Finishing

Finishing is also important for deciding not to finish.

When you believe that you can finish, and you have difficult past experiences to prove it (to yourself most of all) you can more easily walk away from anything that is not worth finishing, without doubting your motivations for doing so.

I've went for 2 years to math uni, then for another two to physics uni, then to music academy for, again, 2 years.

So, technically, I haven't finished any of those, but what I got from each - a solid advanced introduction to the field - is what I really wanted, all in goal of making me a good game maker and a well-rounded person. So, I consider them finished. With pretty good GPA to boot.

Only reason I didn't go to art academy too for 2 years is that I already considered myself proficient in the field.

Point is, you cannot finish if you don't know what your goal is.

Finishing is great and there's definitely a sense of accomplishment. Starting is usually fun ... it has a sense of adventure and a certain newness.

So if starting and finishing represent 5% each, that leaves 90% in the middle that's nothing more than discipline and an overwhelming sense of vision. Discipline is what I have to cultivate in myself - fortunately I recognize both what that is and what it means. And it's discipline in the middle that allows you to finish.

In any case, congrats to Jessica and the rest of this spring's graduating class.

If you decide to make the financial investment to start college, it makes sense to finish. That does not mean it necessarily makes sense to start in the first place.

I finished university, I felt ashamed of having stayed so long. There was no sense of pride, no sense of accomplishment. The predominant - positive - feeling was relief. University was a hoop-jumping exercise, and beyond that it meant nothing to me. An hour after my last exam, I stuck my laptop and the few things I wanted to keep in the back of my car, chucked the rest of my stuff into the bin outside the flat, and drove the 15 hours back home. In the end I got my degree mailed to me rather than bothering to go to graduation. There's a masters degree sitting in a plastic folder in the back of my cupboard somewhere, it's been out of the envelope twice since I got it.

Maybe it's different for others, but for me I only ever get a sense of accomplishment if I honestly value the thing I'm doing.

If you're doing something that you want, or that gives you a sense of satisfaction that's going to be sufficient to justify suffering through it, then rock on. It sounds like the blogger's daughter had a good time, all power to her. But one of the big things that life's taught me is to recognise that people are different (no, really!) and that other people telling you that doing something hard will give you a sense of accomplishment? It's not necessarily true. I stayed at uni because that's the story my parents sold me as a girl, that when you start something you carry it through. But that's not always good advice. When you're doing something that's just going to suck the soul out of you often the best advice is to see if there's a way to stop doing it before it costs you something that's going to take a long time to recover from - if you do at all.

One sense of finishing something, and not necessarily any less valid than the first, is to recognise a bad gamble and say 'It's finished here because I'm finishing it. My life, not yours.'

I just wish I'd known that when I was 16 and was making my decisions in this regard. So, if you are at that age and making your decisions in this sort of regard, it might be worth taking an honest look at whether this is actually something that will make you happy or just something that people are saying will make you happy because it's hard. And, if it is the latter, seeing whether doing other things that people tell you are hard that you don't necessarily want to do makes you happy - and whether it makes you four years and thousands of hours of work worth of happy.

I graduated from the same school a year ago. It took 10 years, because I got very sick in the middle. I did so because I wanted to finish what I started.