I want to tell you something I don't usually say out loud.

I have thirty or more unfinished paintings in my studio. Dozens of books with a bookmark stuck somewhere in the middle third from reading and that many again that I have started to write. Courses I enrolled in, watched the first three lessons, and never returned to. At least six courses that I have written, then shelved and not finished. Projects that seemed urgent in October and are now just taking up shelf space and a quiet corner of my conscience.

I am an expert starter. Genuinely world-class. The beginning of things, the possibility, the newness, the first marks, that part I do well. It's the staying that gets complicated.

For a long time I carried this as a kind of private embarrassment. A character flaw dressed up as curiosity. The responsible version of me would finish what he started. Would see things through. Would have a studio full of resolved work instead of a studio full of questions and experiments.

But lately I've been wondering if I've been holding the wrong frame.

Not because finishing doesn't matter. It does, sometimes. But because the shame I've attached to the unfinished pile might be a borrowed feeling, handed to me by a culture that measures completion, not formation. That counts outputs, not becoming.

What if the starting is the point? Not always. But more often than I've given it credit for.

I don't have a clean answer to this. I'm thinking it through in real time, the same way I think through most things, by making, by writing, by paying attention to what surfaces when I stop defending myself.

This week I want to sit with the unfinished pile. Not to judge it. Just to look at it honestly and ask what it's actually telling me.

Here's what I know about my brain, and maybe yours too.

Novelty is a drug. Not metaphorically, but neurologically. When you begin something new, your brain releases dopamine. The curiosity, the possibility, the not-yet-knowing, that's a genuine chemical reward. And for neurodivergent brains in particular, that reward is sharper at the start and drops off faster once something becomes familiar. This isn't weakness. It's wiring. Being a dopamine junky is real.

So part of what looks like a finishing problem is actually a novelty economy. Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do. It's optimizing for learning, for stimulation, for the edge of what you know. The beginning of anything lives at that edge. The middle and end usually don't.

But there's something else happening too, and it's worth naming.

Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik Effect. Your brain keeps unfinished tasks in an open loop, mentally active, running quietly in the background, consuming cognitive resources even when you're not thinking about them directly. Every unfinished painting, every half-read book, every abandoned course or project is a tab left open. And you're carrying all of them.

That low-grade weight you feel? The vague sense of being behind, of things undone, of not quite being able to settle into the present work? Some of that is the open loops. Not shame exactly. Just load. Minimalism isn’t simply aesthetic restraint. It’s cognitive relief.

And then there's the identity question, which is the one I find most interesting and most unsettling.

We partly construct who we are through completed things. You point to work and say, I made that. I am someone who makes things like that. The finished piece isn't just an object. It's a piece of evidence about who you are.

When the pile of unfinished work grows, it can quietly undermine that narrative. Not because the unfinished work was worthless, it wasn't. But because it sits in a kind of limbo. Not quite experience, not quite evidence. Not yet part of the story you tell about yourself.

Here's the question I keep returning to though: what if the self is being remade in the starting, not just the finishing? Every time you begin something, you're trying on a version of yourself. Most of them don't need to be completed to teach you something real about who you are and who you're becoming and becoming is usually a big plus for me.

The problem isn't the starting. The problem might be the story we tell about what the starting means.

I've been thinking about a specific painting. Started it two years ago. Got about sixty percent of the way in45q6 to the part I was most interested in, the textural problem I was trying to solve, and then set it against the wall when I understood what I needed to understand.

By any normal measure, it's unfinished. But the truth is I finished the question I was actually asking. The remaining forty percent would have been resolution for its own sake. Proof of completion. Not discovery. Just a nod to product and an abandonment of the process that really mattered. Which is more authentic?

I'm not saying this to rationalize leaving things undone. Some of what's against my walls genuinely needs to be finished, and I know the difference. The ones that still have something to say to me, those are unfinished. The ones that already said it, those might just be done in a way I haven't given myself permission to acknowledge.

The harder question is which is which. And I think that requires actually looking. Not avoiding the pile, not feeling bad about it from across the room, but picking things up one at a time and asking honestly: does this still have something for me, or did I already get what I came for?

That discernment is its own practice. It takes honesty and a little courage. But it's different from discipline. It's closer to listening.

→ Read more about building a sustainable creative practice on the blog [insert link]

Two things landed in my inbox this week that fit almost too neatly into what I've been thinking.

The first was a marketing email for a book called The Black Book of Power. Not something I'd recommend, not my world. But buried in the pitch was a phrase I couldn't shake: Threshold Addiction. The idea that we get a genuine dopamine hit from intending to do something. Buying the book, signing up for the course, stretching a new canvas, for a moment, we feel like the person who has done the thing. Then the feeling fades. So we reach for the next threshold.

He was writing about productivity. I am not really a productivity guy as I align much better with anti-hustle and process. But I kept thinking about makers. The beautiful new sketchbook. The supplies for the technique you've been meaning to try. The course that promises to change everything. There's real pleasure in the beginning. That pleasure is not fake. But it can substitute for the work if we're not paying attention.

The second was from Anne LeCluff, a neuroscientist I follow. She was describing what she calls the Omnipotence Dilemma, what happens when everything feels possible and starting costs almost nothing. Her observation: when nothing forces you to choose, choosing becomes harder. What grows scarce isn't skill or access. What grows scarce is attention, conviction, and the ability to articulate why you're doing this work in the first place.

Two different writers, two different worlds. The same underlying problem: we've gotten very good at the feeling of motion. The practice of actually going somewhere is harder, and rarer, and worth more than we usually admit.

If the open loops are creating cognitive load, and they are, then the practical question is how to close them without necessarily finishing everything.

Here are three ways I've found that actually work.

The Conscious Abandon

Pick one unfinished thing and formally decide it's done. Not abandoned, done. Write it down somewhere: "I got what I needed from this. I'm setting it down." The act of naming it, of making a decision rather than just drifting away, closes the loop for your brain. It stops running the background process. This sounds too simple to work. It isn't.

The Harvest

Before you set something down, spend ten minutes extracting what you actually learned. One page, or even just a few sentences. What did this teach you? What would you do differently? What was the real question you were asking? This converts the unfinished thing into something your brain can file as complete, you got the learning, you recorded it, it's done. The half-read book becomes notes. The abandoned course becomes three ideas. The unfinished painting becomes a question answered.

The Pause File

Create a simple list, a notebook page, a document, whatever, called something like "On Hold" or "Waiting." Move things there intentionally rather than leaving them scattered across your studio and your conscience. The difference between an unfinished thing and a paused thing is agency. One happened to you. The other was a choice. Your brain responds differently to each. Getting things out of ambient mental space and onto a list closes the loop enough to release the weight.

(if you use ai to help keep you organized, notebook LM and mymind.ai do a fabulous job of helping out.)

None of these require you to finish everything. They just require you to be honest about what each thing actually is, still alive, ready to harvest, or ready to set down.

Nothing to offer this week beyond the newsletter itself.

If you're working through something like this, the unfinished pile, the open loops, the question of what finishing is even for, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. Just hit reply.

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Thank you for being here.

The unfinished things in your studio are not evidence of failure. They are evidence of a curious mind that kept moving toward what it needed to learn. The question worth asking isn't why you didn't finish? It's what you were actually looking for, and whether you found it.

Some things are done before they look finished. Some things need to be finished to be done. Learning to tell the difference might be one of the more important skills a maker develops over a long creative life.

Keep making. Even when — especially when — you're not sure where it's going.