November 14, 2022
A False Start Versus a Failed Project
One of the cornerstones of becoming better is completing things. There are sadly many people who begin something full of enthusiasm, yet sooner or later abandon it because it has become too difficult. Then they start something new, only to soon quit as well. The vicious cycle then continues, and they never (or rarely) complete anything. But there are crucial differences between a false start and a failed project, and learning to recognize them is pivotal for learning how to complete things.
Indeed, as societies we don’t talk enough about quitting. We don’t talk about learning how to abandon something when you have to. We seem to live in a world teaching people how not to quit. Instead, we should learn how to do it – properly.
And so, in this post, I’ll draw on my own experiences with false starts and failed projects, to show you how we can separate them.
An Example of a False Start
Before I continue, here are two paragraphs I’d ask you to read – I’ll then explain more:
The keychain felt heavy, somehow too metallic and clinical. As he inserted the house key into the lock, Stan felt a profound and unexpected sense of disgust. That was the word, yes; disgust. As he turned the small, lifeless object counterclockwise, the man wondered about those places in the world that have lockless doors. As he entered the apartment, he thought about those houses in the world that don’t have doors at all. He would have thought next about those places many people call home that do not have doors, nor walls, nor a ceiling, but his mind drifted away from world problems when he saw the two suitcases on the hallway floor, a few feet away from the front door. He unconsciously lowered his eyes, as if he was ashamed, and closed the door behind him.
Their twelfth-floor apartment was elegant – it’s not hard to decorate beautifully when you have money. Stan had a lot of money, he always had – his parents had money and his grandparents, too. Stan felt rich, but not wealthy. He always wondered whether the feeling would have been different if he had made his own money – starting from the absolute bottom, perhaps. Now, that would have been a good story – something to narrate to grandchildren near the fireplace, in cold and dreary winter evenings. “Your grandfather was homeless, but with hard work and determination he managed to become rich”. Stan could not even laugh at such thoughts. There was only disgust; always disgust.
“
Notice the lonely quotation marks. That’s where the text stops. And that’s all there is in a document created, as I see, in 2013 and never worked on since. And it’s virtually certain that’s how it will remain.
This excerpt above is a false start. I had some ideas on what I wanted to do with this setup (otherwise I wouldn’t have started writing the story), but they simply weren’t strong enough to make me pursue it.
This is nothing, by the way. I once started a story that I gave up on after writing a good 10k words. I’ve also given up on coding projects, music albums, and whatnot.
False starts, though annoying, are part of the deal. You don’t want to have many of them, both because they’re frustrating and because they cloud your judgment regarding when to quit and when not to quit, but they’re an almost inevitable part of getting better.
From a False Start to a Failed Project
A false start is not a failure. In other words, to start a project and then quit because you realized it won’t work doesn’t mean it’s a case of a failed project.
Instead, a failed project is giving up on something not because of knowledge (realizing it doesn’t work) but because of ignorance. That is to say, a failed project is one you don’t finish because, though you would like to, you don’t know how or you feel overwhelmed.
The difference is crucial, so let’s reiterate it:
- A false start is when you quit something because you know it’s not worth continuing. You basically don’t want to finish it.
- A failed project is when you quit something because you don’t know how to continue it, though you believe it’d be worth it; you would like to finish it. Even then, the “degree of failure” is relevant to any lessons learned. If you would’ve liked to finish the project, you don’t know how, but you’ve reflected and have an idea how to try another way next time, then it’d be hard to call it a failure.
Failure is not to learn anything from your mistakes. Failure is to be stagnant in ignorance.
Beware of Social Pressure
In our world of continuous peer pressure, hustling, and comparisons, giving up on anything is considered an automatic failure.
I can’t put in words how much I’m disgusted by all the believe-in-yourself’s and be-persistent-and-you’ll-be-rewarded’s out there (and all their naive, out-of-context quotes they’re usually accompanied by – which reminds me). The truth is, learning when to quit is a huge part of getting better. Learning when to quit is the only thing that can teach you when not to quit.
So, next time you feel unsure about continuing something (especially if it’s something you just started), ask yourself some tricky, difficult questions: Am I sure this is what I want? Am I sure I know what I want to express with this? Will the pain and suffering be worth it?
And if you decide you want to quit, do so without remorse.
Interested in tips on how to abandon reading something? There you go!
6 Comments
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An invaluable lesson.
Fascinating question. What brought it on?
I don’t have a lot of failed starts. I tend to think a lot about things before I start them, deciding whether it’s worth it before spending much time actually doing something – exploring them mentally, probing for problems – but then I stick.
The things you might consider I’ve abandoned are more things that were wrested from me: I put in everything I had, but someone/something else was the judge of the feasibility of the effort – and nixed it, with no possibility of appeal. I’ve lost several major career/life paths that way. When it’s up to me, I don’t usually change my mind, even when it’s hard.
Makes me cautious about starting new things, but it also has kept me writing one novel trilogy for twenty-two years and counting. And married 47 years. FWIW
I actually discovered a corner of my hard drive with several old projects like this one, and the “a-ha!” moment that motivated me to write this post was when I realized that I wouldn’t want to have finished them. I learned from the experience of not continuing them and didn’t make the same mistakes. That was the limit of their usefulness.
I suppose, as perhaps with everything in life, it’s hard to develop good judgment on all the what-might-have-beens of working on a creative project. I certainly didn’t feel as positively about abandoning these projects back then – it only felt like a failure. Illumination came much, much later (and it was a rather gradual process).
-grin- I call your false starts ‘ideas for stories’. I have a folder full. Some have been developed, some may never be developed, but all are valuable. 🙂
One other sad category is STORY YOU WROTE A ROUGH DRAFT A LONG TIME AGO AND NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVISING. I wrote a lot of things pre-Internet which I thought were decent and possibly even great, but I waited too long before revising. I have resurrected a lot of these — (practically rewriting them in some cases), but there are other titles that seemed great at the time, but with extra years of experience now seemed too difficult to resurrect to make it work. I recently agonized over revising a novella I wrote in 1994. It had a lot of good bits, but there were also several implausible bits as well. I could fix a few of them, but I wasn’t as confident about the novella’s value as I used to be. I probably will end up revising it again soon after rewriting — just to get the damn thing done–, but I’ve learned the hard way that it’s really a bad idea to wait too long to revise something. Now that I’m in my 50s, I’m aware of how precious writing time; you really can’t be wasting time on things you don’t think will be great.
The ability to judge whether something is worth revising (revisiting, rewriting; I suppose these aren’t entirely synonymous) comes with experience, frustratingly enough. I guess most of us have agonized over such decisions and, more than once, have wasted time either doing or not doing something. It’s hard, but perhaps inevitable. Thanks for your comment!