Finish What You Start PDF – Peter Hollins

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What exactly is finishing what you start and following through? You may have heard these phrases before, but what do they mean? To me, they mean making your intentions a reality. Too often, we’ll say we’ll do something, and we might even start it on a lucky weekend.

Finish What You Start PDF – Peter Hollins

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. Finish What You Start PDF

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 wooden 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.

Finish What You Start PDF – Peter Hollins

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 shortly thereafter, which gave me the boost I needed 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 paired with the canoe carving was listening to my favorite albums—something we rarely have time for these days. Finish What You Start PDF

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.

Finish What You Start PDF – Peter Hollins

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 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!

Finish What You Start PDF

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