An illustration of the archive of unfinished things waiting behind every new start.
Why Starting Something New Is So Much More Fun Than Finishing It
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I have a terrible habit of starting new things. Give me a free evening and I can somehow convince myself that what I really need is another app, another plugin, another website idea, another integration, maybe a Discord bot while I am at it.
Of course, if there is a deadline, the answer is easy: finish what you started. But when there is genuinely spare time, somehow, the temptation to make something completely new is much stronger.
New ideas still have possibility
I think that is the biggest reason. A new project is still a seed. You do not fully know what it is going to become yet. Maybe it turns into something useful. Maybe people love it. Maybe it solves a problem you have not even thought through properly yet. Maybe it makes money. Maybe it leads to a completely different idea. At the beginning, all of those possibilities are still open.
That is exciting.
An existing project is different. Once something already exists, the work becomes much more concrete: fix this bug, improve that screen, rewrite this copy, update the listing, add the boring setting you forgot the first time. Useful work, absolutely. But it does not have the same sense of discovery.
An illustration of that early adventure when a new build still has no scars.
Building something new feels adventurous
There is also something fun about imagining who the thing could help. You start with one small idea and immediately your brain runs ahead. What if it did this? What if somebody used it for that? What if this simple thing became something much bigger?
You are not just writing code at that point. You are exploring. That feeling is probably why starting is so addictive.
The obvious problem is the graveyard
Unfortunately, there is a downside. You probably do not want 50 unfinished projects. I say that as someone who appears to be conducting an experiment to find out exactly how many unfinished projects one person can own.
Eventually, every exciting new seed becomes an existing project. And if you only enjoy planting seeds, you end up with a garden full of things that never grew. So there has to be some balance.
An illustration of starting more than you can keep alive.
I do not think the answer is “stop starting things”
I actually think starting new things is valuable. It keeps you curious. You learn new systems. You try ideas quickly. Sometimes one of those experiments turns into something worth taking seriously.
The problem is not starting. The problem is never deciding which experiments deserve the next stage.
At some point, a project has to graduate from “this is fun” to “I am actually going to finish this.” And some projects probably need the opposite decision: that was interesting, I learned something, I am done with it. That is still better than leaving everything permanently half-alive.
Maybe finishing is just a different kind of creativity
I am still working on convincing myself of this one. Starting gives you a blank page. Finishing gives you constraints. You already made decisions. Now you have to improve them, simplify them, fix the parts that do not work and turn the rough idea into something another person can actually use.
That is probably creative too. It just does not give quite the same dopamine hit as opening a brand-new repository and thinking: right, what can this become?
