The work stops, but it does not end

Davinci left behind tons of unfinished paintings and inventions when he died.

Art historians claim that his mind was so ambitious, his desire outran his performance.

Which was fine with him. Leonardo privileged the process over the product. He valued experimentation before resolution. Declaring things done wasn’t as meaningful as simply doing them.

Interestingly enough, one of his most famous paintings is an unfinished work. And five hundred years after his death, not only is there an entire exhibition dedicated to it at the museum, but the painting was also hailed as one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art.

Not bad for work that wasn’t even finished.

It truly is the integrity of the process, not the perfection of the product, that matters most.

Dostoyevsky’s biographer made almost the exact same observation about the novelist. Like his renaissance predecessor, for him, the work stops, but it does not end.

Instead of closure, it displays what might be called aperture, the possibility of perpetual continuation. Life itself is not product, he said, but truly processual in the sense that each present moment makes a real difference in selecting among many possible paths that could proceed from it.

How closely does that describe your own work? Are you more concerned with process or product?

Now, this doesn’t suggest that finishing isn’t valuable, because it certainly is. Real creators go from inception to completion. Those who don’t regularly bring their trains of thought to conclusion aren’t executing, merely ideating.

The secret is, if you become someone who consistently completes their work, then you earn the right to have unfinished pieces. You learn to forgive yourself for not shipping one thing, as you know in your heart you just shipped the last five things.

Leonardo abandoned paintings and inventions for any number of reasons, but one of them was the fact that he knew he already shipped things. There was already a track record of creative completion to stand behind, so it didn’t really matter if a handful of his work remained incomplete.

That’s the price of admission for being prolific. The only way to have great ideas is to have a lot of ideas, and some of those simply aren’t going to make it to the finish line.

But so what? Is anybody really counting?

Edison garnered over a thousand patents during his career, and considering how prolific he was, he probably had another thousand incomplete ones waiting in the wings.

But the finishing committee didn’t throw the book at him, because the sheer volume of finished works vastly outweighed whatever scraps he left behind.

Besides, maybe unfinished works serve a crucial purpose along our creative process. Maybe they have to be unfinished at the time to help is get to where we are today.

In my career as a songwriter, there have been countless verses, choruses and bridges that I wrote years ago, but never found a proper home.

They were fragments. Unfinished art. Works in progress.

And then one day, they magically materialized into one of my current songs, snapping right into place like a chiropractic adjustment.

Don’t you just love it when that happens? It’s like poaching from your own waters. Cannibalizing a car that never drove for its parts and repurposing that gear into a more suitable vehicle.

Whatever metaphor works for you, it’s all in service of the creative process. Yes, you’re the kind of person who regularly completes their work, but you’re also not a pathological completionist.

You don’t pressure yourself to complete every single task on your list, regardless of perceived utility, practical need and real cost. To quote the aforementioned philosophy biographer, the temporality of a processual work takes place not when it has been written but while it is being written.

Doing so might not get your unfinished work into a museum, but at least you’ll maximize your joy along the way.

Remember, as long as you’re delighted by the journey of discovery, you’ll meet success in enough cases to make the effort worthwhile.

Does your work end, or does it merely stop?