the striking differences between successful and unsuccessful workers is not necessarily how much time they spend working, or even how much they accomplish per unit of time, but how many half-written or almost-finished manuscripts they have lying around, how many interesting ideas for various projects that nothing much ever happened to.
If I had to state a take-away, perhaps it would be this:
Take the time to really look at your idea, to see if you think it’s worthless or worth pursuing. Don’t let half-baked ideas pile up.
The PDF from which this quotation is drawn:
