The 90% Gravity Problem: Why We Tend to Quit Right Before the Finish Line

The final stretch is not the same as the first 90%. You don't know what you don't know at the start, you don't have formed ideas or boundaries to butt up against and so progress is easy. As you create, you have gained more knowledge and now have to consider you surroundings, the problem space becomes less open. The closer you get to completion the less space to work in, you likely have greater taste, ideas which are good enough for the first 90% are no longer good enough. So better taste and far less acceptable solutions due to increased dependencies. You also can see parts which were previously acceptable as now not so.

To top it off you have the emotional and ego side at play near the finish line. Is this good enough? This could be done better, etc.

I think that mixture of better taste, more dependent parts and ego make the last part the hardest. I also feel that the finish line being close isn't a strong of a motivator as ego is a demotivator. Whereas, at the start ego has no effect as you don't know anything, you can't be mad because you're new, it's all one big playground.

This is exactly it! The triple whammy of the work getting harder, expectations getting higher, and coping with potential failure once you call it "done".

Exactly, the end is a definitive point, different metrics and variables need to be considered for this end point versus the earlier additive points. When you're creating you evaluate how close to completion you are and that's a useful gauge of productivity and keeps the project ticking along, ego isn't a part of the equation here.

When the end is in sight how close to completion you are isn't useful as ego plays a bigger part and so needs to be factored in. Percentage completion becomes a non-useful metric as it doesn't help you get to you objective of completion, if anything it's harmful as I tend to beat self up for lack of progress. As to what that metric is useful at the end point I don't know. But closeness to completion doesn't help me finish.

I use ego as a substitute but some human factor needs to be accounted for.

I am writing to add two other possibilities.

Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it. Depending on the project this could happen at 50% completion or 90% completion. Take scientific research for example. For me there is a lot of motivation to figure things out, to fill the gaps, to make sure everything is solid. But then there is the mundane part of putting it into text and publishing. And my energy is not in there. I already know what will go into that paper, I know getting it out will count as "success" and I know it should be shared. But my libido is not in it.

Another thing - the end of a big project signifies a big change. If you worked on something for a long time, what will you do once it's finished? Norman Finkelstein in one of his interview put it like that (paraphrasing): "I think some people genuinely don't want to end the conflict [between Israel and Palestine] because they built their whole life around it. In the past it was a problem for me as well. I have spent my whole academic career writing about this conflict. I read enough books to fill this room. Literally. If the conflict ends tomorrow - what am I going to do with my life?".

> Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it.

Yes, I have similar issue with motivation I have noticed, if I am presented with a problem to solve and I can see the solution before implementing anything, I am not really interested in coding the solution and testing it. I.e. the abstract or logical proof of the solution is sufficient for me (the fun part), but the actual coding, fixing some environmental problem and details of creating a working solution are (usually) much more boring - because they are almost always essentially the same.

I think this is where ai is interesting with coding. Abstracts more of the process so you aren't in the weeds

Yes.

The best analogy I can make is actually surprisingly from a book about romantic love, "Undefended Love" [0] where the PhD psychology author goes on to make this critical point:

We often set ourselves up for failure (e.g. negative self talk after a failed romantic outreach attempt) because it results in our progression into a safe and known pattern. They explain that our brains and emotions are somehow more comfortable with a known outcome, even though it is irrevocably and undeniably a worse outcome, simply because it is safe and known to us.

Thus. self-sabotage keeps us inside our comfort zone.

Imaging if you did win that [product launch, vc pitch, ...] your life gets catapulted into the big, scary unknown. Just quit now so we can be comfortable, easy, and lazy!

[0] by Jett Psaris & Marlena S. Lyons

One cause of this is that folks finish the first 90% and are surprised to discover the second 90% still undone. It feels, intuitively, as if you should be able to subtract. (Everything - 90%) should be around 10%, right? No. It's like relativity or something. It doesn't work the way we naively expect.

Even experienced people fall into this trap again and again.

If that's the issue, then remembering to double your timeline estimates helps a lot. Fallback is to have a boss who doubles them for you. If you haven't set aside time for "debugging" and "iteration", you can use those labels for the second 90%. Sometimes they're even accurate labels.

BTW: If you try this fix: In your mind and on any paper plans, label the second 90% as something indispensable. Do not call it "refactoring" or anything else that sounds like it could be done after you ship. It can't. Ask me how I know.

Maybe the projects weren't 90% done but more like 50% and you stopped simply because you rely on motivation rather than discipline.

Things only get more difficult as any project progresses so it's only natural that you will need more effort to reach the end. Novelty is long gone since the project started and now only hard work remains.

Plenty of people talk about this. Some people call it the valley of despair, pit of failure, etc. There's even a book called The Dip.

Personally I'd say the last 10% (real 10% not imagined) is rarely when people quit a project.

I've fallen for this trap a few times before. It's a collision of pareto principle and nirvana fallacy. Diminishing returns dominate the last 20%, causing burnout, and you're held in the tension between sunk cost fallacy and perfectionism. The former turning burning ambition into an anchor around one's neck, and the latter slowly decimating any hope of release with perpetual scope creep.

The best strategy to avert this the next time around is to vastly undershoot on goal size. The scope creep will still happen because we can't change our nature, but the project has a much better chance of reaching completion.

Personally, I tend to put off unpleasant/difficult parts of a project so I can make rapid initial progress. I am ultimately confronted by a moment when all of my remaining tasks are those I put off, and it's off-putting. Fortunately I can usually overcome this by mentally shifting gears to more of a slow grind mode.

A few things come together I think:

20% of the effort gets you 80% of the way there. That means the last 20% is going to take 4x more effort than everything you’ve done so far.

You’re losing excitement and motivation, especially as you see the finish line recede farther into the distance.

You question whether the project was ever worth it, whether you’ll fail after all this work, whether it will be embarrassing, maybe worse than if you had never done any of it.

By this time other tasks are calling your attention, now you’re giving up real possibilities to work on this quixotic, possibly foolish project of yours.

A guy I worked used to (kinda) joke that the first 80% of a project takes about 80% of the work, and the rest of the project takes the other 80% of the work.

Known more formally, and generally as the pareto principle.

I think this pattern is quite common among certain types of people. We start things but never finish them. There are many reasons for this, but for me it’s a combination of procrastination, loss of enthusiasm, and diminishing returns. However, it's difficult to define the finish line because we often change our goals. I have a pet project: applying a genetic algorithm to optimise various problem fields. Initially, I just wanted to design a program that was generic enough for numerical optimisation. Then I wanted to experiment with different forms of genomes, and of course the question of efficiency always comes up. Even though I probably can't discover anything significant that other researchers haven't already found, it's a personal challenge that pushes me to find my own insights, which can take a long time. The next challenge is applying GA to image generation, trading algorithms, and so on. So, the project is never finished and is always in a state of flux. But I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing unless it's a paid project. :)

The most-difficult parts of projects are starting them and ending them.

In my experience, the culprits are lacking a clear rubric for completion; activity inertia; fear of failure; and perfectionism (which I find is closely related to the fear of failure).

LATER ADDITION: By "rubric for completion", I mean the answer to the question When and how will I know it's done and ready to ship?

> The most-difficult parts of projects are starting them and ending them.

I'm not sure that is true. Starting is easy. Ending is even easier — you just give up; which is, I would argue, the easiest thing of all for a human to do.

What is hard is taking a project to "I want to share this with other people". That is when the uncomfortable truths get told. As people generally don't like discomfort, there is a lot of motivation to not reach this state.

> your perspectives

90% gravity / 90% done is a bad perspective. You don't really have data on how long the false positives would have taken to succeed.

Unfortunately, getting from 0 to $100 in revenue isn't always much harder than $100 to $200. Even though the first $100 is insanely hard, so can the next $100 be. People don't like to talk about this in the startup space but the statistics at innovation centres for startups etc are insanely clear: at any given revenue, most startups are only going to keep it above the current value for part of the next 6 months, then crash and burn. And upwards line, let alone exponential growth, is an outlier (and still leads to revenue decline the next year most of the times it happens). Unfortunately, finding something that works (a fly well or net ROI positive channel) often takes so much time maintaining you take your eye and progress off other aspects you would have focused on for success and it becomes a revenue wave when it stops working rather than a stable way to grow.

Second problem is young people think they won't tire.. after three years almost anyone has a period of burnout. Atleast althetes like Olympians or Baseketball players have off seasons, with startups, it's not so. This is why having great people with you who flux at different times and take care of stuff you take your attention of increases success, if you can keep conflict minimal. Yet, most young people also don't want to relinquish control, if they are honest.

That's my view.

I think its related to your motivation for attempting the goal itself. If you wanted to prove you could do something, that could be theoretically accomplished before you reach the goal itself.

There are two books on the issue by a guy called Steven Pressfield, "The War of Art" and "Do the Work". I've read the latter and it's good. He talks about how resistance strengthens the closer you get to ending a project. I've found it useful in my work.

You switch from ideator to employee in that last push. Lots of drudge work. If writing, it's editing. If coding, it's bug fixing.

Also add fear of other people's comments or the project flopping.

And a final dash of the last problems being the hardest (easy ones are solved).

100% I do this. Damn near every time. Years ago I had a successful project that stalled at version 0.9.5. If it wasn't for the kindness of a user who paid me to finish it to a 1.0 release, I would have never got there. Also, it wasn't the money that was the biggest motivator, it was the commitment I made to her that I'd finish it and the avoidance of shame I'd feel if I didn't get it done.

It's hilarious to read these takes. When people live in a bubble and they find the holy grail which was found 155 times before.

I was the second top-level comment. I had no idea it would turn out like this :)

so much quack

It is easy to put off most forms of evaluation until the project is fully done. Aside from not wanting to face evaluation or unease that something wasn't as good as anticipated it also means an evaluation on many much earlier actions one no longer feels represents their new experience and how they wish they had approached the problems in retrospect.

Once I solve the difficult problem of the project I lose interest and find it hard to finish the project.

But the difficult problem is finishing.

Perhaps it is that your interest is in the easy tasks? No shame in that.

It's the opposite of that. The straightforward easy tasks are the boring ones. You solve the major problems first and then it's not fun to do the boring work of making it presentable.

'Boredom' is, perhaps, another way to refer to the same difficult problem. I don't think we are talking about different things.

It seems you have more interest in the easy problems too. I expect most people do, to be fair.

Sure, absolutely. Turned out that's a common ADHD symptom. Turned out I has ADHD.

Does it shed some light? https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/10/1842

There's definitely a zone of despair on most projects I've been on - particularly greenfield projects - the whole thing seems misguided, the codebase is no longer pristine, often I come up with some horrifying realisation of an overlooked technical issue. It feels like we're moments away from failure.

So far it's never proven to be true and, yes, it generally turns out that we're incredibly close to delivery.

I think it's because we get our noses rubbed in all the small problems of the codebase at this point - before that it's not working well enough to see all of the issues, we're more focused on delivering some big chunk of functionality at all to perceive the smaller flaws. Because the small flaws outnumber the "bug chunks" stuff it feels like we're going backwards, but we're not.

It's a bit like essay writing. You get fed up with the whole thing when it's nearly finished because you've looked at it SO many times that it feels boring and all the little typos and grammatical mistakes take forever to fix up and every time you do you find more. It's hard to keep in mind that the problems are getting smaller with each iteration even though they're increasing in number.

Does that sound like the thing you're talking about?

it's not success aversion it's because 10% of the work is 90% of the work.

Basically every project it's easy to "rough in" about 90% of stuff. but the devil's in the details and most of the work is that last refinement. be it code documentation,testing,cleanup refactoring etc in a tech project or sanding/staining furniture, or whatever. typically at the 90% point you're not even half done as far as labor is concerned and those last bits are the most tedious and least rewarding.

Solving problems even if it's not fun seems to motivate me, but once they're solved, I find it hard to finish the implementation.

I'm experiencing it right now. Im almost done with publishing a book but feel like molasses as we get to the finish line.

Jung comes to mind. Until you make the unconscious conscious you will call it fate and it will direct your life.

I agree with the comments, when I read it I also had to think of the Pareto principle at first.

Where’s the data on this? You write like it’s studied?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394506

Every. Damn. Time. I've enjoyed reading The War of Art, that talks a lot about this mysterious "resistance".

for me its the praise you recieve as children, from significant adults, teachers, parents etc, that set you up to follow through with your dreams.

people still manage to acheive their goals in life, but it does seem to be more difficult.

During my training as a psychotherapists, I reflected back on this exact same theme.

I had been a martial artist when I was a young man and wondered why I had only acheived a brown belt in both JKA and Aikido. I was very capable of a black belt in both.

I started looking at other areas of my life, like education and work.

I had been extremely intelligent as a child but did not go to school for the final year. So failed to take any school GCSE's.

Same thing, I had no drive to acheive anything higher than my socio-economic status allowed, pre-determined by societies expectations. how can a working class boy become part of academia and get a degree. its not easy.

I came from a very poor family, so poor in fact, I never had a coat and had holes in my shoes until I left home at a very young age of 16.

I went back to college at 36 years old. My therapist at the time supported and guided me through this period. To deal with this exact issue.

I had this overwhelming feeling of never being able to be late. So I arrived far too early for all appointments. I would arrive at least an hour early. The vacuum of unused time, waiting for an appointment, was a hell for me. it got so bad that I turned around and went home. This could be for a work interview or even a date. I missed out on so much of life.

The trick I learned, was to find something productive to fill in that vacuum, like go to a coffee shop and do the times cryptic crossword, while people watching. until the time of my appointment had arrived. such a simple application of filling in time.

Throughout my 6 years of study as an undergraduate, almost all of my peers experienced the dreaded final months of our degrees. Both as under graduates and post graduates. it never seemed to get easier. the stress, the doubt, the feelings of giving up, were a daily struggle.

Out of the 12 peers that underwent my last post graduate degree, all of us experienced this. yet we all went on to acheive our goals.

It is linked to the fear of success. but more in the realm of "not being good enough".

Society has great difficulty accepting "being good enough" as a valid way of being, its all a human being can aspire to, yet society wants us to be more and better.

is it no wonder that the youngsters of today are struggling with more depression, anxiety and other psychiatric issues, than in my younger years in the 60-70's.

They are set up to fail by constantly being fed that they are not good enough.

>for me its the praise you recieve as children, from significant adults, teachers, parents etc, that set you up to follow through with your dreams.

And this is why modern child psychology de-emphasizes praise.

As it was put to me in one of the attachment parenting classes, "If your children rely on your praise to know if they're doing well, what will they do when you're not around?"

My son is fifteen now, top of his class, loves to study and read, and in his entire life I've never once said, "Good job" to him.

The way you handle it is ask them to reflect on their accomplishment: What do you think about that? How did it make you feel? Etc.

And if you feel like you must use an exclamation, just a "Wow!" is perfect.

As was also shown to us in the classes, children don't seek your praise; they seek your attention (big difference).

This is the most misunderstood parenting advice ever. To the point that yes, parenting classes teach it incorrectly. It is not praise that is de-emphasized, but connecting the praise to their value as a person. You do not want to say, "You are a good child because you achieved a good result." You want to say, "Good job for putting effort into X", regardless of the result, because even if they do a bad job at something, they are still a good person.

"Praise is bad" is a gross over-simplification of the recommendations.