From One Tinkerer To Another

My Fellow Tinkerers,

If you are plagued with projects that you started and never finished, relegating them to “the back burner”, thinking that “someday” you’ll get to them, you are not alone. Oftentimes creative people get excited about an idea or project and start with great enthusiasm, only to get bogged down and lose steam half-way through. This is common among us tinkerers and analyzing a bit some possible causes, here is what I came up with: The initial excitement is for the idea, not for the doing itself.

Sometimes, in the middle of the project a new idea comes and one loses interest in the work at hand and abandons it. At times our projects are considered “unpractical” by those around us and if we don’t have their support, we lose heart and quit, moving on to something else. I would also like to look at possible ways to overcome this predicament and for me, one motivator is my age; at 66 I realize that I don’t have all the time in the world and I push myself, not only to finish a project that I started, but also to tackle some from the “back burner” and bring them to completion.

When ideas come, I try to gage them for their importance, like on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I want to do a project over another? Of course, at times we have to keep those around us happy and choose a “practical” project over a dream project, and finish it too. I find that collaborating with others and receiving feed-back and affirmation is a great motivator to complete projects. Years ago, while being part of a Calligraphy Guild that met once a month, at the end of each meeting we would receive an assignment due the next meeting. That took time and commitment and in spite of the business of life with jobs and families, we never missed an assignment.

So, I just want to close with this, there are times when we just have to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and press on and finish the projects we start, if for nothing else, to avoid giving our lot a bad name.