| I feel like that often, both as a musician and as a programmer. I've got enough skills that it's not hard to get folks to want me on their teams (and they pay, too, which is nice). The problem is that when I launch something wholly on my own I often back off.... there are usually good reasons: it's not gonna be as profitable as I thought, there are actually problems with my idea I couldn't have seen until I got into the project, it's just not as good as the alternative of working on other folk's porjects. My solution to this (because it happens maybe 4 times a year that I drop some project I was working on) is to identify some small goal, even if that goal is "learning how to install postfix" or "getting my banjo chops to the point where I can roll chords along to someone else's songs". Even better is when these small goals are in themselves something I can return to later (like a save point in some dumb video game). Like, I just made a marketing site to try and pick up some event music work. If I don't push on it hard and it doesn't generate a bunch of leads, then it can at least still just sit there and when I come back to it in a couple of months and try and make a push on the idea, then I already have that part of the marketing collateral done. And, with this project, I've progressed in my skills at setting up the server and specifically configuring mail programs, I've learned a little bit about adwords and analytics, and I have something to show my musician buddies. Projects don't have to be all or nothing-- if you can learn from them or jest get some small tangible thing out of them, that's okay and often quite valuable. |