> The high is in expecting an outcome, desiring it, imagining it, not in its fulfillment.
I am staring at unfinished side projects of mine and they are staring back at me.
Visualizing your win is important to help you stay focused on a goal but equality important is not to get carried away with the visualization. If you imagine yourself winning too often, you'll feel like you already achieved that goal and won't be as motivated to follow through. After-all, what's the point in doing the extra work, if you already think you've won?
He's got a lot of other really good insights. If you're a poker player, I highly recommend his audio books which are available on audible.
-- Spock
(From memory, paraphrasing)
The one that Goodreads and other sites attribute to Flaubert is: "Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory." I couldn't find a source for this but I think rather than Flaubert this is from Julian Barnes's book Flaubert's Parrot, which has:
“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.” (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1414912-flaubert-s-par...).
This quote does not appear in the full text of that book, though (https://archive.org/stream/sentimentaleduca00flauiala/sentim...).
I totally agree with the sentiment expressed, of course. The real lover not being as beautiful or desirable as the imagined version is a common motif esp. in Middle Eastern literature.
I do, however, remember selectively reading the book later in school so I must have mis-appropriated that memory.
I am yet to have a single unfinished side project that I wouldn't be recycling a few years later into something related to my day job.
And yes - it starts with high expectations and dreaming about the outcome, sketching the thing, engineering parts of it - and when it's almost there, then I lose interest. But by that time the hardest part - figuring out how - is done. And it's absolutely addictive.
The difference is that at a Casino, all games are rigged so that your expected value over large number of iterations in any game is that you'll lose money. In a startup, the expected value over investing a lot of time and energy is that you'll gain money in the end. VCs are giving you money to keep gambling, and asking you to give them a cut of your winnings. The house is run by the market.
Jokes aside, though, did I read it right that you're saying you don't have enough side projects? Start a bigger one then.