Eradicating the Guilt of Unfinished Side-Projects
If you take a quick glean at my GitHub repository, there are a few things you can gather from it:
- I stay busy,
- I have diversified myself with different tech stacks,
- I have a definite passion for coding,
and 4. I have a habit of starting a bunch of new projects, and as a result, my GitHub accounts (yes, I have a few) have turned into a graveyard that is only fitting to haunt me on this fine October morning.
I learned that I have an adoration for new repositories. It feels like opening a new book for the first time — the smell of the pages, the stiffness of it, the way the cover feels virtually untouched and undefiled by human hands. If I were to give it a name, perhaps I’d call it fleeting passions. But, are they really passions if they don’t even stick longer than two weeks though? I’m not sure. Maybe I should call them think-flings — a passionate love affair of thought that brings you sudden fulfillment, only to leave you with no lasting effect on your life, despite feeling as if this will be the end-all thought that will make you millions one day.
You immediately start to think this will be the thought you settle down with and have little think-children that grow up and become contributors to the think-fortune, but weeks later you end up still married to the monotonous regularity of some Fortune 500 CEO’s core values day in and day out, while living out your free-time by adding more unfinished think-flings to your GitHub repository.
Every think-fling starts off just like Spring Break. You equate the feeling of meeting new people to discovering new depths of your mind while brainstorming your project. Instead of frolicking on the beach, you’re frolicking in new tech stacks and tools you wished your employer would let you use. Your skimpy bathing suit becomes your skimpy project with no unit or integration tests because you’re so wildly free that no one is lurking over your shoulder to remind you about stiff stuff like authorization security or alcohol poisoning. You get to be free, even if only for a moment. Maybe that freedom to do what you wanted was what you actually wanted all along.
I realized I like a moment to throw caution to the wind and just make something. Maybe some of those ideas would go on to be very successful and that drives my motives to put more quality into my codebase, but the reality is, as I try to order business cards for one of my think-flings, write one-pagers, press kits, and meet with people in the industry to identify how to work this at an angle of earning funding and users, I realize, I’ve gotten further away from what I enjoyed about the project, the freedom, and I stop.
I only recently realized that the reason I stopped wasn’t the reason I thought.
It’s a shame oftentimes we don’t understand the hidden motives of our own brain, or perhaps it lies to us because we’d be so ashamed to find out its actual motives that we’d stop desiring anything due to guilt and inner resentment which could lead us down a path away from survival. However, I digress I stopped because I had no think-fling, therefore I had no freedom to do what I wanted anymore, and I didn’t want to admit that my wills for freedom and control of my personal time meant more to me than becoming some ultra-rich multimillionaire with my own business. Expounding upon this analogy, my think-fling had finally upgraded to boyfriend material and as we know, relationships require a lot of responsibility and committment. In conclusion, I realized that managing a marriage with your employer and a new relationship with your side-project leaves you with little time for the flings you so enjoy.
So unless you’re ready to give up certain freedoms, I encourage you not to feel so bad about having multiple, unfinished projects, as I no longer do.
