I cant finish anything, and opportunity is passing me by... help

[imcostalong]

I posted this on lifehack.org and got a few good responses. I'm just reposting it here to find different angles to tackle this unending problem. Any advice is appreciated.

Heres my story, I'm 19, and I have a good life. It seems, however, that I don't deserve any of the gifts I have been granted. I am employed at USAToday as a Web Producer, I have my own 401k Started, and I own my own house. I started self-educating myself since I was 12 on Graphics Design, Web Production, Drawing, Sculpting, Making Music, whatever peaked my interest at the time. I have succeeded quickly in each field, faster even as I would jump to the next. Everything comes way too easy to me, except for finding necessary motivation. I know I'm sounding big headed and please forgive me, I'm trying to be as humble as possible, but I need you to understand the situation in its entirety.

My problem is, with everything I want to do and believe I CAN do comes this need for instant gratification. I show people projects half finished to get their criticism and they are always blown away, congratulating me to no end. Yet, instead of using their positive responses to my advantage I just take the credit and move on. Basically, with every positive review I immediately get the satisfaction I need, as if I have already finished, and I start a new project. Now I have a trillion unfinished projects, like my first digital painting http://www.geocities.com/imcostalong1/Picture.jpg and they don't get touched after my addiction to gratification is satisfied. That digital painting was created two years ago and I still haven't finished it.

Now, I know it seems like I'm bragging, and I absolutely hate formatting this post the way I have but I don't know how else to get the right advice. I would trade every "talent" I have for the ability to FINISH anything I start. This sucks, its like constantly being teased with potential. I just never seem to care anymore, about anything, nothing seems challenging; no programming language, no design, nothing pushes me to get better. I'm not the best but sometimes knowing I'm "better than most" in one field makes me jump to another, and it's a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE habbit.

I really don't want to let my life, goals, or potential slip me by because of my ego; I'm begging for advice. I've tried writing down my goals, setting routines, not telling people about my projects, yet I just can't seem to find a way to get my **** done or find the will to get other good ideas started. My goals are slipping through my fingers as I sit at my house staring at the wall wondering why I'm so bored, and this apathy is getting much MUCH worse.

It seems everything in this world is a double edge sword.

[m18pak]

Go down to your local library and borrow some books on procrastination. Then once you've read up on the psychology of procrastination psychoanalyze yourself. Ask yourself why it is you have this need for "instant gratification", as you put it.

From your post the reasons I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. You never complete work because you're overly self-critical and afraid that your end product won't be good enough.
2. You don't try to finish because you're still harboring secret feelings of inadequacy from childhood experiences of having your work treated with disdain or ridicule, which is why you have this neurotic need for praise and admiration, and why you can't finish because you're afraid that your finished work will be scorned.
3. You have a need for immediate gratification because you don't want to think about the long term. What you're currently doing is something that you don't actually want to do, especially not for the years to come, so you sabotage any chance of success because you don't want to get sucked further into doing this for the long haul.
4. You have very low self-confidence i.e. you feel like an impostor. You feel like you don't really know what you're doing, and that if you really tried and did all that you could you would still fail, and then everyone would know how you can't really do your job and how you're just muddling your way through. If you really worked and put in effort you still wouldn't produce anything and then you would feel humiliated.
etc etc...

I would bet that somewhere along the line there is a subconscious belief that your performance indicates your worth as a person, which is why you can't perform because you're too scared.

Once you've identified the underlying emotional structure that is causing your conditioned behaviour use EFT (Emotional Freedom Therapy) on it. The best thing would be if you could identify the specific event that lead you to feeling the way you subconsciously feel right now and using EFT on that specific memory.

Note that there are many other emotional-management techniques out there (BBSF, Sedona, Doyletics etc) but EFT is widely regarded as the best.

Sometimes you won't even need to use these techniques. Simply identifying the underlying emotional cause and consciously making a decision that you will no longer feel that way can sometimes work too.

Oh, and I almost forgot. You should also consider looking at CBT or some other form of behavioural therapy (Dialetical Behavioural Therapy etc) to work on the distorted mental thought processes that are caused by your emotional block and serve to reinforce it.

Good luck. I know this may seem like a lot of work but the fact of the matter is that with complex behavioural problems like these you have to put in a lot of work to solve them. It's ultimately up to you whether you overcome this obstacle in your life, so I wish you the best.

PS. If none of this applies to you then just think of it as being me talking to myself.

[Amanda Norris]

Maybe you aren't motivated to finish anything because it really isn't that important to you. What's it worth? As Ecclesiastes says:

"Everything is meaningless."

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

I know it's depressing, but try reading Ecclesiastes and try to reconcile those feelings within yourself. Maybe everything that you work on is meaningless. So then what is the meaning of life? Answer that question for yourself.

[Konini]

I also have a terrible habit of not finishing things. For a while my screensaver said, "what will I finish today"!

In my youth, I used to like to do lists and ticking them off. Now I hate them. Except on my day off, I find it helpful, just to ask what will I finish today, and for that matter what will I finish in the next 50 minutes. So when I am feeling out-of-it, I work from the hour to ten minutes to the next hour and keep notes in my Journal (See Steve's recommendation) as I go.

This advice now is more fun. You remind me of Toby Moores of Sleepy Dog here in the UK. Sleepy Dog makes family computer games. Toby Moores describes himself in his youth as being rubbish at finishing things. He now runs a successful company in which creativity and starting things is the key. He trains everyone to be creative (fill you in another time) and expects only 1 out of 200 ideas to fly to its completion. Frank umm forgot his surname of Creative Labs has the same idea. People do rapid pitching. instead of conceive, build, launch; they launch, test, build. Every Friday people have to make a rapid pitch on their work in the nABC format: need, Approach, Build, Competition. The point being that ideas change as you interact. What you finish will not be what you started!

You might like to try to get an attachment to either of these firms in the UK (an exchange with someone here maybe?).

You might also like to consider building an online portfolio of your work. I seemed to have wiped the link off my feed by mistake (thanks to you, I know that now and correct it). Google Design Swarm and build a portolio like Alex has done. I love her work.


And will you always be a non-finisher? Unlikely. Many of my professional colleagues say I am a Completer-Finisher. At work I run with a simple criterion: the job is not finished until the money is in the bank. I plan to finish jobs. My non-finishing is to do with stuff no one is waiting for. Guess what I just check the time and I am late for Pilates. See the point. I prefer to reply to you than rush off to something for me. You might also be very people oriented.

Anyway, I digress. What does Toby Moores do - he hires completer-finishers to follow through what the creatives have started. Team work is a absolute pleasure when you really value the people who are different from you! I have found that to be the greatest privilege of passing years. To really admire other people's work. I still like it when they admire mine but it is more important for me to feel sincerely that theirs is terrific.

Hope this helps and have a good life. It is nice that you are appreciative of everything you have.

And now I'd better slink off to the gym and apologise. Can't go in to the class. I was late last week too! Ooh. Have to get a new screensaver.

[imcostalong]

I appreciate everyones advice. I have read everything carefully and I agree with most.

I've studies a lot of NLP psychology and sociology so I have been able to identify a lot of the underlying factors with in my personality that harbor most of my tendencies to procrastinate. I'm pretty honest with myself, and yes a lot of these feelings and habits are founded on a problem with my ego. To tell you the honest truth though, I had a lot of encouragement as a child from my peers and my parents, but I adopted most of my "laziness" from my arrogance to authority figures (Teachers mainly). Sadly, (refering to a post I read earlier) the blame here is not on my environment, but myself.

Today and yesterday I sat down and started redesigning, I completed a website for my buddy and started a new "Myspace revamp" for my other friends music myspace. I'm doing my best to ignore the voice of apathy in my head, I've always been able to identify it, yet working against it was not my strongest asset



And as for the online portfolio, I just have never really agreed with layouts I design. They never seem to properly represent my level of skill. I used to own 3eyesdesign.com but quit paying for the server when I just started to use it as a personal file hosting site vs an actual portfolio.

I will take your advice to heart and keep working.