Second Life Log

I really wanted to share this, because it makes a good point of dividing your potential projects into the categories of "experiments" and "commitments". The idea being if you label something as a "commitment", you commit to finishing the project through thick and thin. If you label it an "experiment", then you can push as far as you like, then abandon the experiment if you feel like you can't derive anything more useful from it. And, of course, if you feel the need to re-label something, you can do that. The point is to make a habit of finishing things when you commit to them. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/04/01/finish-what-you-start/

Follow my lead on this one. Let's say any project, goal, or path is a series of steps. You cannot cheat and skip steps to finish the path, and there are always enough easy steps to finish the path. Now, as you travel along the path, you find a block in your way. You come to the conclusion that the block cannot be bypassed without a large amount of effort. Put another way, it's like attempting to jump over several steps on a stairway. It takes much more effort, and there's a limit on how far you can jump. I would submit that the block itself is part of the path, and the steps to go through the block are there. What may be happening is your mind sees a group of steps as a single step, and refuses to see it as the series of steps it actually is. So, to get through the block, you need to find those steps, and just as before, take them one at a time, until the block is behind you.

This image illustrates what your emotions go through when taking on a project.  Note in the middle is the "Dark swamp of despair", and the bridge over it is "belief / persistence". Once you persist over the swamp, you start to regain your confidence in the project, and can soldier on to a satisfying conclusion. The post I pulled it from is here: https://john.do/inevitable/ .   I should inform you that the graphic is a refactor from a post by the same author in 2016, which was "stolen" (possibly) from "Steal Like An Artist" (2012), which was in turn "stolen" from Maureen McHugh (but the author published the credit in their book). I like the general concept of the really low point during the project, when many many people abandon it. This has happened to me time and time again.