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> Finishing anything is a miracle in and of itself. A huge shoutout to anyone who’s ever done anything to completion at all. He is writing about art (creative writing), as opposed to commercial product. Art is fairly inward-focused, and its goals can be a lot “fuzzier” than product. I was an artist, in my Yute. At one time, I wanted to actually make a living from it. But artists finish, all the time. Some, treat their art as a product, and that seems to help, but they also risk commoditization of their creativity. I’ve spent pretty much my entire life, shipping software. That’s been for externally-imposed deadlines, usually as part of an integrated team, with synchronized milestones. As he mentions, that helps a lot. Since working on my own stuff, I’ve had to drastically reduce the scale of my work, and practice self-discipline that, I suspect, many folks here would consider extreme. But I still finish stuff. Finishing stuff is actually part of the personal satisfaction that I get. It’s an art, in itself. |
Finishing a project is not the same thing as finishing the artifact the project is about.
A project to build a house can be completed so that you can sell the house. But someone buys it and continues to build on the house, so the house was not finished.
This applies not only to art I think. It’s a bit of a semantic discussion though, because I guess completing projects is the important bit. You cannot have too many things as work in progress.