SOFA - Start Often Finish rArely

This is just my normal approach to life, owing mostly to low conscientiousness (and probably unmedicated ADHD).

The result has been thousands of side projects but nothing I can actually put on a portfolio or monetize (and as a result, poverty).

It's sort of bizarre and hilarious to see people glorify and promote it?

Do normal people have to make a significant conscious effort not to finish what they start?!

> Do normal people have to make a significant conscious effort not to finish what they start?!

I believe their issue is that they can't even start.

Maybe it's the 80-20 Rule in action. Do 20% to learn the 80%.

> Do normal people have to make a significant conscious effort not to finish what they start?!

No, some things are hard and take significant conscious effort to complete regardless of how "normal" you are. Especially things that pay well.

Interesting. Is the thought "if I start this, I have to do this properly, and see it all the way through" a major part of that hesitation?

The "I'm not allowed to have fun or make mistakes" mindset seems to be drilled into people hard by the education system. I also suppose the survival fear adds "this time and energy I invest should pay off somehow" to the balance, at least it does for me (when considering significant projects).

My "backdoor" to working on many projects is that most of my projects only last a few hours, so the question of "is it worth the investment" never really factors into it.

> is the thought "if I start this, I have to do this properly, and see it all the way through" a major part of that hesitation?

I don't think that's it. It is the knowledge that, please forgive my blunt comparison, a spoiled child that wants this and than that and then that other thing and so on, will never get fulfilment.

The trick to good fulfilment is (sometimes anxious) persistence followed by some redemption.

An example. For work, there's some hardware related software bug that is nagging me already for some time. I want to find the fix. For that, i need to read docs and schematics, talk to people, do experiments and fail quite often. Finally i will have a mental model good enough to understand and fix the problem. The road can be frustrating, but i know fixing it will be fulfilling, and that keeps me going. Also the fact that some people are relying on/anticipating the solution, helps with my motivation.

If i just would try some other discipline every other day, i would never get such fulfilment.

Very relatable, I have a post from 2021 describing the same thing and I haven't made much progress since then despite big life changes. I have a buddy who's similar to me in that regard, but he found developer work, but couldn't stand the uninteresting problem space and left after a few months. He's been trying to get back into tech for a few years now to no avail. From the outside it's easy to ask "why?", but perhaps employment isn't the endgame that one hopes it will be with regard to focus.

I don’t think anyone is more or less normal here. But for some people, feeling the pressure to finish everything you’ve started could in worst case learn to burnout, not only like ”getting exhausted from a specific project” but your brain actually stops functioning. Maybe that’s why they glorify a more ”go with the flow” lifestyle.

It’s interesting to see most people here connecting ”starting many projects for fun” with procrastrinating, and also wanting to fix that with discipline. For others the situation is completely different. The grass is greener on the other side I guess: me as an ambitious person actually _want_ to procrastrinate more, and don’t see it as a bad thing to be less outcome-focused.