I Have 47 Unfinished Projects and I'm at Peace with It

I counted them last week: forty-seven. Half-built... Stuff. Logo concepts that stalled at round two. A new logo for my business I swore I'd finish in November.

Of 2022.

Some of those projects taught me something I needed for a completely different project, and some were stepping stones to a better version of an idea. Others were just fun for three hours on a Tuesday night.

As humans, we tend to treat unfinished work like failure, as if the only thing that counts is completion. Completion is one outcome, of course, but learning is another. Exploration is another: discovering you don't actually care about the thing you thought you cared about is a huge a win, not a loss.

I've built a career on finished work - we all have - sort of. But I also built it on the 47 things I didn't finish, because those projects showed me where the real ones were hiding. I think of them as wayfinding signs guiding my way towards retirement.