Finish What You Start

This may describe you—maybe you are the type of person that will take on a big project: a book, a song, something like that—and you get partway into and you’re like, gee whiz, this is harder than I thought it would be, and you capitulate, putting it away, and never coming back to it.

I did this recently.

I took up guitar. How hard can it be? Well, not that hard, in principle—I’ve been a musician for years, and I know music theory and chords and stuff, so that part was easy. But I have tiny hands, and in the physical universe we occupy, barre chords are an impossibility. My index finger simply does not stretch across the fretboard to mute all the strings. I mean, sure: with infinity time and infinity resources, and maybe with the use of a Procrustean finger-stretcher, I could make it work. I was able to play songs without barre chords, like Coldplay’s “Yellow,” but if you can’t play barre chords there is really no point to the guitar. So I “put it aside” and said that I would “come back to it.” And no, what they say about guys with small hands is absolutely not true.

Generally, though, I finish what I start. I started my MFA program, figuring that it would be a cakewalk, and after a few months, said, shit, this is hard, but I stuck with it, and finished it over three years. I finished two other degrees in such fashion. I stayed at Lehman pretty much longer than anyone else in my associate class—not many of us were left at the bankruptcy. There were 12 MBAs hired in Equities in 2001—in 2008, I was the only one left. The Daily Dirtnap didn’t exactly come roaring out of the gates, but I stuck with that, too.

A behaviorist would say that I have a high tolerance for frustration, which is another way of saying that when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. And in any new endeavor, the going will get tough, particularly in startups. If you want to read a good story about that, read about Ben Horowitz at Loudcloud in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I can tell you this for sure: I have never met someone who started a business and said that it was easy. I mean, after a while, it gets easy, when the business matures, and then you can sit back and collect fat dividends, but in the beginning, there are hard problems to solve. Some people have a low tolerance for frustration. They take up a new project, then two weeks into it, they’re like, shit, too hard, and they go back to dicking the dog or whatever it is they do with their free time.

I would put a graph in here, but I don’t believe in visual aids in essays, but imagine a graph where you have some visual representation of things being easy in the beginning, then they get very hard in the middle, then they get very easy at the end. It is the middle part that you have to power through. I call this “the resistance.” You have to power through the resistance. I have had variations of this in all my essays, about the relationship between pain and growth, and doing hard things, and how there is no growth without suffering. And maybe quitting something is perfectly rational behavior—you do a cost-benefit analysis of how long it will take you to learn a skill, and what the expected return is from learning that skill, and you decide in the end that it isn’t worth it. And that’s fine. But there are some people who demonstrate a repeated pattern of starting things they don’t finish. They don’t finish anything. They never see a project through to completion. These are the people who tell you at cocktail parties that they’ve been working on the same book for the last 15 years. They’re not really working on the book, obviously, and that book is unlikely to ever get finished. Lots of bad books get published in the U.S. every year. You know what’s worse than a bad book? No book! Also, there are a lot of bad books that sell millions of copies. The David Goggins book is terrible. Bestseller. There is no accounting for some people’s taste.

So a lot of life is powering through the resistance.

When Street Freak came out in 2011, I got a Goodreads review from a publishing dude in Minnesota. As it turns out, he was in my Swab Summer platoon at the Coast Guard Academy in 1994. I will briefly explain: “Swab Summer” is the Coast Guard Academy’s version of basic training, where the upperclass cadets train the incoming freshmen. It is what it sounds like: a lot like Full Metal Jacket, at least back then. Anyway, this guy takes a shot at me in the review, telling everyone that he hated my guts, that I was a “faux drill sergeant-type character,” and then went on to write a nice review of the book and said that he’d like to grab a beer with me someday. Well, we still haven’t had the beer, and I’ll give you the reason why: he didn’t demonstrate a lot of introspection about his two weeks at the Academy, before he quit ignominiously. Number one, he didn’t power through the resistance. Number two, if I was responsible for running him out of that place, it is highly likely that I did him a favor, that he ended up long-term happier for not having a career in the Coast Guard. I was a tough sonofabitch back then. More kids processed out of the Academy in my platoon than any other platoon, by a lot—saving them a lifetime of misery, something I take pride in. Doing hard things is a good thing in general, even doing some things just because they are hard, because of the way you feel at the end. At week two of my Swab Summer, when I was a freshman, I was having panic attacks. Pushed through the resistance. Did something hard. Finished what I started. At graduation, I was doing the happy-happy dance.

Then you get these people who are resolute—they will simply not give up, no matter what. Music production is like that. If you hear a track on the radio or at a club, hundreds of hours went into that piece of music. And it’s not simply musicianship—it’s technical proficiency with the software. It’s not something you just “pick up.” It’s thousands of hours in front of the computer, making mistakes, and making more mistakes, and noodling around with stuff, tinkering, learning all the while. Buying your 14-year-old Logic or Ableton might be one of the greatest investments you ever made. Those kids will sit in their bedrooms until four in the morning, hammering away at the computer, until they finally figure it out. They are resolute. I went through this three years ago, fancied myself a producer, starting messing around in Logic and discovered it was a lot fucking harder than I thought it was going to be. Sometime you should read about Matt Fax. As a twelve-year-old, this kid had dozens of tracks up on Beatport under the alias Mike Duz. At age 14, he was producing tracks with BT. In terms of production ability, I’d rate him in the top 5 in the world. That guy put in his 10,000 hours a long time ago.

The thing I happen to be an expert on is books, having written six of them, four of them published. You know how you write books? You write books. You can’t write books not writing. A lot of people think that everything they write has to be perfect, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. Write something down, put it in the freezer for two weeks, and come back and revise it. Also, you get a lot of people who think they have to write like a writer, and they’re writing like what they think a writer should write like, and their voice gets lost in the bullshit. Which brings me back to the Goggins book—the dude is barely literate, but he has a strong voice, and it comes through, which is why the book is so popular. He’s not trying to be someone he’s not. It’s that authenticity that people are looking for. If you are writing with a desire to look good, then it’s not going to work out.

If you start something, you should finish it. Unless the costs are high and the benefits are low. But there is something to be said for finishing what you start, even in those cases. There is shame associated with quitting. When the police train German Shepherds, they talk about the dogs that have drive, which is another way of saying motivation. Those dogs make the best police dogs, because they are the easiest to train. Humans can have drive, too—they’ll run through a brick wall to accomplish a goal. You don’t have to run a Tough Mudder to be resolute. Sometimes, it’s as simple as answering an email.