Wednesday, September 2

Finish what you start

Starting is easy and cheap.

Sanctified26 Work13 Follow Through1

Key takeaways

Count every unfinished thing you own right now
Finish the oldest open item before you sleep tonight
Say a real completion date out loud to another person

TL;DR

Starting is easy and cheap. Finishing is the part that changes you, and most of us bail somewhere in the boring middle.

Close one open loop

Look around your house. The drawer that still sticks. The email you drafted and never sent. The book with a receipt still in it at page sixty. None of it is a crisis. All of it is evidence.

Count what you left open

Go count them. Not to feel bad, just to see the number. Most men are carrying twelve to twenty unfinished things and calling the weight of it stress.

Here is the ugly part. Each one sends you a small bill. A flicker when you walk past the garage. A tightness when someone asks how the project's going. You pay in attention all day long and never notice the withdrawal. The open loop costs more than the finish would have.

You used to think you had a discipline problem. You had a closing problem. You loved the first afternoon of anything.

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Kill the good version

You don't quit because it got hard. You quit because it stopped being impressive. The vision in your head was clean and the actual thing is crooked and slow, so you go find a new vision.

Finish it crooked. A painted room with one bad corner beats a taped-off room for nine months. Done teaches you things that planning never will, and it teaches them fast.

Tell someone the date

Pick a real date and say it out loud to a person who will ask. Not a goal. A date. Vague intentions die in private and nobody comes to the funeral.

Then do the last ten percent, which is always the dullest ten percent. Cleanup. The phone call. Putting the tools away. That's the work that makes you a man people can plan around.

Today

Pick the oldest unfinished thing you own and take it all the way to done before you sleep.

Go deeper

There's a line about counting the cost before you build, because a man who lays a foundation and can't finish gets mocked by everyone walking by. Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish is in Luke 14:29-30. Sobering, and not really about money. God finishes what He starts in a man, slowly, through the dull middle stretches. Becoming like Him includes learning to do the same with a shelf, a promise, a conversation you left hanging. Holiness is mostly follow through.