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Comment by jhp123 | Hacker News Reader

To take the contrary position: give up. Your project will take far longer than you think, and you will get much less from it than you hope (at least in terms of external validation and rewards).

You may feel a horrible pressure to finish it, but you are a free person and can simply choose not to. You can free yourself from this pain without lifting a finger. Go take a walk or bake some cookies instead.

If you have the intrinsic motivation to continue with your project, then your interest will return at some point and you'll get back to it with the wind at your back. If you don't have that intrinsic motivation any more then you will only make yourself miserable by trying to whip yourself forward.

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Reminds me of The Onion skit where a guy spent 15 years writing a book on ant eaters only to realize it was a horrible waste of time.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv...

Sometimes it best to trust your personal prioritization of when and when not to work on a project.

Reminds me of this New Yorker piece about the death of a well-known Sherlock Holmes researcher: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/13/mysterious-cir...

At the risk of spoiling the surprise, the conclusion rather strongly implied is that he killed himself after coming to feel that he’d wasted his life devoting it to a second-rate author.

this video is pure gold

Look , 90% of good work / product won’t exist if people all give up because they don’t want to grind and only work if they feel like it . You cannot get rid of grinding in any projects even if you are passionate about it . There are gonna be times or parts of it that you need to grind. No excuse if you choose to be a grown up

I guess that's kind of the point. You don't have to choose to be that kind of grown up.

There is work that is unpleasant but needs to be done (chasing raceconditions, memory leaks, etc.) - and there is grind, that kills all your love for the project. If it is the latter, I really do recommend to make a break and do something else. I tried both and grinding did not work out, but coming back fresh did and I usually immmediately spotted the problem, I otherwise would have wasted lots of energy on it.

Yes, but it's okay to refuse to grind. Sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze, and it's equally grown up to give up.

As a grown up I can choose to enjoy a project until I stop enjoying it.

Does every project actually need to be brought to its conclusion? No. Is it nice to take pride in completed projects? Yes. Do the projects I do bring me additional knowledge? Yes, usually.

I think that the ability to complete a project is a desirable skill. I think the desire to take a project to completion is worthy, otherwise why start it? Still, priorities change right along with interests. Much like saying "No" is considered a skill, knowing when to finish, and when to throw in the towel, are both equally valuable skills.

When I signed my daughter up for soccer this summer I had to willingly drop a personal and extremely fun side project because I've committed an extra 4+ hours/week to her development. Am I not a grown up for making this decision?

> Am I not a grown up for making this decision?

No, of course this is not the case. You made a decision based on priorities.

The headline of the article:

> Finish your projects > Don’t let fear, or that last 10%, hold you back.

... and reading the article, it seems targeted at people who want to finish their projects, but are struggling with the reality of actually doing so.

GP seems to be talking about the same sort of thing --- giving up because the going got grindy.

It's of course fine to just screw around in your free time if the goal is to screw around in the first place. It's also fine to realize that some goal (project, etc.) you set no longer aligns with your priorities.

I feel like there are two groups of people here talking about different things but thinking they're the same.

The difference is perspective. You're right that grind is unavoidable, but it requires a big-picture perspective that the work is still valuable and therefore worth completing. If the wider circumstances have changed, then grinding because success demands grinding belies the fact that success will no longer be achieved through grinding. The key, in the beginning, is to attempt to reduce the amount of grinding that will be necessary by reducing scope as much as possible for what is needed to ship; the less grinding you need, the more likely you are to ship, and the more likely you are to continue to ship in the future.

I apply that mentality to my job. If I’m just goofing around at home I don’t “have to” do anything.

That's absolutely true. Alternate perspective, though --- might it be that "goofing around" was the goal here, and therefore the goal was accomplished?

I've lashed myself to the mast (so to speak) and forced myself to finish projects that I would've otherwise walked away from, and I'm so so glad I did.

> You can free yourself from this pain without lifting a finger.

Sometimes the cost of doing things is pain. I was going to say the cost of doing _great_ things is pain, but honestly, the cost of doing anything is usually some level of pain.

It isn't always the case, but I have found that pain is the #1 litmus test for "is what you are doing valuable". Some times this turns out to be a "you worked hard instead of smart" problem, but game theory wise one can assume that painful things are generally avoided or not fully explored.

There is a really good reason you are spammed to death with GPT chat bot clones, but have to go around like a beggar to find things that actually matter.

What happened as a result of finishing those projects?

One thing: internal satisfaction. External success, too! The biggest one recently was releasing a course on MySQL at https://planetscale.com/mysql-for-developers. It was painful to push that over the finish line, but giving up on it would have been a huge disservice.

I don’t think it’s really fair to count projects on your day job, unless you have the option of unilaterally cancelling those by yourself?

And even then, you have a lot of extra external motivation (money, peer pressure, boss) to keep pushing when you’d otherwise give up.

Not to say that the satisfaction is any less, but the environment seems different.

A lot of my day job work is self directed because our managers expect a lot out of us but also leave us alone to do the work (amazing right?) but message received.

Let's take one not related to software at all! I turned a shed into an office over the course of many months: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1333866090573811723. I wanted to give up and burn it down at some points, but I powered through and ended up with the perfect shedquarters!

I also did a podcast many years ago that was hard for me to produce, but I powered through until I felt like it had reached its natural conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzr2Hd6Uscin....

I created a course teaching college students financial accounting that's made over 100k in the 5 or 6 years it's been live (http://acct229.com). That was a freakin grind that I thought about quitting a lot.

I also started doing tech YouTube videos recently and each one is a tiny exercise in finishing (and it feels great to ship!): https://www.youtube.com/@aarondfrancis/videos?view=0&sort=p&...

I wrote and released an open source package called Sidecar (https://github.com/hammerstonedev/sidecar) for managing Lambda functions from Laravel. That led to me speaking at Laracon Online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rq-yHAwYjQ) and also to being asked to produce a course for Laracasts (https://youtu.be/0Rq-yHAwYjQ?t=11759). Speaking at the first Laracon led to speaking at the second Laracon Online (https://youtu.be/f4QShF42c6E?t=21744). Both of these led to me being profiled by GitHub's ReadME project at https://github.com/readme/stories/aaron-francis. (The shedquarters is featured here!)

That interview led to another piece called "Publishing your work increases your luck" at https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work. I gave a talk on that article at GitHub Universe. That article led to... this article. And here we are!

Each of these things have 1) felt awesome to release and 2) directly increased my luck, my bank account, or led to the next thing.

Hope those examples hit home a little harder!

Thank you so so much for listing these examples. I am the exact target audience for your financial accounting videos. Immediately bookmarked and shared with a few of my close friends. Appreciate you for finishing these projects -- they definitely will come in valuable for people like me :)

> Hope those examples hit home a little harder!

They’re certainly done outside of work and make the point a lot better ;)

Shed looks fun! Now if only I had the space for it. Think 20x10 covers my entire garden.

Aaron, thank you for this course! I started watching it about a week ago, and I love your teaching style.

I've been using relational databases for years, but my conceptual understanding was never that strong. I hadn't touched MySQL in particular for several years. Your course not only got me back up to speed, but I learned a lot of things I'd never known before.

I love how you organize your lessons, how you make sure to answer the right questions at the right times, and how you prioritize helping the learner build a strong mental model.

I hope you make more content like this in the future.

Gah, this is so encouraging. Thank you for taking the time to say so! I put _so_ much into that and I'm glad to hear it's been helpful for you. Organizing the content was actually a really big struggle for me, so this is particularly meaningful.

It's fascinating seeing the varied (and sometimes quite opposite) replies. I think a good chunk of this comes down to one's personality.

I've had an internal notion of "healthy masochism" for a while — much like what you're saying, where pain is part of the process. And if you go through it enough, and taste the final reward enough times, you almost start to feel the pain as a good thing, or a reward on its own.

On the other hand, there are other personalities (maybe less of them in software, given the amount of pain to be found there :), where the "whip yourself forward" approach plain sucks, and just creates scars rather than promoting growth.

Different strokes for different folks, though I definitely get where you're coming from.

Yeah everyone is super different, and it is kinda funny to see all the varied replies here.

Some of the stories I hold onto when I'm having a tough time finishing are those of writers who talk about what a struggle it is to write. Jerry Seinfeld on the Tim Ferriss show was one of my favorite interviews ever. He talks about about how his advice to young comedians is to just work. There's no way around it. That's been a great comfort to me. The War of Art is another good source of inspiration.

I'm thinking maybe it depends on goals?

I don't know what your goals are when you start projects; personally, I seldom start projects just for fun. If it's a program, then it's a tool I want to use. If it's project around the house, it's probably a repair or upgrade that has meaningful impact on my life. It's easy to get discouraged on these kinds of projects, but you have to see them through or in some sense you suffer for it.

In the middle ground there are things you kind of started because you wanted to, to see if you could do it, or because you thought it would be cool. Maybe a drawing you you were working on, or a research project (actually, I don't know if this fits or not). In a home wood shop, maybe you're making an new tool because you enjoy owning nicer tools than you can afford or just tools you made yourself. These projects, you don't really have to finish, but you probably don't want a graveyard full of them either. It's a pride thing. I start projects like this myself on occasion; they end up particularly hard to finish because I have too many of the first type.

Then there are people who are just screwing around, doing what's fun in the moment. I basically never do this, but a lot of people do. Those projects are fine as well, but people doing that sort of thing are going to have a very different outlook.

I mean don’t most of us fall on either side of the divide at different times? Pushing myself through weight lifting to resolve knee pain feels worth it. Finishing a goofy side project I’ve lost interest in doesn’t.

Honestly the best thing to do is to decrease the scope of the project, cut lots of feature until you can finish it in a reasonable amount of time.

Agreed. Better to reflect honestly and stop, take the valuable lessons. I try to have fun working on my projects, and not think about the end result all the time. If you are not motivated by money, that is a lot easier of course.

Haha. You are the Cerberus in my head that I must fight before beginning any of my projects.

> you will get much less from it than you hope (at least in terms of external validation and rewards)

The best thing is when you're not doing it for validation but for fun. Or, even better, for your own utility, like this is something I want to use for myself that ostensibly exists nowhere else! It's uncommon you think of something like that, though.

Recently, a program I use got an update that's made it go from perfect to horrible. While it sucks, it's given me a project like that; I'm now working on my own substitute that gets back to my "perfect" and has none of the features I don't want. Until it's finished, I'm still using the original program, whose horribleness motivates me daily. ;D

There are good pain points and there are bad pain points.

If you think you'll gain in other areas despite failing and it won't affect other aspects of your life (think health and mental), then by all means power through.

And keep in mind a track record of finished work is a degree of proof that no one can deny, so long as you're able to host it and let others see it.

> Go take a walk or bake some cookies instead.

Funny enough, I had few concept projects got un-stuck maybe because of it. Long story short: sometimes it's helpful to leave the project for a few days so you can come back to it from a relatively new perspective. Get a good exercise AND then a good rest helps too, especially when the project is big.

I found that a good solution is to have an handful of ongoing projects so we can pause the current one when the motivation is low, have a little break, then see which one can be resumed after that. There's less pressure, it's more healthy, and over the years it adds up.

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