I often find myself struggling to get things done. Quite certainly there are many reasons for why this is, but I think one major factor is that I am trying to do too many things at once. There's just so much for me to explore and work on, that it's hard for me to resist creating new and exciting projects every week. I am greedy for projects, one might say. However, just the same as trying to hold on to as many liana from different trees as possible won't swing you far through the jungle, having too many projects at once won't be of much use.
However, unlike a liana, a project evolves over time. It gets filled with effort, hopes, expectations and most of all, time. So, what do you do when you realize that you can't go on with this project?
Some argue that it isn't a bad thing at all to drop a project, after all, what you learned during the work on the project remains within you, so the loss is minimal, right? Well, not quite, unfortunately. The one thing that will die with the project is the hope you put into it succeeding, into the project becoming something magnificent, something people can marvel at (even if it's just you yourself). This is also why it's so hard for me to give up on something. I know that I'm well capable of seeing the project finished, so it's most of the time not a problem of hitting a dead end, but rather that I run out of time. I run out of time because I create new projects that then take their toll. So what am I to do? I should give up on something that I know has the potential to bring me, and possibly others, a lot of joy? Is this really a reasonable demand?
I don't know. The problem with most projects, and especially most of my own projects, is that their usefulness raises exponentially towards their completion. Which means that for a very, very long time, no results will be shown at all. This makes it difficult to judge whether a project will actually bring enough profit in the end or not. The problem is only made worse by my personality, which drives me to try to finish something, no matter how awful its state is (I force myself to finish bad movies and series, etc).
The ideal solution would be if I could pass on. Pass on my projects to other people, so they could pick up what I started and nothing would be lost. Sadly, this is made nearly impossible because of a few simple reasons:
1) The project's success is not any more visible to outsiders than it is to you, so they don't know either 2) There's often no compelling reason to pick something existing, but unfinished up 3) It's a lot of hard and tedious work to get into something someone else made, resulting in a huge overhead, during which nothing gets done at all 4) Few people actually have the necessary skill 5) Even fewer people actually know me 6) And no one has the time to do it
I'd love to be able to give some of my projects away and see them evolve further from there, possibly flourishing quicker and better than in my own hands. Without the possibility to do this, I'm still stuck with the only choice of giving up. But what should I give up? Which of these projects are worth the effort? Am I even worth it myself? I'd give all my money to someone or something that can give me a precise answer.
Written by shinmera