Finishing projects is an art. You need to balance pragmatism of getting things done with the bar on quality you set for yourself.
Many people I know are perfectionists, and have a high standard for themselves. This often comes from parents saying something like “why did you not get the highest grade?”, and class mates laughing when we do something poorly. Consequently, we are embarrassed to not deliver perfection. I guess parents ingrain this into children to embed a drive to their kids life, and to do their work well.
A harmful consequence of this is that it is really difficult to pick up new hobbies and independent skills. Whenever you try something new, first you suck at it. It’s frustrating because even as a beginner, you can tell very much how bad you are at it.
When I told my cousin, who installed a pull-up bar at home, that cannot do many pull-ups, he said to me: “That’s great! That’s the time when you can improve quickly!” But it is not easy to get frustrated, knowing that there are many people much, much better at what you are trying to learn.
Whenever someone says to me, “I want to learn X? How can you be so good at it?”, I respond:
How do you get good at anything? You do it shitty a thousand times first. — Johannes Buchner
Being bad at something but still practicing it for the fun of it, without ambition to become the best, is called dilettantism. Be a dilettante in many things and ignore the perfectionism.
I wrote this text, for example.
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