I knew a somebody who was addicted to Oxycontin. “Sometimes I think about getting clean,” he said. “Like every day. But then I think, nah. I made my choice. I’m going to stick with it.”

What grit. He’s like the entrepreneur who is determined to see her business model all the way to its logical conclusion, even if that means drowning with the ship. The fanatically committed professional and the junkie each refuse to commit to abandoning their commitments. And we admire their doggedness. We want to believe that if we are persistent enough in proving our devotion to some skill, problem, person, project, we will have achieved something worthwhile.

I met a former ballerina. She started learning ballet when she was 3. She wanted to be a professional dancer. Then she wanted to be a professional dance teacher. Most of her free time was completely occupied by dance for her entire life. She continued ballet until she was 22. Then she quit.

She wanted to be a normal person, she said. She made quotation marks with her index and middle fingers.

She quit a beautiful art form that she had nearly mastered because she did not want it. Now she’s working as a barista and she’s figuring out what she wants.

Beginning a new project or working toward a new goal is easy. Beginnings are accompanied by a vital heat. When we begin a project we are drunk on a vision. The hangover produced by the tediousness of the actual work has not yet left us tired or bitter.

Our excitement escalates. Then we meet a challenge. Not small, identifiable, easily-overcome challenges — these feed our confidence and self-satisfaction. I mean jury boxes full of doubts that call into question not only our competence but the validity of our entire enterprise. No outcome can be worth this much investment, they say. Sometimes we listen to their judgement. Our abandoned projects clutter the back of our mind like memories of once-lovers.

We love to pass around advice on Being Productive and Achieving Your Goals. Articles on the subject of completing tasks are everywhere. We’ve memorized their messages:

1. Work on it every day.
2. Break large, vague tasks into smaller, more specific tasks.
3. Set designated amounts of time to work on projects.
4. Give yourself rewards for completing jobs.
5. Remind yourself of your original vision.
6. Write embarrassing inspirational quotes on post-it notes and plaster them around your desk.

On it goes.

I’m less interested in the effectiveness of these tactics than I am in what their widespread proliferation tells us about ourselves. Here are a few basic conclusions that are worth acknowledging:

1. We believe that we want to finish what we start.
2. We often have a hard time finishing what we start.
3. We want to believe that our ability to get things done can be improved.
4. When we don’t feel like finishing something, we often believe that the problem lies in ourselves, rather than the project itself.

But maybe we don’t finish so many of our projects because most of our projects are bad ideas. Maybe some part of us knows that our motivation isn’t authentic, or that our premise is flawed, and that’s why we resist completion.

Maybe your kid will still go to college if you don’t get that promotion. Maybe your screenplay is a dud. Maybe the product your startup is offering just isn’t really that valuable. Maybe your life won’t improve all that much after you start going to the gym for an hour every day. Maybe. We may as well consider these doubts as real possibilities, rather than hastily and defensively reject them as loser-talk.

Perhaps our unwillingness to finish what we start is a valuable message. Perhaps our failure to follow through on all of our goals is saving us from squandering our best work on our worst ideas.