Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “Elegiac Verse”
The feeling of crossing the finish line on your best work is an exhilarating rush of ecstasy, relief, surprise, and pride. You have to lose yourself in the project only to find you’re a different person on the other side, for as we create, we’re creating ourselves.
Rather than just jumping to the next thing, it’s time to bask in the success you’ve created.
RUN A VICTORY LAP
Near the end of our convoy missions, we’d cross out of Iraq and back into Kuwait. About twenty minutes after crossing the border, there was a collective, palpable sense of relief, pride, and gratitude among our soldiers. Jokes would start, inane radio chatter would need to be squelched, and parts you didn’t know could clench would loosen up. We weren’t done, but we at least could do it by the numbers. It was then that I knew that I wouldn’t be writing any letters to family members or be a chew toy for the brass back at base.
One of the reasons I remember that feeling so vividly is that we actually had some transition time between the constant threat of ambush or mishap and being back at base, which, as a line leader, sometimes felt like a different kind of ambush zone. As a team, we had enough time to celebrate together in the ways that soldiers do — in short, we had time for a team victory lap before the busywork of base consumed our time and attention.
Victory laps are a regular feature of sports and other high-pressure events, but many of us don’t realize how analogs show up elsewhere in our lives. Wedding receptions, showing new babies to friends, graduation walks, and taking friends on rides in the new car are all versions of victory laps. When we make or achieve something significant, we want to show it. But just as important, we want to be seen for making or achieving it.
Yet when it comes to our best work, we often feel differently. It seems braggy, self-centered, or juvenile to celebrate the completion of our one
project when our heroes have done so much more and better work.
That the outcomes of our best work are unlikely to be as clear-cut as other types of work also make it hard to run a victory lap. In my story above, it was clear what success looked like: we delivered whatever we were ordered to, on time, and every soldier that we left with came back with us unharmed. We either accomplished the objectives or we didn’t. It’s the same with most of the other examples above.
But it always feels as if we could do more or do better than we did with our best-work projects. Given our negativity biases, even when we do share that we’ve finished something, we need to make sure to tell people how it could have been better or what it’s missing. If we meet our goals, we comment that we didn’t do a good job of setting the right goals. Rather than running the victory lap, we add a few
more missed rungs to the Jacob’s ladder we’re adept at building.
Chapter 4
focused on setting goals from the start to help compensate for the tendency to have postcommencement goal creep. But the other important piece is sharing that original goal with your success pack, for when it’s time to run your victory lap, they can rightly nudge you to celebrate and witness your victory. Sometimes the most important job of your success pack isn’t to help you get to the finish line but rather to help you reflect on and amplify your successful finish.
What we so often forget, though, is that the victory lap isn’t just about the victor but also the community.
Your success pack has been on the field or on the sidelines with you. Families and friends have missed you and pitched in for you in different ways. Your community has supported you and cheered you on the whole time. It’s likely that someone has been inspired by what you’re doing, and they’re making your victory an example of what they can do. Not
running your victory lap deprives your community of the chance to celebrate the victory they’ve been instrumental in accomplishing.
I’ve made the case for the victory lap so strong here because many people dismiss it as optional. It’s no more optional than saying thank you or showing your appreciation for the big and small ways people have shown up for you. It deserves to be on your postfinish checklist just as much as anything else does.
Here are some ideas for how to run your victory lap:
Let your success pack know when you’ve finished your project.
It doesn’t need to be elaborate or long — it can be a text that reads “Done!” — but they need to know, especially as they
may have rallied to help you get through the red zone.
When appropriate, make it a staple response to “What’s going on?” or “How’s it been?”
Sure, the cashier at the grocery store may not want to be engaged, but coworkers, neighbors, friends, and family probably do. The barista that’s made coffee for you and seen you typing away during your lunch break for six months might also be excited to know that they’ve been a part of the project too. Per the usual, it’s probably wise to avoid mentioning it to naysayers, and be cautious with derailers who may kneecap you.
Create a milestone moment.
It might be a celebration dinner with your family. It could be a vacation, if your means allow for it. It could be a concert or a community party. As a general rule, the more intangible your best work is, the more likely that you’re going to need to make it tangible and visible; the physicality of new spaces, stuff in the world, or performances often prompt the reflection in ways that intangible work doesn’t.
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Whatever your victory lap looks like, make sure to run it. You and the people around you deserve it.
MAKE SPACE AND TIME TO TRANSITION BETWEEN PROJECTS
There’s a natural tendency to want to start the next project right after finishing a major project, or at least plan that that’s what you’re going to do. Doing that, though, is akin to finishing a marathon only to immediately start running another. We’d understand the wear, tear, and likelihood of injury for the marathon runner, and, as you might guess, there are analogous conditions awaiting those who don’t allow for recovery and transition time with their work.
There’s also a corollary that follows the insight that the more it
matters to you, the more you’ll thrash:
the more it matters to you, the greater the need for downtime and transition time after finishing your project.
There’s a lot of your heart, blood, soul, and time tied up in the project, and finishing the project releases all that energy into the world. But, importantly, that energy is released from you
, meaning there’s an energetic void in you where the project once lived. Living with that void can be unsettling, disorienting, uplifting, relieving, and anticlimactic all at the same time.
Pushing a project through the red zone also often requires a lot of discipline, boundaries, and courage, so there’s residue all around you. Chores and administrivia may have piled up. Loved ones and friends may have directly supported your project or have dealt with being disconnected from you while you were plugged into the project. There may be a backlog of small projects that have accrued as you triaged your best-work project. And you may be flat-out spent after leaving it all on the field with your project — it’s not at all uncommon for people to get sick right after a big finish, as if their body was holding everything together just long enough to finish.
You may be dealing with all the elements above, or it may only be one that’s particularly weighty for you. In any event, it’s better to plan that you’ll need downtime and transition time and actually allow yourself to take it rather than assume that you’ll be on point immediately following the completion of your project.
Here are some questions to help give some defaults for your transition time:
What low-energy projects or tasks would either feel good to work through or relieve unnecessary pressure?
Who are the people you would either like to catch up with or who would make you feel less pressure to catch up with?
Do you have outlets, hobbies, or other activities that you would like to catch up on? For example, if you’ve been on a writing project but like gardening, catching up on your gardening would create some space without your sitting around twitching and looking for something to do.
If nothing else, you’ll have some cleanup work to do after you cross the finish line, so let’s discuss what that looks like.
GIVE YOURSELF TIME TO DO SOME CAT WORK — CLEAN UP, ARCHIVE, AND TRASH
The process of getting projects done is messy. Through the process, we hoard, scatter, cram, stack, lose, break, and wear out physical, mental, and digital stuff all over the place. Even when we create or maintain habits and routines that help us clean up as we go, there still tends to be a level of detritus and mess that routine sweeps miss.
After you complete a project is the perfect time for CAT (clean up, archive, and trash) work. You’ll be doing this work across at least three different areas — environmental, digital, and social — but you may also need to do some CAT work in other dimensions of your life. You may also be able to clean up and trash stuff, and then archive if you’re able to make quick decisions; or skip the cleanup if your routines have done a decent job of keeping things relatively organized.
Let’s walk through this step by step, assuming you need to do some cleanup before making decisions about what to trash and what to archive.
CLEAN UP
Depending on how messy you’ve been and how much was missed during any routines you have, this could be a quick process that moves on to archive or trash, but the main point of this phase is to make sense of what’s around you.
Use the list below to scan the three major areas of your life:
Environmental.
Your work environment may be your office, your kitchen table, your workshop, or wherever else you’ve been making stuff. Depending on what you’ve created, you may need to do some cleanup and maintenance on the tools you’ve used. Included in this cleanup and maintenance phase is restocking or replacing items that were expended throughout the process.
Digital.
Now’s a good time to make sense of all the links, working files, stuff dropped on your desktop, and notes and tasks you made for yourself. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to make sense of the digital mess you’ve made six months from now, so if you don’t do it now, it’s going to hang around and clutter up your systems and brain until you’ve had enough and have to clean it out. I recommend backing up your device before cleaning it out, so even if you mistakenly archive or trash something, you can still get to it later.
Social.
It may be strange to put your social life as a dimension for cleanup, but it’s useful to consider what needs to happen with the people around you. You may have put off a conversation while you were in the red zone and now it’s time to pick it up. You may have been less-than-your-best self when you were interrupted, or committed to a follow-up or made a promise that you need to see through. You likely have a long list of thank-yous to say, as well, and don’t want to get into the awkward zone where it feels too late to say it, but it also feels weird to not say it. (I’m not going to detail the archive and trash steps for the social dimension, but you may need some space (archive) or a breakup (trash) that’s beyond the scope of this book.)
ARCHIVE
Once you can make sense of your creative mess, you can make good decisions about what’s worth keeping and what’s not. In this step we’re going beyond just keeping stuff; we’re going to organize things to make them easy to find when we need them in the future. No more running around the house trying to find a book or having to look at seven versions of a file to figure out which one is the most recent.
Here’s how to work through what needs to be archived:
Environmental.
Archiving stuff in your environment can be as simple as putting it back where it’s supposed to be, but it may also include reorganizing your environment or storing some stuff that’s not being used. If you’ve printed out a lot of stuff, you may need to scan it or put it in labeled folders so you can retrieve it more easily later.
Digital.
In a similar vein, the archive step here centers on organizing your digital stuff so that it’s out of the way and easier to retrieve later. A chief difference is our natural tendency to keep a lot of duplicate files or slightly different versions. It seems like a good idea at the time but later creates more work as we try to figure out which file is the right one, or we have to check every item in a search. Even if you want to keep all the different versions, naming the final file “FINAL” makes it easier to spot in the future. A little bit of archiving now goes a long way later.
TRASH
Since you’ve cleaned up or archived everything else that matters, you can get rid of what doesn’t. “Trashing” could mean recycling, donating, or throwing something away. The main point is that it’s something you
no longer need, so there’s no point in hanging on to it, and the sooner it’s gone, the better. The longer you hold on to it,
the harder it’s going to be to get rid of in the future.
Here’s how to work through what needs to be trashed:
Environmental.
Physical stuff is harder to get rid of but generally easier to reacquire if you need it. The obvious exceptions to this are unique items such as heirlooms, high-end equipment, and so on, but those items typically aren’t the ones that are going to get in the way of the next project.
Digital.
Since you have a backup of the mess, deleting files is much easier. If you make a mistake, you can always retrieve it from your backup. Unless you produce or edit audio, video, or high-resolution images, it’s unlikely that you’ll take up enough space to be an issue.
I’m very aware that CAT work may sound slightly more appealing than dental work — it’s a frog that many of us, myself included, would rather not do.
But, like all frogs, it’s not a matter of if you’ll need to do some CAT work but how bad it will be when you have to do it.
Not doing it during your project transition time means that you’ll inevitably have to do it at the most inconvenient time during another project.
The printer will run out of toner right before you need to print off something to show to someone else. Or someone will ask for a file while you’re on a trip and you’ll have to spend an afternoon trying to find the right file. Or you’ll spill coffee on the stack in the corner of your desk or kitchen table right as you’re headed for your commute or off to an important meeting and thus have to choose between
saving the stack or being late (again).
So, since you’re intentionally between projects (right?), still close enough to the project for your mess to be intelligible, and needing some low-energy work to do, there’s no better time to do the CAT work that’s going to make your future work that much easier to do. I’ll take it one step further: CAT work is actually part
of the project and thus a part of fully finishing it.
AFTER-ACTION REVIEWS MAKE YOUR NEXT PROJECT EASIER, BETTER, AND MORE FUN
Throughout the stages of getting the project done, you’ve had a lot of wins as well as varying degrees of setbacks and challenges, and you’ve figured out how to get and keep momentum. Many of those elements will be common across other projects, and much like using your GATES, you can start your next project leveraging those lessons learned rather than learning them all over again. Learning something once is an investment; learning it twice is a waste.
After nearly every Army training activity, exercise, or event, an after-action review (AAR) is conducted, wherein participants from the event review it to improve operational efficiency, enhance training, and convert the experience into institutional memory. In most cases, the AAR is part of a checklist such that the event isn’t done until an AAR is completed. They’re so ubiquitous that soldiers often joke about needing to do them for the most minor and banal activities such as sweeping the floor or doing one push-up.
But more important than the efficiency, training, and shared-memory elements mentioned above is that it instills in everyone a habit of continuous improvement, at all levels. Though soldiers may
joke about doing an AAR after sweeping the floors, the thought process actually leads to improvements in floor sweeping and beyond.
TODD KASHDANCURATING AND TRIMMING RELATIONSHIPS
Think about your allies and social support network. Which had the greatest influence on you — when they showed up to help during times of trouble (picking you up at 3:00 a.m. after that flat tire, being available when you got a poor prognosis from the doctor) or when things went right (celebrating your promotion or your personal record in the gym)?
We’ve been culturally trained to believe that a good friend is there when life is difficult. In the last ten years, science has flipped the script to show that being supportive when others disclose triumphs and joys is the better predictor of relationship satisfaction, intimacy, commitment, and stability. This seems silly — why does anyone need your enthusiastic interest and questions that augment the details, prolonging their happiness? After all, they had the positive event, not you.
The reason is that support for positive disclosures is a safe way to test the alarm of whether someone truly cares about your welfare. What can you do with this knowledge?
You possess a new lens for discerning which friends to invest in (or with great pain, trim).
With deliberate practice of being there when things go right, you can disrupt habits and scripts to develop and sustain healthier, satisfying relationships.
You can be empowered to shape the relationships that are most desirable for your life. Instead of being a pawn who is passive, reactive, with little sense of control, you can be an originator who is active, responsible, with a profound sense of agency.
A world-recognized authority on well-being, strengths, social relationships, stress, and anxiety, Dr. Todd Kashdan, professor of psychology at George Mason University, has published over two hundred scholarly articles and is the author ofThe Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self — Not Just Your “Good” Self — Drives Success and Fulfillment, among other books.
Doing an AAR for your projects can have the same effect.
Rather than just mentally working through the questions below, I recommend writing down your answers in bullet form. That way, when it’s time to do your next project, you can review your last AAR rather than rely on your memory to do so. Our faulty memories, when they do work, are far more likely to recall setbacks and challenges than the wins and practices that led to our success.
The following are questions to ask during your AAR. The goal is to be as honest as you can with your answers — this isn’t the time to sugarcoat things or pile on yourself.
What went well?
This question is fairly straightforward, and we’re starting with it even though the natural tendency is to anchor on the next question. This question need not be focused merely on outcomes: consider the people, processes, and tools that made the project go well.
What setbacks, challenges, or missteps did I experience?
This question is also straightforward. Don’t forget to include challenges you had with other people or your planning, environment, or tools.
What did I learn?
This question is intentionally broad to cover project-specific lessons as well as those that are evergreen. Did you discover that you had a particular strength or weakness that you discounted? Did you learn a new key skill or gain insight into how key players in your ecosystem interact?
What habits, practices, or routines do I want to keep doing going forward?
To get through the void and red zone of your last projects, you likely had to develop or reinforce some habits, practices, or routines. For instance, I learned very early on while writing this manuscript that trying to draft from home wasn’t working, so I started going to a coffee shop that’s about three quarters of a mile from my house. As much as I’d rather write from home (in theory), in practice, going to the coffee shop is a routine that I’ll likely keep doing when it’s time to get some drafting done.
Were there any especially important difference-makers to the project?
For this question, consider difference-makers that go both ways. Your answer can repeat or elevate items already listed, as this question is the one that captures the top items you’ll want to remember in the future. For instance, a major difference-maker for this project was the health issue that ate up four months of the time I had to finish the book. But another (positive) difference-maker was retroactively creating a per diem budget and checking account for myself to allow myself to sink into the flow of working from the aforementioned coffee shop.
As you can see from some of the items I highlighted from my experience, what gets captured will vary from significant (four months of pain and discomfort eating up my writing time) to what may seem to be minor (going to a coffee shop to write). But capturing them all and reviewing them at the start of your next major project is incredibly helpful. For instance, if I happen to be lamenting or overwhelmed by how big a book project feels, remembering that I still completed this one on time despite losing
four months will help me see that I’ll likely be able to do the next one on the timeline I agree to. And I know to plan on going to the coffee shop and bake that into my plans and budgets unless I’ve created a better environment.
Your first few project AARs may create significant changes in the way you do your next projects. As you continue to do them, you may find that you “only” improve 1 to 5 percent per project. But 1 to 5 percent per project over a decade of projects amounts to astonishing improvements in your effectiveness, efficiency, and momentum. A focus block at the start of your project (to review previous and other relevant AARs) and at the end (to create a new one) is a small price to pay for what you’ll get out of the process.
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED NEW POSSIBILITIES BY FINISHING YOUR PROJECT
Along the way of completing your best work, you’ve overcome dragons, handled a horde of frogs, assembled a team, navigated a few logjams and tarpits, negotiated with derailers, shaped time, and tussled with your inner demons. You’ve been on quite the quest.
But you’ve also unlocked new realities, opportunities, and mastery by completing your project. And while “new realities” may seem to be out there, it’s actually true: there are conditions in this world that wouldn’t exist had you not done it when, how, and with whom you did it.
Every best-work project you finish leaves more of your fingerprints on the universe.
If nothing else, completing your project has spawned more projects. The nature of our best work is that we’re never done, and many of us create work and projects that carry on even after our death. The finish of one project is just the start of many others.
While it’s not an exhaustive list, the completion of your project may have unlocked new:
Projects.
Is there a new idea or project that can claim the place in your five projects that this one just opened up?
GATES.
What GATES did you cultivate, or what new ones got added to your array?
Communities.
What new communities did you work your way into?
Mindsets and stories.
What self-defeating story has your victory made untrue or what positive story has your victory made true?
Portfolio points.
Did you complete a project you need to show the world on your portfolio, resume, or vita?
You may be in a position where someone is responsible for giving you feedback on your work and career progression, but even in those scenarios, you’re responsible for writing and updating the story of your work and career. You’re doing the work to make the story, so go ahead and do the work of writing the story.
As important and powerful as finishing is, it’s important that we put it in the proper context. The following Buddhist aphorism captures the tension nicely:
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
We often believe that after we complete a significant project or journey, our life will be fundamentally different, but we often find that our life pretty much looks the same. If we place too much attachment on the world being different and better, it inevitably leads to frustration and suffering. But there’s also another insight embedded in the aphorism: after we accomplish something significant, we need to return to doing what we did to get there. Understanding the aphorism from a place of expected outcomes misses that it’s also about process and practice.
So, yes, set goals, make plans, put the plans to work, and navigate the void to go from idea to done. Celebrate the victories you accrue and be proud of the work. But when your work is done, take a breather, set new sights, and start finishing anew.
Before success, start finishing.
After success, start finishing.
When it comes to your best work, that’s both all there is to it and all there can ever be. Days spent doing your best work compound to create a thriving life.
A victory lap is a social activity that you and your supporters need.
The more a project matters to you, the greater the need for downtime and transition time after finishing it.
Giving yourself CAT (clean up, archive, and trash) time will make the next project easier to do because you won’t be fighting the messes of your last project.
After-action reviews make every project a learning experience at the same time that they set you up for greater success in future projects.
Finishing a best-work project unlocks new realities.
Let your success pack know when you’ve finished your project.
It doesn’t need to be elaborate or long — it can be a text that reads “Done!” — but they need to know, especially as they
may have rallied to help you get through the red zone.
