Stick to your task

I used to finish every book I started, thinking I had a moral obligation to not be a quitter. In fact, here’s a poem I learned as a kid:

Stick to your task till it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honor, power, place, and praise
Will come, in time, to the one who stays.

Stick to your task till it sticks to you;
Bend at it, sweat at it, smile at it, too,
For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile
Will come life’s victories, after awhile.

And I agree. But at the same time, I think it’s important to know when to quit. (I’m mainly talking about creative endeavors, but I suppose the principles could apply elsewhere.)

See, there’s only so much time in a day. “You can’t do everything, but you can do anything,” they say. Finishing what one starts is good, but only if the thing started is worth finishing. And if it’s not? I no longer feel bad about dropping it.

Besides, it’s not always the right time for a project. Some things, like bread, take a while to rise. Stopping work on a project doesn’t have to mean throwing it away; whenever I abandon one, I see it as putting it on the back burner. But if it really is worthless, then I have no qualms about killing it.

What this comes down to, basically, is priorities. For example, it may seem from this blog that I start an awful lot of things that I don’t finish (NaNoWriMo, Random: A Little Bit of Everything, etc.). That’s true. :) And while I used to feel guilty about it, I’ve freed myself from that bondage. I only need to feel guilty about not finishing the things that really do need to be finished. The rest is chaff in the wind.

I see it this way: in my pursuit of the things that matter most, I shouldn’t discount endeavors on face value alone. This means starting lots of projects because I don’t know in advance which ones will succeed and which will fail. But once I have enough data to make a decision, I needn’t feel bad about axing a project that I feel isn’t going anywhere, or that I don’t have enough time for, or enough interest for that matter.

I guess this is my apology (in the “defense” sense) for finishing only half of what I start. But rest assured that I (usually) finish the stuff that matters. At least I hope.