We all want to accomplish a lot.
We know that accomplishing anything significant will require focus, and that it will take time. And that anything of significance will certainly require a lot of effort.
But that doesn’t seem to stop us from piling up our ambitions.
When a new idea or opportunity arises, we embrace it and add it to the list. It’s energizing to think about all the things we’ve set out to do.
But we can’t do everything. And we certainly can’t do it all at once. We need to choose what happens next. Not which thing to start, but which thing to finish.
Starting is exciting, but it’s really only finishing that matters.
We can leave a bunch of ambitions out there and continue to pile them on. But we should be very selective about which one is going to get done next. And then we should focus on doing it well, all the way through to completion. Then we can make our next choice, and step by step we’ll make real progress over time.
We’ll always have an increasing mound of ambitions before us, but we’ll also start to accumulate an impressive list of accomplishments. And it’s those accomplishments are where our biggest rewards and best lessons come from (even if things don’t always work out as we had hoped).
Finishing > starting.
Photo credit: Anne
