A Project Is Not Forever
Becky Blades' book Start More Than You Can Finish helped me realize and let go of the burden of feeling I need to finish the things I start. Blades is so enthusiastic about starts -- we are defined by the projects we start, she says, not those we finish -- and she points out that we could hardly begin anything worthwhile if we actually were certain we had everything we needed to finish it.
But increasingly, it feels like we are denied opportunities to finish anything at all.
When one starts a newsletter (I won't call it a substack), one rarely does so with an end date in mind, or a number of issues after which one has done enough. Perhaps we should. Robin Sloan's idea that a newsletter can have seasons, like a TV show, was a revelation to me, although I have yet to try doing this.
I was thinking about this recently with Manu Moreale's post about potentially ending his three-year People & Blogs project. He writes about how much effort it is taking, the lack of momentum, and finally:
I know there are lots of people out there who enjoy it and would love to see it continue. But the reality of the vast majority of projects on the web is that they’re usually either solo projects or they’re run by very small teams that more often than not end up losing momentum and shutting everything down because of a lack of support.
I've been spending more time lately on the indieweb and techy sections of the internet (partly because I've become interested in Relatable Problems in Other Fields), and wow, I didn't realize how true this one xkcd comic was. Basically, a lot of the internet's infrastructure relies on various open source projects that are thanklessly maintained by one person or a small group. (And yes, this is a security vulnerability.)
I was moved by this post: Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give.
He writes:
I gave too much of myself away. Not just code. Myself. My time, my energy, my emotional bandwidth, my identity. I made myself a public resource and then was surprised when the public felt entitled to my resources.
Relatable.
You start a small project, and it becomes a big project. We call this success. People need your project, people want your project, people say they appreciate your work on this project. People don't help. There's no end date, no off-ramp. To leave the project feels like failure. To remain, eventually, costs you too much.
You leave. It may feel like failure.
But a project is not forever. It was never supposed to be forever.
If it stays small and never takes off, it's a failure.
If it gets big and you never meant for it to be that big and you can't or don't want to sustain it at that level -- also a failure.
This can't be the right frame for us to look at our work.
Remember when "conscious uncoupling" was the new phrase for reimagining divorce? How can we consciously uncouple from our projects?
How can we deliberately engineer completion for ourselves? How can we allow ourselves this sense of completion even when others suggest we are abandoning a project mid-stream? When yes, more work could have been done, but at what cost?
Like being a real writer, completion is a gift we can only give ourselves.