Finishing Projects

When it comes to finishing projects, there two end-of-spectrum problems connected to it:

1. Inability to finish a project.
2. Compulsion to finish a project

I once read that overachievers become what they are because in their childhood they got a tremendous positive response to something they had accomplished. And as a result, they got addicted to this rush of positive emotions associated with the end of a project, an accomplishment.

Sounds very plausible to me.

I have a friend who is an overachiever. She is doing great with her career. Her social life is wonderful. Her networking abilities are outstanding. It's hard to imaging all the things she manage to fit into her week. She finishes all her projects.

She also can't help herself but finish what she shouldn't be finishing -- like a box of chocolate éclairs. She feels compulsion to finish whatever she starts.

I, on the other hand, have really hard time finishing projects, which is considered to be typical for people with ADD. However, I absolutely refuse to believe that a child -- any child -- could be born with the "unfinished project" syndrome. It's obviously a learned behavior.

I wish I knew how I picked that one up. But mostly I wish I knew how to get rid of it.

Fear: Abandoning Enterpreneurship

Right after college I got to work for a great small company. There were only 12 of us and my boss -- the CEO -- a brilliant businessman who was only 33 at the time manages to snatch a great market share. Actually, we were doing what nobody else was doing at the time - forecasts for major metropolitan cities' consumption of water and electricity.

Ten years after I moved away, my former boss sold his company and moved to the Silicon Valley to work as a programmer for one of the major software companies. What happened? I don't know, but, perhaps, something like what is happening to one of my friends now. Lets call him Dan.

Dan is a party planner. He is great at what he does. What he is not good at is strategic thinking. And so his business is always above the water but just about. Last week Dan called me to ask whether he should convert into a programmer or a webmaster because his business is not doing well and the news of the recession are very, very scary.

Dammit!

I've spent hours helping him improve his business. Free of charge. Just because I wanted to help. And now he wants me to help him be a coward. I am sorry but I don't think he needs my help with that.

What I really think, it that he should do whatever he whats to do. But do it without trying to scare the hell out of me because he needs someone to be scared with him; and without whining to me about bad things that MIGHT happen to his business. Really, if I ever want to hear someone's whining I'll listen to my own.

People do get scared and depressed, but the worst thing one can do when feeling like that is to try and bring someone down with him (or her) because it feels lonely to be scared without a company.

Fear

I was born to a family of cowards. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins were all born and raised to be cowards. Don't get me wrong -- they are (or were) all capable, talented and some of them are quite brilliant.

But none of them have had the courage to follow a dream, to voice an opinion when it weren't safe to do so, to not follow the crowd, to stand up for any cause or to go after anything that weren't easily obtainable.

It's not something unique to my family. Being fearful actually quite common among Eastern European Jews. Centuries of prosecution breed fear, and then fear breeds more fear. Something like that.

I'd like to say that I am different, but I am not. I was brought up to be afraid of anybody in charge, to keep my thoughts to myself and to never risk a failure. It did sink in, too.

For many years I was scared day and night until one day I got really sick of being scared. I don't remember what day it was. But from that day forward I started being afraid a little less each day.

I squeezed as much fear out of my heart and mind as I could -- not all at once, of cause. It did take a few years.

Now it seems silly that I ever was afraid of people in charge. They are there to either be respected and liked if they deserve or to be disrespected -- not to be afraid of.

Also, my opinions are not something I hide any more. Those who know me know that i have opinions about pretty much everything and I tend to voice them even if they're not what the majority thinks.

The only thing I completely failed to eradicate is the fear of failure. It's still with me in its full blown force and it takes the most idiotic forms. For example I feel scared silly to go back to something I let go for a while. It may be checking an email I haven't checked for sometime. Or returning to an unfinished writing. Or connecting again with a social network from which I was absent for a month.

I was scared returning to this blog after a brake. Very scared.

I still am.

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Photo: paolo màrgari