•6. The Art of Never Finishing.
There are quite a few books I would love to read. Out of them, there is this chunk that I would love to, but I can’t, for they have never been written.
You see, most authors don’t like to observe their art, and my humble self also abhors going into contact with anything I’ve created — I just never like it enough. Yet, sometimes on my computer I find pieces of writing by my own pen I genuinely enjoy — but I never went beyond few pages.
4 A4 pages, more or less a limit of what I can write in one sitting, is the most common size of my started “novels” and “novellas” — exposition, and then just puff. Why? Laziness? Lack of talent? Lack of time? Oh my dears, this would easily produce a dozen unfinished, or more appropriately to say, unstarted products — I’m pretty sure I have close to a hundred.
It takes an art to fail at delivering an actual product to do this. An art of never finishing.
Am I proud of it? Should I be? I don’t know. What I know, though, is that you shouldn’t respect people who laugh at product and honor an idea. Ideas are worthless. I have a hundred, you have a hundred. Making a product is great. Making a product out of a shitty idea is greater still. How often do you catch yourself appraising a success of some company or individual, thinking, “damn, I could have that idea as well!” or even “damn, I had this idea!”? I do this all the time.
How often do you do “damn, I could have run Apple [Google, Microsoft, Exxon, Goldman Sachs] so much better!”? I almost never do.
The art of never finishing is important if you’re a professional do-nothing scumbag. For the rest of us, it’s a burden we work to weed out.