On Finishing What You Start
Is entering the race the most important thing? I suppose it is, to the extent that if you don’t then there really isn’t anything else that matters. Dreaming, planning and intending can be exciting, entertaining, and even impressive to others (for a while), but they don’t come close to getting out there and doing it.
For most people who have thrown their hat into a ring of any sort, whether they’ve taken a major plunge or merely taken on a big job, the focus is usually on winning vs losing, success vs failure. We ‘keep score’. It is a natural instinct to evaluate and judge our own and others’ performance, and the simplest way to do so is to measure against the performance of others.
It has been my own observation, though, that what most people have the hardest time with is going the distance. Through the years I’ve been disappointed most by co-workers and employees who can’t follow through or keep up the pace to the end of a project or task. The people I’ve enjoyed working with the most, conversely, are those who are both thorough and finish line oriented. Always meeting deadlines is important too, and is a form of ‘finishing’ in itself.
Finishing what you start is the most important aspect of anything. Sometimes, when we’re doing something for the first time, we get stuck. We encounter a totally unfamiliar set of circumstances that we don’t feel equipped for. Needing to seek help, or educate ourselves on something overnight, is not a reason to quit. It is the cost of learning something new. Even if we’re never going to be doing the exact same thing again, meeting the challenges and finishing what we started is the creation of an inestimable value within ourselves, not only for what we learned and accomplished, but for who we are and how we see ourselves.
The reasons people quit or peter out are many. Not least among them, if you look beyond the ostensible reasons and excuses, is the fear of failure. Analyzing all the ways that this manifests, and each individual’s personal history underlying disproportionate fear, isn’t what this post is about. That type of analysis is highly personal and private. It’s either carried out alone via self-education and introspection, or through formal or informal therapy. The archeology of typical fears is usually not necessary for functioning anyway. For example, there are many performers, speakers, etc. who have stage fright, or butterflies, or even throw up every single time they’re going on. If it doesn’t spiral out of control, we can simply learn to live with it until we want or need to address it.
There are 2 basic components to finishing what you started. They are motivation and discipline.
Motivation seems obvious and well addressed in our society. Although this factor may seem well (and sometimes too much) addressed, I don’t find it to be that well understood in general.
We’ve spent recent decades throwing away the sticks and piling on the carrots, telling our kids that winning isn’t everything. We focus on rewards, entitlement and perks. We insist that no one should ever ‘feel bad about themselves’. There is good stuff in all this, and no doubt plenty of responsible parents work on providing, and sometimes even teaching about, having a moral compass. What’s missing is recognition of negative motivation, and the extent to which it rules our lives. Most of us go to school and work because we have to, not because there is nothing else we would rather do. With some attention and guidance, many find something they like best within what they have to do, but how many tasks are driven solely by positive motivation? If we don’t work, we won’t be able to meet even our basic needs. If we don’t do the laundry we won’t have anything clean to wear. By focusing on the concept that by working harder, learning the system and putting out some extra effort, we’ll get to satisfy more desires, we by-pass the place where negative motivation ends and positive motivation begins, and sometimes lose valuable insight on where we want to go and why.
A child can learn the intense satisfaction of doing a difficult job thoroughly and well. Children who have done this and also been lucky enough to receive positive reinforcement, applied consistently, might (cross your fingers and align the stars) discover through the age of reason that elusive why …and with it the personal satisfaction of really feeling good about yourself. Those children are a minority. Maybe their guardian angels aren’t paying attention on a regular basis, or else adults unwittingly supply a self gratifying caveat that makes the satisfaction of achievement always conditional on pleasing others. There are plenty of high achieving 50 year olds that regularly think (or wish) that their father would have been proud of them.
Once we start examining motivation, we realize that sometimes it is simple and other times complex, but that sorting the positive from the negative isn’t hard at all. Everyone does things to gain approval or avoid disapproval from family, friends and peers. What we do, as well as what we wish to do, privately, is even easier. Everything can be viewed in terms of its initiation (desire for gratification), its enactment, and its consequences. The questions of why am I doing this, what do I get or avoid by doing it, and whether what I want and what I’m getting match, can reveal their answers the moment you really ask.
Positive motivation is not always an easy thing to discover or uncover. Finding something that you enjoy and have talent for can sometimes mean risking disapproval of family and peers. It often entails risk. Most difficult of all, it means creating your own version of the definitions of success. That’s more often achieved with a supportive spouse or life partner than within any other relationship, but frequently it is only possible if you’re willing to set out all alone.
For many people, being alone is scarier than failure. That does not necessarily indicate weakness. We are social animals, and our needs and functions are so complex as to mandate interdependency for almost any occupation beyond plain survival. Peer groups can offer a lot more than approval; they can serve to extend our knowledge, resources, and abilities.
I’ve encountered a lot of people who look for their path outside of themselves and, not surprisingly, never find it. The things that attract us don’t necessarily have any relationship to what we’re good at. I can passionately adore arts or music or sports, yet have no particular talents applicable to their specific production if my aptitudes tend to, say, the scientific.
Finding your own talents is a matter of experience and observation. Whatever you’ve done best at, enjoyed doing most, forgotten about time while doing, gets sorted to the top of the experience list, and then analyzed by skills utilized and context. Nothing is too mundane or irrelevant for this. If your biggest lifetime success so far was at partying, you can identify skills from it, such as hospitality or entertainment or interpersonal relationships. We like to believe that people who know what their ‘thing’ is are lucky, but this is rarely true. Mostly they’ve persevered until they discovered and learned ‘it’, which brought them only to a starting point.
A word about distractions here for those who are introspective. Personal accomplishment fulfills higher levels of need. A lack of understanding about our own needs, urges and desires, however, can really mess up both the journey and the destination. We all have needs and wants on both conscious and unconscious levels, and a failure to recognize this can occasionally cause us to sabotage our own efforts.
Positive motivation is everywhere in our lives. We’re born with it. Children are curious about everything. We learn, unfortunately, to close that part of ourselves off to some extent. One of the reasons that science and technology are becoming increasingly dominant in our world is that pure curiosity is fully and always encouraged in these areas, but anyone who isn’t clinically depressed or in the grip of major issues (such as anger) can find and re-connect with their personal curiosity and positive motivation easily. Matching it with occupation, tasks and goals, though, can be very difficult without discipline.
Discipline is imposed on us by our societal structures and institutions. We learn what it is just by having to show up on time every day, or by needing to meet a deadline. Whether it is studying for and passing a test, or getting our work done so that we can get paid and cover the rent or mortgage, there’s a basic level of discipline we all have to meet just to get by. Developing personal discipline beyond those parameters requires serious motivation, and all that really means is that you want something enough to go after it without a parent or boss or trainer.
Our society offers advanced levels of structured discipline to high achievers in many areas. Academia, science, the military, and big business all have special paths laid out for motivated individuals who require or prefer a de facto parent or big brother, and some of these paths also lead to the opportunity to join the leading ranks. There are many areas in which going it alone is not an option, yet any endeavor chosen will also be enhanced by higher levels of personal discipline.
We have a tendency today to view those who exhibit a high level of personal discipline as driven or monomaniacal. We admire and idolize high achievers, especially in business and sports, yet most of us are not and do not believe that we can ever be, like them. In doing this we exhibit the lack of understanding of positive motivation and personal success. We’ve jumped out of the everyman’s basic world of mostly negative motivation straight into the common definition of winning.
Those superstar achievers in the spotlight, just like the less popularly known achievers in more specialized and/or less glamorous circles, do typically exemplify an application of discipline in addition to their other attributes. This hardly means that a high level of discipline belongs only to the realm they inhabit, or that their positions themselves are the only worthy spoils.
Discipline is the single most important link between motivation and achievement, and it is also plays a major role in whether and to what extent each of us find a personal positive motivation to begin with. Learning to finish what we start, and to do as fine a job as we are capable of in every circumstance, increases our knowledge and understanding of future opportunities, choices and possibilities dramatically. In applying it, we often surprise ourselves with our own performance and invariably increase our self confidence, which naturally broadens the scope of what is possible.
Discipline is often the key factor in any personal, professional or business success, because there are truly few challenging undertakings that do not require attention to and competence in areas outside of those in which our primary talents and motivation lie.
Applying discipline to every undertaking not only improves our performance greatly, it also sharpens the focus so that we are continually making better choices. Start with the simple conviction that if it is worth doing at all it is worth finishing. Insist to yourself that you will always finish everything you start, that you will put everything you have into doing the best job possible, and you will find yourself refining your processes of learning, experience gathering, and making future choices.
Once you apply yourself and develop the determination and discipline to finish any undertaking you choose fully and well, you will eventually find the exercise of personal discipline brimming with things such as drive, desire, and passion. It is like crossing a line from a place where the task looms before you in domination to a place where you survey and dominate the tasks. This passage leads to forms of personal power and freedom.
This is not a recommendation to become a workaholic or approach every aspect of life in a deliberate and planned manner. It doesn’t mean that playing or dabbling or just having fun should be subjected to serious discipline. Personal discipline is an essential step toward gaining a higher level of personal success and satisfaction. If you’re trying something that turns out, half-way through, to be less enjoyable or harder than you expected, finish it anyway. Make sure you walk away at the end knowing that you did your absolute best and learned a lot. Once you, and everyone around you, absorbs the knowledge that you finish anything you take on, do it on time and do it well, the scope of future possibilities that opens is liable to amaze you.
