The Power of Completion

“When my husband does the dishes, he always leaves some plates in the sink, their surfaces unwiped. I tried to correct the behaviour until I remembered that if I finish everything in my Work in Progress Folder, I’m afraid I’ll die,” Sarah Manguso once said. Yet the truth is that completion recharges energy, rather than using it up.

Perfectionists love to begin new projects, because as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind. By contrast, finishing things means struggling your way through the messy, imperfect reality.

Social psychologists describe what’s going on here with “construal level theory”, which refers to the way we envision objects and events from different mental altitudes. For example, when considering how to spend your next summer holiday, you’re likely to picture it from 30,000 feet—“going to the beach”, or “hiking in the mountains”. But when it nears, you start focusing on details like which beach, or mountain trail. Similarly, any major undertaking starts as outlines, smooth; only when digging in do you face imperfections and then mistakenly assume that a new project might be free of them.

And yet, in reality, repeatedly starting but rarely finishing things is a recipe for suffering. People think finishing things “would exhaust even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it”, Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see “that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy”.

The trick to finishing things is simply to redefine what counts as finished. Instead of viewing a project’s completion as only occasional, after days or weeks of work, think of your days as sequential (连续的) small “deliverables”. Each ending provides an energy‑boost for the next. “Work is done, then forgotten,” says the Tao Te Ching (《道德经》). “Therefore it lasts forever.” You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward.