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Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

Glad you still liked it, despite the strong complaints!

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)

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> I mean, if you never ship you're literally the kind of person who doesn't ship though

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.

I recognize the author’s argument from the Atomic Habits books — inner motivation heavily stems from the picture of self.

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.

Of course I do not ship a lot of personal projects. That’s why they’re personal.

I have enough to ship in my day job. Not shipping my personal projects is my prerogative.

Of course that's your prerogative, but their claim still holds true. If you never ship your own projects, you're still a person that never ships.

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.

> 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.

Don’t worry, there’s no conflict there. We don’t ship at my day job either ;)

But really my point was that you can still derive a lot of satisfaction from a project without shipping it.

Absolutely!

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