I Never Finish Anyth

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. I Never Finish Anyth I am a great by James Gregg. I'll often come up with an idea that I get excited about.

Then I brainstorm a catchy name for it, check the availability of URLs and social media accounts, maybe even set up a landing page. It gives me a big rush, and I imagine a dazzlingly bright future ahead of me for the concept. And then the idea crawls up and dies inside of me because I didn't actually do anything. To finish things, you need to fall in love with the part of the process that's harder to love, the bit where you roll up your sleeves and do the damn thing. Maybe that's why it's got another much tougher sounding name, execution.

The human brain is a brilliant, idea generating machine. In the past, we had to convert our ideas into solutions just to stay alive, to make sure that we had enough food or didn't get eaten. But now on the safety of our comfortable, hygienic, homogenized 21st century lives, it's all too easy to fall asleep on our true potential. Your idea doesn't mean diddly squat until it's out in the world. And to do that, it's going to take some hard manual labor.

So to stay on track, you'll need to engage with the execution process as much as the idea itself. None of my various bright ideas, a social network for sneaker collectors, customizable artwork for your bicycle, a recipe sharing platform, a book about designers turned entrepreneurs Okay. That last one I'm actually set on doing. None of those have come to fruition yet. And while cycle love might be building momentum, I still have a huge hang up about creating the ebooks or information based content about cycling or whatever it is that I've been talking about for months months.

It's still a blog, not a business, and costing me money instead of making it. I chickened out of the work. You need graft or grit or gumption or whatever you wanna call it. Whether it's by actually blogging on your blog or starting your start up, value is created by doing. This is a quote by Sam Altman.

It's easier to sit around and talk about building a start up than it is to actually start a start up, And it's fun to talk about. But over time, the difference between fun and fulfilling becomes clear. Doing things is really hard. It's why, for example, you can generally tell people what you're working on without NDAs, and most patents never matter. The value and the difficulty comes from the execution.

When I looked back at the list of goals I'd set out for 2013 the other day, I felt pretty embarrassed, especially as it's published in plain sight on the Internet. I didn't come close to achieving any of my resolutions, not one thing on the list. But I know that beating yourself up about this kind of stuff is stupid. So I haven't made any New Year's resolutions this year. You don't want high resolutions anyhow.

You want low resolution. You want to let go of the fear of up, of it not being perfect, of what other people think, of things that probably won't ever happen, and just crank that stuff out, baby. Instead of trying to finish everything, try to finish one thing Today, if possible, and then another and another. I think I just finished this blog post. What are you gonna finish today?

There are a couple of things that I wanna pull out of this article. The first is actually not by the author, but he quotes Sam Altman, who is the president of, a tech incubator. And he quotes Sam as saying, over time, the difference between fun and fulfilling becomes apparent. It's really, really fun to talk about new ideas and to talk about all the things you're going to do. But over time, the more you talk about things that you never actually end up doing, the less fun it becomes.

If you're always talking about things and never actually finishing any of them, you kinda start to question yourself. And next time you have the big idea, there's that little voice in your head that says, yeah. Good idea, but you never do anything. And so the gap just grows bigger and bigger the longer you talk about stuff and don't actually finish it. I get it.

It's fun to come up with new ideas. I come up with new ideas every day, and they're all gonna change the world. And that's the fun part. It's fun to think up new ideas, things you're gonna build, things you're gonna do around the house, projects you're gonna do in the backyard, and you instantly hop on the forums or run to Google or Pinterest or Stack Overflow or whatever, and you start dreaming about this idea and planning it up and sketching it out. And this is what the guys who host the texting podcast, they call this the madness.

So on their podcast, they're always having new ideas and talking back and forth about the new start up they're gonna build. And the question is often, do you have the madness about this? And that is the perfect descriptor for what this actually is. It's the madness. It's that moment in time where you think this can't possibly fail.

This is the greatest idea in history, but a month or a week or maybe even a day, you're on to some other idea. And the greatest idea in history is now just a, oh, yeah. I thought about doing that, but I didn't end up doing it. And just like writing is a skill and public speaking is a skill and programming is a skill, finishing things is a skill. You can learn to be a finisher.

I'm not gonna let you get away with saying, well, I'm a good starter, but I'm a bad finisher, so this one isn't really for me. Well, get better at it. Be a finisher. You don't wanna go through your whole life with a bunch of half finished projects or ideas that you wish you had implemented. Finishing is a muscle.

You can build it. Finishing is a skill. You can learn it. You just gotta start small. And you even can start by looking around your house or looking around your hard drive right now and saying, what things did I start that I thought were great and maybe still are great, but I never finished?

Do you have a half done project in the house? Do you have a half built website? Do you have a blog that you spun up, but you never wrote on? Start there. And, yeah, the execution is a slog.

It's fun to tell people you started a new blog. It's not as much fun to be up at 11:30 writing your next blog post. We get a big high when we tell people, hey. I started a new blog, and they say, oh, that's so cool. Good for you.

But we don't get any high when it's just us alone writing, And that's what separates the dreamers from the people who are actually successful. It's easy to dream. It's hard to execute. So look around, see if there's something you started that you haven't finished and that you wanna finish, and do it. Put in the time.

Do the work. And if there's not, that's fine. You don't have to pick up any of these old projects you don't like, but at least make a commitment to yourself that the next thing you decide to undertake, you're gonna actually do. Make that commitment to yourself. You can decide to be a finisher.

The Music Makers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from next week's episode. No time for something important? Try getting up earlier. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short term, say, an afternoon, and underestimate what we can get done over the long term if we do a little bit at a time.

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