The Draft

We all have that one side project sitting in a folder, scribbled down in a semi-filled notebook that you bought specifically for this project a decade ago, waiting to be finally finished in this life or the next.

What happened? You really liked that idea; it’s all you were talking about.

It never went away, really; it’s still there. Haunting in the back of your mind, the thought of how your life could have been by now if you had stuck to it. A private git-repo last edited 2 years ago.

You see the other content creators making a living with their ideas, having a thriving community, having this seemingly endless freedom to do anything they want, being more successful in a month than you’ve ever been since the dawn of the internet.
Even your closest friends seem to live better lives than you, and it’s surely just because you didn’t finish your dream project that could have changed everything in your life.

Then one day (the fact that it’s a few days before the new year is a complete coincidence), you finally rise up from your sorrow with this sudden urge to tackle this project.
Surely, this time you’ll finish it; you’ve collected enough experience in the meantime to finish it even faster than before.

It’s been a year since you last worked on it, so it’s better to start from scratch because clearly you learned a lot and the old prototype is clearly amateur-level. You won’t need any of that old stuff.

You power through the week, making serious progress. Good job, you! At this rate, you might even later include these other ideas you had to make the whole thing perfect. Better yet, start working on them now, before you forget about it.

You can already see it: thousands of people seeing your work, nitpicking these details that have been on your mind for days now.
You’ve seen the other people’s work; it’s imperfect and clearly shows signs of inexperience; your result must be flawless, otherwise no one will notice all your hard work.

Hmm, what’s wrong? You’re barely making progress. I tell you what, why don’t you take a short break? Hey, I remember this other idea you had in that notebook. Can we take a look at that? You still have months ahead, so a quick side quest won’t hurt.

We all have that one draft sitting on a hard drive, photographed from some old notebook you used to have 20 years ago in high school, waiting to be finally finished in this life or the next…