I Was A Great Starter and A Horrible Finisher… Here’s How I Fixed It

I love starting new things.

There’s a drug-like thrill to coming up with an idea, or learning about something new, doing some research, plotting the course, then starting.

In the world of entrepreneurship, there is no shortage of things you can start all the time. Really good marketers clamor for your attention, scratching your itch to start. A new tool, affiliate program, business opportunity, startup…

Man, it feels good to scratch that starting itch.

The problem of course is that the shelf life of the new start thrills we feel is short. Really short. And then we find ourselves in the world of the mundane, tedious, the actual work. And depending on your tolerance level you will stay for a while or you will bounce super fast.

Either way, your life becomes a starting, stopping, starting again drama that not only fails to produce any significant results but you also begin to look like an unstable mess to those around you. From your audience on social media, your blog readers, YouTube subscribers, friends, and even your spouse begin to look at you with a look that needs very little explanation. A look that says, “We love you but you need to get your act together. You’re a mess.”

Poor Finishers Tell Amazing Stories

I realized this in my own life because I found that early on when I would start a new project or pursuit, I could easily come up with a simple explanation for why I wasn’t finishing. You know the classics… not enough time, money, the company wasn’t right, my mentor was a jerk, the market is saturated, or the deeply philosophical, “I’m just not feeling it” followed by mystical statements about finding purpose.

But the more I quit things the stories had to become even more fantastic because my audience and the most important person in my life, my wife, were looking at me with that look I described earlier.

So we begin to weave tales of drama and intrigue. We weave stories about other people. They didn’t do, someone said, the other person did the other thing. The key message is, we’re not finishing because of some other person, not because of us of course.