Art, Love and the Mortal Kombat Mantra
FINISH IT!!
It all started with Clarence from Kansas:
“You’re great at starting things. Terrible at finishing them.”
It’s odd to hear a stranger tell you who you are with pinpointed clarity while you’re still bumbling around getting ready to know yourself.
Clarence is an Enneagram coach and told me I was a “Seven” personality type. This reluctance to finish, he said, is a curse of the eternally enthusiastic Sevens.
I’ve written about starting (before you’re ready), showing up (consistently), the writing process itself, and building habits to help it all hum. But I’ve never touched on finishing. And here’s why.
Finishing, publishing, shipping a damn thing — it’s my obstacle, my dragon, my demon. Even in the last hour since I began this piece, my mind scattered to a hundred other shiny objects, new ideas, different tasks to start. I dream of the books I should be writing, the adventures I could be having, the half-baked business ideas waiting for me to launch, the people I long to meet.
Meanwhile, the books I’ve already started, the business ideas I’m already working on, the people I’m losing touch with are sitting, waiting, watching as I neglect them. This piece itself may even sit brewing 90% complete with a heaping mess of other half-finished maybe-masterpieces.
I desperately wanted to title this post “How I Stopped Sucking At Life and Began Nailing It Every Single Day.” It’d be great click bait. We love hearing from people who have figured at all out. “Here’s how I did it, here’s how you can too.”
Alas, this isn’t one of those posts. Instead I come to you bearing a list of passionately launched projects that are waiting for me to button up and ship off:
- Escape Into a New Direction guidebook for Escape The City (which I’m procrastinating on to write this very post).
- Publishing Tales of Ecuador (the sequel to Tales of Iceland, whose author and my friend is understandably upset that it’s over two years delayed).
- Squaring up on my finances (all the invoices, expenses, taxes, money owed, money owed to me).
- Completing the six books I’m reading.
- How to Wander, a book I’ve been trying to write for four years (available for pre-order here).
This, like most of my writing, isn’t to showcase how awesome I am. It’s largely about documenting my own becoming. And today the person I aim to become is someone who finishes more, more often.
Taking inspiration from a 90’s video game seems like a good way to start.
Do you remember Mortal Kombat? Each fighter had fatal “finishing moves” to end their opponent in the goriest 16-bit details you’ve ever seen. Each match ends with one fighter swaying half-conscious, holding onto their last thread of life. The omniscient announcer shouts “FINISH HIM!!” cueing the winner-to-be to land their unique and fatal blow.
Jax ripped off his opponents’ arms at the shoulders.
Sonya blew a kiss of death at her opponent, burning them to a skeletal crisp.
Liu Kang ludicrously turned into a dragon and chomped off his opponent from the waist up.
But the one I remember best was Kano. He torpedoed his hand into his opponent’s chest to rip out their bloody and still beating heart.
Now, I don’t love comparing the ripping out of heart with art, projects and other creative acts. But I’ll be damned if that announcer doesn’t also live inside my own head, shouting at me from somewhere and everywhere, reminding me about my many started projects, imploring me: FINISH IT!!!!
Maybe that announcer is actually Clarence from Kansas:
“Most people have a To-Do list. You need a To-Finish list.”
But starting is so fun! It’s exciting, it’s romantic, it’s sexy!
Yet we don’t know M.C. Escher, Louis C.K, or J.K. Rowling for their impulsively started works. We remember them for the labors of love they’ve finished.
And if projects are acts of love, which I think they are, maybe love is like John Mayer said: “Love ain’t a thing. Love is a Verb.”
If starting is love the noun (something that happens to you), finishing is love the verb (something you deliberately do).
(Or maybe starting is lust and finishing is love? I’m not sure.)
Either way, an entire relationship exists in each tiny creative birth. Starting is way sexier than finishing, and finishing well is about as sexy as clawing your way to a 50-year anniversary. The fluttery high school romance of a project fades somewhere in the long middle years. Slogging through that is a feat.
Of course finishing doesn’t mean you never quit a thing. That’s an act of finishing in itself. Not finishing and yet not quite quitting is sending it into a purgatory of sorts. Going back to the relationship analogy, it’s like taking “a break” but never coming back together to decide if it’s continuing or ending. Which is killing it, starving it, murdering it violently by neglect.
I’m recognizing that to grow into the writer, the adult, the human I hope to become, I’ll need to channel my inner Kano. I’ll need to pierce through whatever flesh and bone barrier sits between me and my undone projects, grip it by its pulsing heart, rip the damn thing out and FINISH IT.
Maybe you do too. Maybe there’s a project, an article, a drawing, an idea, swaying half-alive, half-dead, 99% finished and suffering in purgatory.
Maybe it’s time to channel your inner Kano — or Sonya or Liu Kang or whoever feels most appropriate for your personality and the task at hand — and FINISH IT.
After all, what we finish defines us.
I finished this piece.
Your turn.
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