I think your edit was basically going to be my reply, haha. It is hard to address every side of every potential topic in an article. I actually needed help softening the tone to end up with the final version you're reading today. I'm empathetic by nature so it's easy for me to write with empathy, but I'm still prone to generalizing my personal experiences!
Ouch!
I strongly encourage you to read up and understand the sunk cost fallacy. In general, do not let past efforts be the guide for future decisions.
I've quit a lot of projects in my life. And it was the right thing to do. Put another way, many of the valuable projects I've completed would not have been accomplished had I stuck to the projects I had sunk time into.
> You also have a duty to your future self to release the project. Every time you don't release a project, you're telling yourself that you’re the kind of person who doesn't ship.
If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop telling yourself these lies.
Despite the strong complaints, the article isn't that bad and does have some merits.
I hear your feedback, but I don't fully agree with all of it. I do understand the sunk cost fallacy quite well, but thinking about the time committed can be a useful framing to help push past the fear of releasing or drudgery of the last 10%.
> If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop telling yourself these lies.
I mean, if you never ship you're literally the kind of person who doesn't ship though. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but eventually you'll stop believing yourself because you know it's not true!
Perhaps you'll enjoy my other piece more: Publishing your work increases your luck (https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work)
This is a bit of an "argument from extremes" fallacy. If you don't ship 90% of what you work on, but do ship the remaining 10%, then that may well not only be fine, but optimal.
My point is that saying to yourself "Every time you don't release a project, you're telling yourself that you’re the kind of person who doesn't ship." is a faulty belief. There's a whole spectrum between releasing everything and releasing nothing. Some people like myself start a lot of things (big and small), and there is no practical way to finish all of them - life is simply not long enough. For such people, not finishing 80-90% of those projects and focusing on a few that seem to have higher value is the way to go. Such a person should not (and hopefully does not) tell themselves that "they're the kind of person that doesn't ship." If they do tell themselves that, the solution isn't to start shipping everything they start, but to change their internal monologue.
I strongly recommend you get to know intricately the lives of successful creators. The majority have more projects unfinished than finished.
The example used in the book (there used for stopping negative habits) was that of smoking. A smoker that is looking to quit goes out with a colleague for a smoke break, and the colleague offers him one. If he refuses by saying “I don’t smoke now/I’m trying to quit”, he will much more likely not be able to quit his addiction. But if he answers with “I’m not a smoker”, he is on a good path.
It was a really eye opening part of that book for me - people’s view of themselves recursively depends on past experiences/facts and inner motivations. If we do (or don’t do in case of smoking) something a lot of time we can accept it as our new selves, and vice versa.
I have enough to ship in my day job. Not shipping my personal projects is my prerogative.
What you do at your day job doesn't matter, (unless you work for yourself), if you ship while at work, your work is a place that ships. Not you.
Naw, this is just a toxic take.
A project is a project, whether it's a solo one or collaborative. Whether it's "personal" or professional. 99.9999% of software that actually gets widely used (because it's useful to many people) has more than 1 coder, and arbitrarily deciding that the only "real" coding you can claim to is unpaid solo coding is a weird gate to keep.
Does the Sistine Chapel not make Michelangelo "someone who completes paintings" because he was doing paid work for the Vatican? Please.
But really my point was that you can still derive a lot of satisfaction from a project without shipping it.
I will likewise critique your critique:
Instead of creating a new thread you post directly to the author who responded to an unrelated message. Since the author is obviously responding to criticisms, why did you feel the need to expand a thread with a non-related article quotation you took issue with rather than start your own? It seems to me you wanted to ensure that the author read what you wrote because you felt it was particularly important for him to see it. I don't agree.
The article is about finishing projects instead of starting new ones -- it is not about when to cut losses. The two topics may seem related but I argue that they are not.
The type of person to leave an unfinished project on the table because it isn't 'good enough' is the person for whom the author is writing. It is not the type of person who can't let a project go despite the damage that project is causing to other things or despite the project being a lost cause.
Example:
The person who makes a bet 'if I risk X in exchange for A% of success happening and I lose, I can live with that, but I couldn't live with not trying' is not the person who makes a bet 'I lost X, which I couldn't afford to lose, but if I risk everything I have left or go into debt, then I can make back what I lost and be whole again'. One is an entrepreneur and the other is a gambling addict. The same type of difference exists in the two cases you present.
Your final sentence seems to be a half-assed acknowledgment that you found value in the work, but you are unable to give praise so the complements you use are negated put-downs (not bad, despite complaints, is not meritless). I think that this form of praise is worthless and makes you look petty. Stop doing it.
I have no idea what you are talking about. My comment is on the same topic as the head of the thread, and provides more details on that original critique.
Your reply, while interesting, would work better as a standalone comment and doesn't really relate to the thread.
Unless you made commitments to others, one should never feel guilt for not finishing a project.
Something I learned in my 20's: Guilt is one of worst long term motivators, and almost never yields anything positive. It's why those who guilt trip others are best avoided.
You’ve codified this in a way that I feel like I can begin to manage it better. Really great post. I’ll incorporate this one into my life going forward.
In video games which I personally know, “make games that are fun to make not to play.”
The polish and marketing of a thing is always done better by bigger budgets which you don’t have. The math the article is missing is that shipping something polished and boring is only possible because you valued your time at zero. So even if you find success, an honest accounting could wind up making your ROI negative.
Indeed I’ve gotten out of so many worse situations by quitting early and getting my life back compared to the colleagues I left behind. It was never worth the chance to ship something that would have never found an audience anyway. This is especially true of people doing startups, they are doing psychological warfare against themselves and shrouding the reality that they have already failed and will have learned little by spending 4 years on something compared to 1.