A Procrastinator's Guide to Finishing Things

this is the artist alice neal all she ever wanted to do with her art was capture the imperfect world that she saw around her in her quest to capture raw and real life what she used to do is she'd just walk around the neighborhood where she lived and she'd just go up to people and say hey can i paint your portrait they'd come in she'd paint their portraits and it led to some pretty amazing results but in 1965 it led to a really mysterious one she approached this man who said his name was james hunter we'll get to know each other throughout the process and by the end we'll have a really cool piece of art james says yes but in that first session alice couldn't help but notice that james was really really upset so she asked him what's wrong turns out james hunter had just been drafted to fight in the vietnam war he wasn't happy about it alice started with his face capturing that look of raw hopelessness but the next day when it was time for that second painting session james never showed up in fact nobody ever saw james again more on how that goes later in the story for now let's talk about projects first things first this video is sponsored by shopify they've helped me finish quite a lot of big projects and more on why they're relevant later g'day my name is cam and i thought that i would start things out with a confession a list of projects that i have started but i haven't finished i bought a van and i tried to do it up like one of those van life things that you see online nah bought a brewing kit tried to make a beer failed i bought a touring bike with the hope that i would cycle across central asia and i barely took it out of the house i've started bands that only ever played one gig i have countless comic books that have began but going nowhere and one time when i was 24 i filmed a documentary in asia over a three-month period got all of the files have them still on hard drives today but i have not edited a single minute so that was the old me let's talk about me at 31 let's fast forward i'm different now bruh i've changed i've written and illustrated a full book i regularly finish youtube videos all the time comics podcast apparel lots of stuff that i see from start all the way to the finish which begs the million dollar question what changed part one the harsh truth the biggest change for me was that i learned a super harsh truth your body of work is only as good as the projects you finish i first felt this when i applied for a job and instead of asking for a resume they asked for a portfolio and i was thinking great i've done heaps of creative projects of all those creative projects i thought that i had done turns out i'd finished like 2 out of 20. so my portfolio became embarrassingly thin i thought this whole time that i had been doing stuff turns out i'd just been starting stuff so the light bulb for me came when a mentor told me you know what your problem is and i wasn't ready to hear it but he told me anyway he said one day you write a song the next day you make an ad and on day three you draw a sketch and you expect them all to add up to some sort of body of work some sort of creative career but you don't finish those things and also those things are separate you are laying a brick of a million different houses and expecting a mansion it's not gonna happen okay thanks bro but later that night i realized he was right and so i asked him for advice and he said just draw the same thing every single day just pick one thing draw it every day finish it too and so for a year i concentrated all of that scattered creative energy into that one drawing i would start the picture of an ibis finish the drawing and that was the task i am so grateful for that advice because yeah man it fully worked what i learned is that the more you finish projects the more projects you finish in the future it's this motivating cycle and the reason it's like that is because finishing is just another skill it's just another skill you can refine it's like an end game in chess you can learn these tactics and develop it as a habit so at this point in the video you might be thinking harsh truth got it but this finishing skill how do we get that well in order to fully learn it we gotta start with why we need it part two why we stop in no order here's a couple of reasons that i have stopped projects a lack of self-belief i hated the idea of my mortal execution ruining the fantasy of the perfect idea i got more excited about something else i didn't have enough grit i didn't like the idea enough to truly pursue it i was scared what people would think agree to resent the project and last but not least finishing was just hard the end of the project got really long and boring it became a huge freaking slog and i just i just didn't want to do it so it turns out that that last point the end of a project being really long and boring is more of a documented thing than i first realized this is a graph from a writer called michael lop on the x-axis we have the time a project takes and on the y-axis we have the joy that it brings in as you can see the start is really exciting but short-lived and the end not so exciting and it drags out basically his take is that finishing sucks but if it does suck is there at least an easier way to do it part three write a bad book first you've probably heard a version of this phrase but my favorite is from the writer anne lamott she said when she writes books she just gives herself the easy aim of writing two crappy pages a day that's obviously specific to writing but when translated to any other craft the most general form of this phrase is done is better than perfect i really liked her advice when i wrote this book all right so right now me physically holding this book is a fantasy that past me dreamed of this book started out as a blank page in google docs you know when you see that cursor and it's really intimidating it's just blinking at you and it's like come on buddy make a real genuine impact on people but do it in your own way come on buddy do it when that is the goal how the hell is anybody meant to start that's terrifying so i gave myself the new plan don't write a good book just write a bad book write a bad book first because i could write a bad book i knew i could because i had never written a book so i didn't know i could write a good book but surely man i could probably write a bad book suddenly the goal became achievable sure enough it worked so why does this work but more importantly how can you apply it to your life huh the easiest way that i think i can explain this is with this flowchart it's sometimes called the action feedback loop here we can see that an action leads to an outcome and then once we have that outcome we can make an assessment on it and then further refine our actions and so on what a loop for me at first my action was just right anything my outcome was poorly written draft and my assessment would be that is some shockingly bad writing so then my next action would be edit so how can you apply this to your life let's say you're a musician and you've got an unfinished song you've got some verses you might even have a little bridge but you are missing the hook you want the catchy chorus the sparkling anthemic melody that defines your early career it's pretty daunting but what if we just wrote a chorus a simple way to lower the bar is to focus on quantity over quality instead of writing one brilliant chorus you say today i'm going to write 15 average choruses by focusing on quantity over quality we remove the anxiety that our ideas won't be good enough ironically this often leads to ideas that are this is because of something called the flow state a defining feature of the flow state is when things are challenging enough so you don't get bored but easy enough so you don't get frustrated this goldilocks zone increases focus and decreases creative inhibitions stress and that pesky self-reflection for me coming up with 40 mediocre ideas in an hour fits this bill perfectly but the question that you might have is why why do we need these techniques why aren't we naturally more inclined to just be able to do this that answer right after this very imperfect slide into today's sponsor shopify a relevant sponsor as always and i say relevant because when i started my online shop i kind of started horribly like really not well but hey at least i started switching to shopify was a game changer something about that platform just made me take ecommerce seriously after i switched to shopify my sales literally doubled that is 100 true shopify is an all-in-one easy to use online commerce platform anyone can use it regardless of your technical ability to start grow maintain and scale a business amazing it lets you sell online but also in person and on social media they've got plugins resources support from first sale to full scale now these plugins are what help me take structless.com which is the website where i sell prints and apparel from an experiment to a fully fledged business hell yeah baby profit also shopify helps more entrepreneurs than anybody else in the world millions of people in over 175 countries with shopify i was able to take my pipe dream idea and turn it into a reality and actually see my clothes get worn on people all around the world and that is honestly it's one of the coolest feelings ever as you know i only ever bring on sponsors that i truly believe in and yeah shopify is awesome so if you are curious if you do want to start your shopify journey there is a link in the description to shopify.com truthless and you can get a 14 free day trial so check it out if you want but yeah sponsorship aside i genuinely recommend them part four perfectionism and self-worth to once again quote anne lamott but this time a lot more poorly perfectionism is the belief that if we do nothing wrong we can make it to the grave without suffering something like that when it comes to finishing projects personally i've experienced two really limiting beliefs the first is that need to be perfect and the second the more insidious one is that on some level i thought that i was only as good as the work that i could produce if this is your mindset it makes completing things absolutely terrifying you can see this belief in things like when social media metrics dictate your emotions thinking that somebody is a better person than you because their art is more commercially successful suspecting that something must be inherently wrong with you because you can't make songs like your heroes can these are all symptoms of those core beliefs but we all know what's true your worth is not your work now that is a lovely phrase and i'm sure it would look beautiful in some white text and a noisy gradient background but how do we actually apply this mindset practically the reality is unpacking that for yourself is way more complex than it seems and i am definitely not a therapist and i can really only ever talk about what's worked for me i'm not an expert so take what works leave what doesn't but here is the incredibly abridged version of what's worked for me i tried to find moments from my childhood where what i was worth as a person and what i could make were equated i had a lot from school i was a bright kid which meant that i was rewarded for being intelligent but it also meant that i thought i was only valuable if i was being intelligent i also spent a lot of time just trying to notice how much western society conflates your value with your ability to produce stuff so if my childhood and my culture were both saying that my work is my worth then i started creating these goals that weren't around achievement you know things like going to the beach or spending time with friends yeah so now that we've all theoretically unpacked why we internally judge ourselves by our ability to create it's time for the life hacks this is obviously way harder than just watching a youtube video but hopefully this is a good overview part five using hacks to finish let's go through them you can use rewards this is probably the simplest one if you do this you can have this i find when i do this i have to be very very strict you can try distraction detoxes or lock boxes you can give yourself artificial deadlines this works freakishly well for me for some reason i refer to this as the microwave ding energy you could use an accountability partner this is someone who you tell your goal to and then they keep you accountable to finishing that goal you can practice finishing by finishing tiny things simple things like if a jacket's on your bed you just put it in your cupboard what you're doing here is you are strengthening the muscle of finishing it's like a marathon bruh another hack is to do it because someone said you can't if you need that extra motivational kick go to that dark why that person that you want to prove wrong and imagine them laughing at you when you haven't finished your thing and then prove them wrong another hack which is really more of a mindset hack is to trust the process i find that i have to tell myself this through pretty much every project and that's because most things are ugly until the last five minutes when that happens to me i just repeat that mantra trust the process but my favorite hack of them all is just this really simple visualizing exercise remember that graph that we had before the one by that writer michael lop what i think this graph is missing is the huge spike in joy that comes when you are finally done when i am in that discouraging messy middle of a project i just try to think about what it's gonna feel like when it's done between tapping into your reasons for doing things productivity hacks and of course unpacking those limiting beliefs that we put on ourselves that trail of unfinished projects starts looking a lot more like a body of work all right so what if you've watched this whole video and you still feel no closer to finishing your project there is one final option that i'm going to put forward it's easy to get caught up in that long final stage of finishing but sometimes if you take a step back your project might already be finished remember that story that we started with about alice neil and james hunter how james just disappeared without a trace before alice could even finish painting him well here's what alice did next she said you know what this is finished it's done this perfectly captures the experience that i have had with james hunter alice neil signed her half-done work and gave it to the museum and you know what people freaking loved it and what's more is this unfinished portrait would go on to influence alice neil's career for the rest of her life see perfectionism isn't the path to finishing a project it's in the way of the path to finishing the project all alice neil ever wanted to do was capture the imperfect world that she saw around her and in 1965 she figured out exactly how to leave the artwork unfinished and imperfect just like life thank you very much for listening i hope that you got some value out of that and a big thank you to shopify for sponsoring this video i really like having them as a channel sponsor so if you do want to start your journey with them you can check out that link is shopify.com truthless for a 14 day trial alrighty subscribe if you're new and you like this vibe and have a gorgeous day catcher

Channel: struthless

Views: 257,347

Keywords: how to stop procrastinating, personal growth, ted talks, procrastination and perfectionism, how to finish projects, how to finish what you start, procrastination advice, advice for procrastinators, how to finish a project, why i hate finishing things, project management, struthless69, advice to serial procrasinator, how to stop overthinking, procrastination ted talk, tim urban, matt d'avella, better ideas, ali abdaal, procrastination hacks, productivity hacks, self help

Id: WlKSBblYGH0

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022