Finish What You Start – Peter Hollins

Introduction

What exactly is finishing what you start and following through? You have
may heard these phrases before, but what do they mean?
To me, they mean making your intentions reality. Too often, we’ll say we’ll
do something, and we might even start it one lucky weekend. But at the first
sign of hardship, fatigue, boredom, or busyness, we abandon it all too easily
and it sits in our garage (mental, figurative, or literal) for the rest of eternity.
Finishing what you start and following through is breaking through that
common loop and taking hold of your life.

My personal experience with finishing what I start has been checkered. One
summer, I promised myself that I would carve a wooden canoe, about 12
inches long and 3 inches wide. Not too big, but a sufficient challenge for
someone with no woodworking experience. The first week, I made a
considerable dent in my wood block. The second week, my hands were sore
and the new Star Wars movie was out. The third week, I was too busy
seeing Star Wars again and procrastinating. My wooden canoe wasn’t
meant to be.

But every time I walked through my garage to my car, the canoe was a
damning reminder of my laziness and inability to follow through. It wore on
me until I committed myself to finishing it a couple of summers later. You
can probably guess what happened. The first week went great, the second
week was moderate, and the third week I was already running on fumes.

I was fortunate to learn about temptation bundling some time shortly
thereafter, which provided the boost for me to finish my canoe. Briefly, as
temptation bundling will be a major theme later in the book, temptation
bundling is when you combine an obligatory (and undesirable) task with an
instantaneous reward. When you can bribe yourself into working hard,
suddenly finishing what you start isn’t a massive exercise in willpower—
it’s the pursuit of something pleasurable, if only by association.
The reward I bundled the canoe carving with was listening to my favorite
albums—something we rarely have time for these days. When’s the last
time you listened to your favorite album from beginning to end without
interruption?

Suddenly, a new world was opened to me; if I could make any unpleasant
task just pleasant enough by pairing it with something I enjoyed, I could
plow my way through just about anything. It was a small realization like
this that led me to study the science of following through and executing,
despite the human brain’s instinctual resistance to doing so. How can we
circumvent our worst instincts and get things done when we want, without
the specter of a deadline over our heads? How can we pay attention to our
attention and do that what is most difficult—live with supreme discomfort?
I’d like to think I’ve come up with great systems for myself that can be
widely applied for just about any context. There are many tactics in this
book—I don’t use all of them all of the time, but most of them will work for
most people.

As usual, I wrote this book for myself and am glad and proud
to be able to share my findings. I hope they are helpful and help you
accomplish exactly what you want. At least, I hope they force you to listen
to your favorite albums from time to time—a win in itself!