This is a variation on the parent post's suggestion of picking a project you can finish in three days. I find that task can itself be hard, and is work that gets in the way of the fun work. In the past I've burnt out my excitement while trying to do it.

So I have 5+ small games, a game engine, an interpreter and a compiler, a few short stories, some music projects, a personal website, some art projects, and several books to read, and most aren't done.

When inspiration strikes, e.g. I'm feeling musical, I open up my music folder and click around a bit. Or if I feel like making a game, the first thing I do is go play one of my existing half-built games, and pop open the editor. It is helpful here to leave things in a working-ish state and keep ideas around in text files about what you could do next. Make picking the project back up easy for yourself.

I do also start new things or decide not to come back to old ones, but I wound up here by realizing that my interests aren't actually infinite. There's only about a dozen distinct things I really want to do and periodically get excited about.

For years I had been starting and then totally dropping projects, but I had "started making a game" a hundred times. My plan became to treat random projects like turning a ratchet, and I feel it's gone great from there.

I feel this way as well, but my reasoning is different. I do much better work when I feel like I don't have to do something, but I can choose to do something. I've almost always done more efficient work on my own side projects than on the things I've been assigned to do.

When I talk about an idea that I haven't really built out yet, it creates a sense of obligation to do that work. That sense of obligation makes me not want to do the grunt work required to get the project done. I do better if that obligation is all internal. In that sense, writing in a journal about my ideas and vision is much more beneficial to me than talking with people about it.

That said, I try to be careful about recognizing when I do need to talk with others. If I went too far in the internal approach, I'd end up doing years-long projects without ever validating that they're meaningful to other end users.

> Strangely, I could feel myself drawn towards the temptation of giving up, even though I knew failure meant certain death. In hindsight, I think it's because the act of giving up feels so similar to the sensation of success, at least in a superficially immediate way.

Over the years, the mantra that "giving up feels like success" has really helped me not give up simply to access that feeling.

[1] https://moxie.org/stories/brink-of-death/

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