If I was to describe one practice that, when sustained over time, could produce the greatest benefits for your life, it would be this: regularly starting—and completing—meaningful projects.
Projects are bigger than individual tasks, but still aim to complete some concrete set of actions. A project can be all sorts of things. It can be a goal to start exercising, a plan to learn French, moving to a new city, or getting a new job.
Most of us have many projects, including the active strivings of our daily life, as well as daydreams about hobbies we’d like to learn, sports we’d like to try or career moves we might want to make.
But even though we all have projects, there is an enormous difference in our propensity to complete them.
Some people are finishers. Their life is a steady conveyor belt of realized goals and projects.
Other people are starters. They have a lot of enthusiasm for new efforts, but somehow fail to reach a conclusion with most of the efforts they begin.
If you feel like you’re more of a starter than a finisher, that’s not a reason to be alarmed. Indeed, I have a lot of sympathy for you; I used to be a frequent starter and infrequent finisher myself.
And starters should be proud. Even though you may not complete all your projects, there is at least a strong desire to do things and enthusiasm for life. It’s far better to be constantly seized by ideas for your life than to have no aspirations at all.
However, in both my personal experience and work with students over the last two decades, I know that becoming a consistent finisher is not always easy, even when you know it can produce dramatic benefits over time.
So today, let me share with you a three-step process you can use to become a more consistent finisher:
- Be specific
- Be brief
- Only one project at a time
1. Be specific
Projects that are more specific are also more successful. The raw materials that spark our motivations are often sprawling and vague. It takes work to shape them into a format we can make progress on.
Consider the following projects, ordered from most general to most specific:
- I want to be healthier.
- I want to get in shape.
- I want to start exercising more.
- I want to start running.
- I want to run every day.
- I wake up early and run every morning.
Each rung you ascend on the ladder of specificity makes your project more actionable, and more likely that you’ll successfully complete it before moving on.
2. Be brief
Motivation fades with time. The race you began with a sprint often ends with a slog. There’s a simple fix for this: choose shorter periods of time to focus.
For open-ended projects where improvement is continuous (e.g., fitness, language learning, research on a topic), limit your first several projects to one-month sprints. Remember: you can always stack projects working on the same goal back-to-back, but working in short bursts keeps you focused.
If your project is defined by all-or-nothing achievements (e.g., launching a business, writing a book, graduating from college), then I recommend either finding short-term milestones to focus your effort (e.g., getting one client, writing a book proposal, passing your next exam) OR being pickier when taking on longer projects. A four-year project should inspire much more thought before embarking than a four-week effort.
3. Only one project at a time
Once you pick a project, commit to finish it or to deliberately put it aside before picking a new one. Resist the urge to start any new projects until you’ve exited out of your last one.
While there’s always a little slipperiness in what, exactly, constitutes a project, the intention is what matters most. Habits, routine work and the “whirlwind” of your daily life will continue, but steel yourself against committing to new projects until your previous one officially concludes.1 [1]
Becoming a project finisher, not just a starter, isn’t something that happens all at once. Instead, it’s a meta-habit, a kind of practice you establish and reinforce through repeated experience. It takes some time and practice to learn, but by choosing the right sorts of projects—and completing them consistently—you can take your life in any direction you wish.
_ _ _
Next week, I’m going to be holding a new session of my course, Rapid Learner [2]. This course teaches the strategy I’ve used for my learning projects, such as the MIT Challenge [3], Year Without English [4] and, most recently, Foundations [5]. In this six-week course, I’ll teach you not only how to design successful projects, but to optimize your learning and results. But first, I’d like to share how you can go from finishing projects to making those projects effective—choosing activities that are likely to accelerate your learning.