The Real Reason You Never Finish Anything

It's overrated anyway and I'll prove it.

Apr 17, 2025

If I sat down over mocktails with every multipassionate person on earth, I’d have thousands of fascinating—and unrepeatable—conversations.

I’d soak up stories about making Tarot decks from scratch, what an intuitive painting session means and how to write like dead people. I’d geek out over the science of charisma, becoming a pet influencer and starting a neurodiversity awareness movement out of the back of your car.1

Each tale would be wildly different—except for one thing.

At some point in every conversation, I’d hear:

“I never finish anything.”

“I’m all planning and no follow-through.”

“I’m more of an idea guy.”

And as a fellow multipassionate, I’d nod along like a bobblehead because the struggle is real. Show me a shiny object lover, and I’ll show you a quitter.

Our common ground is that we’re endlessly curious. Learning is our drug of choice. Some of us may find the allure of discovery so compelling we fancy ourselves a lowkey Indiana Jones.

When your brain is a monkey mainlining Pixie Stix, something’s gotta give. You can’t be expected to finish all your projects when every shiny object in a ten-mile radius flashes its bedroom eyes at you and whispers, Just for a minute . . .

The unfortunate truth is that not finishing things is the multipotentialite tax, and we pay it with guilt, self-criticism and abandoned Trello boards. And when we look at this repeating pattern in our lives, it leads to internalized stories that we’re flaky, undisciplined or terrible at time management.

But what if I told you that none of those stories are true? That quitting doesn’t make you broken; it makes you savvy AF—if you know how to work with it. I’m about to offer you a whole new lens on what it means to finish things without becoming someone you’re not. This reframe will change how you approach every passion project from here on out—and, if I do my job well, how you see yourself forevermore.

The False-Start Hall of Fame

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar:

You’ve got 37 courses you were jazzed about for approximately two and a half weeks. Now, whenever you want to buy a new one, the devil on your shoulder tells you how wasteful you are and that this will just end up being another corpse in the course graveyard.
There’s a whole-ass closet filled with supplies of an art form you were convinced might be your life’s calling. Now they gather dust and mock you, and you’re torn between purging the reminder of your failure and keeping them FOREVER in a sacred vow to get them out some weekend and put them to use.
Your excitement for an activity evaporates once the novelty wears off or it’s no longer a challenge, and suddenly, you can’t remember what made you so obsessed with the thing in the first place.

And once you’ve labeled yourself a quitter, it makes it harder to permit yourself to start anything new because, well . . . You know how you are. This is by far the worst thing that can happen because now you are not only not finishing things, you’re not starting them either.

Beware of this insidious limbo. This is the place where joy goes to die.

Finished Just Might Look Different for You

What if we stopped thinking of “finished” as a milestone dictated by somebody else? If you start a project expecting a particular outcome and begin to realize that what you thought you would get is different from reality, why on earth would you continue?

What if, for instance, you wanted to learn how to help your sister, who suffers from chemical sensitivities and environmental contaminants? Maybe you research like a crazy person for four months, synthesize the information and now feel inexplicably . . . complete. You thought you had to turn your knowledge into online workshops and add a seventh passive income stream because society told you to. Capitalism whispered in your ear that all your activities have to be monetized, or you’re a waste of space.

But the reality is you just got what you came for, and you’re done now. Wouldn’t it be revolutionary if that got to be enough?

Alternatively, what if you have the DNA of a designer but not a builder? In college, I loved the act of designing costumes that a staff of people in the costume shop magicked into being. Imagine my despair when the real world of off-off-OFF Broadway expected me to construct those garments from the ground up. 😱

That experience doesn’t make me a failure. It makes me honest that I don’t have the patience to be a seamstress.

Why Are We Like This?

Gen Xers were taught that you don’t quit when the going gets tough. This lesson was apparently in all the parenting pamphlets that went out in the 70s, sandwiched between such wisdom as A truck bed is a perfectly reasonable place to pile children, and They’re potty trained? They can raise themselves now! Give ‘em a house key on a string!

Don’t get me wrong, I value a good work ethic. But I’ve also watched the younger generations champion the idea of working smarter, not harder—and I’m here for it. I also think hard work can be enjoyable if you’re getting what you want from an activity. However, if a project (or a job) just doesn’t feel good anymore, that’s valuable information to consider. You may no longer be getting what you need out of the experience. And that does not make you a slacker.

If it had truly been in the cards for me to be a costume designer, the labors of constructing garments would not have felt tedious and terrible. It might not have been my favorite part of the job, but it wouldn’t have made me want to quit. That desire stemmed from the truth that I actually wanted to be a writer.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the opposite of the obsession that seizes us at the start of a new passion is misery.

(This is logical because we live in extremes).

Don’t confuse staying somewhere you’re any shade of miserable with having tenacity and grit. If what you’re looking for isn’t where you’re looking, you are supposed to look somewhere else.

Barbara Sher, patron saint of multipassionates, puts it brilliantly: “If you wanted to buy a pair of shoes and you walked into a pet store, you wouldn’t blame yourself for not wanting dog food. And when you walked out empty-handed, you wouldn’t call yourself a quitter.”

Identify the Feeling You’re After, Then Chase It

Shiny object lovers need to remember our minds get fired up for their own reasons, and they aren’t always connected with accomplishment.

It could be the anticipation of, What’s going to happen next?

It might be that delicious moment on the precipice before diving into a new endeavor.

Or it could be when you discover a new rabbit hole and you’re powerless to resist its siren song.

Whatever it is for you, memorize what that moment feels like. That glorious, lit-up-from-the-inside excitement. Make that your endgame.

The next time you’re hijacked by a new squirrel to chase, instead of thinking, This is how I’m finally going to get rich and famous, simply jump at the opportunity to marinate in that feeling.

Get Radical With It

Steve Jobs used to look in the mirror every day and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do?”2 Ever since I heard that story, I’ve applied the same lens to my life.

Time is short; we know this. But when you combine that awareness with a truth you can feel in your bones—that we’re not here simply to grind and produce—you just might be able to accept the following radical proposition:

Start all the projects you want to start under the influence of that feeling you identified above 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼 and don’t finish MOST of them.

What if you had a giant colorful notebook where you let every new idea you have run rampant? In it, you can map out details, draw diagrams, compile research, glue in images and just generally lose yourself in the ecstasy of imagining the possibilities until you run out of steam and collapse in a satisfied heap.

In many, many cases, that will be all you need to do to “get what you came for.” And when you know, you know.

But sometimes, the idea won’t let go of you that easily, and you’ll feel compelled to buy supplies and materials and an online course about how to use them. And maybe, six months or a year down the line, you’ll find those supplies in a closet collecting dust. When that happens, it might be best to just admit that you’re finished. My favorite solution—dreamed up by Barbara Sher—is what she calls the Scanner’s Finish.

She suggests that when you know the chances are good that you won’t be working on a project again, you should gather up all the parts, wrap them in a parcel of brown paper and tie it with string. Then, attach a large label explaining what the project is, what the goal was, what stage the project is at now and what the next steps are, should it ever be continued.

In doing this, you’re signing off on it. You have decided it’s finished by your standards, which—and this may shock you—are the only ones that matter. You’ve also created the possibility that your efforts won’t be wasted by explaining what it is and what the next steps are. Your bored teenager could come across it one summer afternoon and pick up right where you left off!

Sher also encourages us to put these parcels on a bookshelf reserved for displaying our life’s work, which sounds like an avant-garde exhibition of the inner workings of a multifaceted mind. Which is to say . . . glorious. If you’re more of a purger, these little project bundles could be given away on Freecycle or Buy Nothing forums, and you can consider yourself a patron of someone else’s art.

But What If You Do Want to Finish?

So far, we have reframed our approach to finishing and learned how to pursue a different reward altogether. But what if you actually do want to finish something, and worry you don’t have what it takes?

Next week, I’ll show you how to Jedi mind trick yourself into finishing every task you deem worthy of finishing. That part’s key—it has to be worthy—but trust that after implementing this process, you’ll see yourself in a whole new light.

Paid subscribers will also receive a downloadable toolkit that takes the guesswork out of quitting. It’ll help you avoid the swamp of sunk costs and make a decision you feel good about, so you can get on with chasing squirrels.

Would your life’s work bookshelf make one hell of an interesting museum? It would make my MONTH if you’d tell me in the comments what would be included.

Reading other people’s obsession lists or mapping their zany career trajectories is legit one of my favorite pastimes.

(gets up to make popcorn)