Why cant i finish what I start?
I keep meeting a woman. She has an original idea and very good work which she has spent years creating, and her days improving and buying new materials for. She stays up late telling herself that when the work is ready, she will put it up on her website with a payment link for people to buy.
She has even set a date to finish this work, and it's three weeks from now, written boldly on her notepad. Then, three days before launching her payment link, she has another idea, this time it's a better color and name for her product, or a new tutorial she has to learn first so she starts from the beginning, all the while justifying that the work is not ready and she is just being careful.
I know this woman because I've been her.
The peculiar thing about starting afresh is that it's exciting. All of a sudden you get this burst of energy and see the possibility and direction of the work. No one has seen the final work to judge it yet, and you haven't refunded a customer's money who rejected it yet. You feel safe.
Now finishing your work is different. You know that once your work is completed, it must leave your hands if you plan on making money from it. A stranger from wherever can see it and have their own opinion, which you didn't ask for to begin with but you get anyway, because you are now visible. And one thing is for certain, when you have a complete work, you can earn money from it. Putting it in front of people can change your reputation overnight, and it also asserts that you are capable of following through with your words. These alone can make finishing your work feel much more dangerous than starting again. It's human nature to run away from danger, so you start again.
As a woman who lived in this habit for a long time, I used to think it was perfectionism, or rather a fear of failure. But let me tell you a precise version of this habit. Last year I built a life dashboard with ten tabs and colors and all the fancy buttons. It had a body tracker, a wardrobe planner with eight little color circles showing me which mood to choose my outfit for that month or season, an income goal, thirteen self-concept rewrites scheduled to run for ninety days. I added a heat map to show which days I tracked and which days I failed to show up. It was beautiful, and I was proud of it, but I couldn't keep up with it. I grasped the fact that I had complicated my own life, and that was the behavior staring at me via the system I created. I had a surplus of information and ambition, yet I made a complicated system to distract me from finishing anything that would make me visible. Tweaking the colors on this life dashboard gave me something to do. I was busy tweaking.
Now the most interesting part of this, when your work is almost finished, and you know you've done enough that the next step exposes you and carries great responsibility, or call it consequence. Examples of moments like this vary for every creator: a song mixed, mastered and ready for release, your sales link ready to go live, your workshop invite ready to go out to women. Then, in an instant, your mind creates a brilliant solution, "I know what I'll do instead." This is what you pay attention to. I'm not saying this new idea isn't brilliant; it may become your next big idea, but when it shows up exactly days before your current work is ready to go out there, I don't automatically trust it, and you shouldn't either. The better way to investigate is to ask yourself: what would finishing this force me to find out?
Because I can tell you, by asking myself this question, I discovered it’s not failure you fear, you are afraid of exposure, of discovering people don't care, of having to charge money and stand firmly behind your price, which makes most soulful creative people shriek, of becoming marketable, and of finding out whether the woman you see yourself as can actually deliver. This is a lot to place on the shoulders of one little "Publish" button.
The swirl 33 pattern showed as a ritual object
I call this pattern Swirl 33. I gave it a name because it was imperative to identify and catch it. Swirl 33 is the habit of staying in motion because of the fear of exposure. Many women caught in this habit are extraordinarily productive, that's why they can move and do everything a productive person does. She can have years of evidence of her hard work and innovative ideas, but she has little to no finished product in the world that someone can pay her for. That's why this habit is hard to track: if someone is not moving, you can say they gave up but this habit looks like devotion and ambition.
Now the exit from this habit is simpler than you think, and it's always this. When I scrapped my complicated ten-tab system, I thought to myself, what's one small thing I can finish and sell? Even though the thoughts kept coming — rebuild the website, create this and that — I shut it down and still asked, "one small thing." That was when I redesigned, with my own hands, the second version of my dashboard on Notion, no shiny buttons, just what I needed to gather my extraordinary ideas, focus on one thing to finish, and gather the evidence that I am actually finishing them. Then something happened. My body of work became real, and my ideas became assets, priced and uploaded with a real link for people to buy.
Look at what you've been working on and be honest with yourself. How long has this been almost ready, and what have you added or tweaked during the build? Then ask yourself this practical question: what would become possible if you finished it this week? Would you have something to sell, talk about, submit to places, or point to? That's your question for today. Because capable women already have big dreams. They just need to become very adept at knowing when their big minds start encouraging them to escape the finish line.
THE NEW SIMPLE TOOL I CREATED
This is one of the patterns I built ARTOMYSTIC Studio to help you notice while you're doing it. You don't have to lose another whole year. Start with tracking the pattern and consciously build the exit.
