“Projects in Flight”

First a confession. I tend to have enthusiasms, work hard on them for a while, and then have something else interesting come across my radar, which will then become my new enthusiasm. This tends to lead to a lot of half-completed things, which I then feel bad about and avoid, causing me to not get anything done, making me feel even worse.

I’ve decided that I’m going to try a different strategy: “projects in flight”. I’m embracing the fact that I have enthusiasms, and lots of them. I contain multitudes. And this is good.

So instead of feeling bad that I have a dozen projects that aren’t getting anywhere, I’m going to acknowledge that I have a lot of interests, and more of them than I have time to do. So some of them don’t pan out. Some of them get partway through, and then I discover that the problem is better solved a different way, or that the thing I want to do isn’t actually as good as I thought, or whatever. I am allowed to fail.

Think about it this way: for every Google or Facebook, there are a hundred startups that try to do something, get partway in, and fail. Maybe the idea wasn’t so great. Maybe the resources to do the thing they wanted to do just aren’t feasible, or available, or affordable. Maybe they just can’t get someone to give them the seed money to try.

All these projects fail. And the entrepreneurs don’t feel bad about themselves if they do. They gave it the shot they could give it, with the effort and resources they had at hand, and it didn’t work out – and they move on to their next project.

So I’ve decided to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset for my personal projects. I’m keeping a list of everything I’m doing, from the trivial to the complex, and allowing myself to be happy that I am creative and multifaceted; if something doesn’t get done, it stays on the list as something to come back to, unless I decide it’s not worth coming back to…and then it goes into the “idea pool”. Maybe it’ll trigger something else later. Maybe it won’t. It’s fine.

It hasn’t failed. I haven’t failed. I’ve just discovered something that as I approached it this time, it didn’t succeed. It was my AltaVista, or Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo! Search instead of my Google. Maybe on another look later, with more information, more experience, more time, more energy it will succeed.

But I don’t have to feel bad about it anymore. I can be proud and happy that I’m trying things and doing things. Yes, I do want to finish things too, but I can stop looking at the unfinished things and thinking that I’m failing because they’re not all done and perfect.

So: I have a dozen or so projects in flight, at various levels of done, and I’m happy that I have interesting things to do!