Some Things Matter, Most Don’t
Finish What You Start (Or Not)
Life’s Too Short
“Finish what you start.”
“If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
“Don’t start something you can’t finish.”
“Don’t start Project B until you finish Project A.”
“Close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades.”
I Googled for platitudes on finishing what you start. The lines above are a small sampling of the garbage that got barfed onto my screen as a result. This is stuff we’ve all heard. My own father was a big believer in finishing everything you start, and finishing it to perfection. He lived it and forced everyone else in his sphere of influence to live it as well. Even absent controlling parents, we have all had teachers or bosses who espouse this philosophy, that if something is started, it must be finished to perfection.
The issues facing our educational systems are numerous. Don’t even get me started on Common Core Math. As someone who did K-12 in the ’70s and early ’80s, I did not have to learn Common Core, but that does not mean I didn’t see my share of poor teaching habits.
One of the worst is the way schools condition students to think that everything that is started needs to be finished, just by virtue of having been started. The schools then take that a step further and rate what you have done, with penalties assigned for performance less than perfection.
This is not to say we should all be quitters, or that nothing is worth doing. I have a general operating philosophy that what must get done, will get done, and the rest is just details. As for the rest? Necessity is a gradient, not a binary concept. We tend to get done what we need to get done. Many of the activities of everyday life are not necessary.
In 11th Grade, I took Modern American Literature. I remember having a conversation with a classmate where I asserted that where literature was concerned, “classic” was a euphemism for “boring”. My teacher was a super nice lady, but she dwelled on some of the tritest aspects of literature. She would pick some obvious example of, say, foreshadowing and spend an entire class period hammering on something that was patently obvious.
We only have so much time to do what we hope to accomplish, and we have very little time to waste. As one example of this, consider that you start watching a 2-hour movie on television. You get twenty minutes in and find yourself bored silly. Do you finish watching that movie, or do you come up with something more worth your time? This is another “respect your time” scenario that I examined in a previous piece.
Watching movies is passive. Suppose you are doing something more active. Making dinner, for instance. You decide to make a casserole for dinner, and halfway through prepping your ingredients, you find that a dinner guest that evening is allergic to one of the primary ingredients. Do you finish making the casserole as planned, or do you either amend the recipe or come up with some other dinner plan?
Depending on how much you like your guest, you are most likely going to change course on your dinner plans. Does that make you a “quitter,” or does it make you a person who can use real-time problem-solving skills to avert a potentially catastrophic turn of events?
An example from my personal writing. A few years back, I hammered out the first draft of a novel as part of a NaNoWriMo project. Earlier this year, when I got a new computer, I was migrating files from my old Mac to my new PC. That got me started reviewing some of the writing archives I’d stored over the years.
I was on record as having finished NaNoWriMo one year and opened up that project file to see whether any of it was worth editing. All that was left of the novel was two sentences. I had forgotten that a couple of years back, I went on an editing binge, and decided that novel was pure trash. It was a science fiction piece, and to my eternal shame, involved time travel. Yikes.
Apparently, rather than taking a surgical fine-tuning approach to the editing, I had gone after that manuscript with a metaphorical machete. There was nothing left but the two opening sentences. Does that mean I was a quitter for abandoning that manuscript? You wouldn’t say so if you had to slog through that tripe. Believe me, I did the world’s readers a favor deep-sixing the bulk of that project.
Sometimes what looks to one person like quitting is really a strategic retreat & regroup. When I was a freshman in college, I took Calculus with Analytic Geometry. One night, there was a homework problem I couldn’t crack. My Calculus class was the first period, and the homework was due at 8:00 AM. I realized I was tired and not thinking clearly. I set the homework aside and went to bed. The next morning before class, I looked at the problem, and the solution was obvious. I just needed to give my tired brain some much-needed rest, and the problem was not so intractable.
As far as insisting that all jobs be done to the best of our ability, I will go ahead and call hooey on that as well. Not everything needs to be done to perfection. That was a hard lesson for me to learn. I’m an MBTI INTJ, and one of the traits of that personality type is a strong tendency towards perfectionism. Some people may see that as a positive, but it is really not.
Some things deserve perfection. Most things are well served by the old saw, “Good enough for government work.” By way of example, at a former job, I was responsible for creating weekly status reports on defect tracking in a new printer my company was designing. My initial version of those reports included statistics on every defect on that product, sorted by subsystem.
The problem was, those reports, highly detailed as they were, managed to obscure the major problems with the product in a sea of detail. The project manager requested that I pool the bottom 20% of errors in a single “Other” category, permitting more expansive treatment of the major issues facing the project. Fine detail was lost, but the end result was a report that more usefully described the major problems, and marginalized the minor issues.
I still feel that drive to make everything perfect, but have managed to learn over the years that sometimes good enough is truly sufficient. This perspective has become even more important in the age of COVID. So many people are under pressures they were never prepared for, that we don’t need to be creating more pressure by nitpicking every little thing just because it doesn’t meet some insane standard of perfection.
Pay attention to detail where it is warranted, accept “good enough” where perfection is not necessary, which is most of the time, and allow yourself to say, “Screw it” when you realize it just doesn’t matter. This is not to say be a slacker or a quitter. Just realize that perfection is a very recent human construct, and not a healthy one. Nature is messy, disorderly, bloody, violent, and generally not socially acceptable, and for all that, it has persisted for billions of years.
A comparatively short time ago, some apes grew brains a little too large for their own good and proceeded to invent all manner of ways to give each other a multitude of health issues stemming from the desire of the few to control the actions of the many. If we have learned anything from this recent pandemic, it should be that life is too short to drive yourself and everyone around you crazy with an undue fixation on things that truly do not matter.
And if you look at the state of the world today, can anyone say that human civilization is working well? Perhaps it is time to try something different. Perhaps it is time to remember that we are just a bunch of apes with a hyperinflated sense of self. Perhaps we could start by taking a step back and remembering how to relax and be kind to ourselves and one another.
