The Project

It’s my view that projects are 1. all-consuming and 2. end in tragedy. To anyone who disagrees, I’d respond: OK, let me add the qualifier that any GOOD project is 1. all-consuming and 2. ends in tragedy. Moving forward, anytime I say "project," you can assume I’m talking about a good project.

Let’s start with this: all projects are ultimately idealistic. What I mean is that any good project 1. begins as an idea and 2. isn’t realistic, because it can’t be. The reason it can’t be realistic is that what makes a project good is that it is derived from one’s imagination, not from one’s pre-existing reality. Because projects are always birthed from idealism, they are almost doomed to fail once we get started on them.

If you disagree that a project needs to be unrealistic, I’d argue that the projects one imagines are artificially limited by 1. their environment, or what they have access to, and 2. their ego. So, if your projects aren’t ending in failure, you’re probably not dreaming big enough. This could be because you either 1. don’t have exposure to things that make you dream bigger, or 2. you don’t have a big ego. You might think number 2 is good, but when I say that projects end in tragedy, I mean that they end in catharsis.

Once you begin working on your project, you’ll quickly realize that things are harder than you thought. That’s because the project is the domain of the amateur. In other words, projects are always your first attempt at doing the thing you’re doing. If it’s not your first time, then it’s probably not a project—it might be a task or a job, but probably not a project.

While it might be your first time doing the specific thing you’re doing, it isn’t your first time exercising the skills required for the project to be completed. Projects are always a coming together of many skills. If you’re making an album, it certainly isn’t your first time playing an instrument, it isn’t your first time jamming with other people, it isn’t your first time making art, it isn’t your first time paying a professional for help, and it isn’t your first time telling the public about something you’ve made. Once you’ve made an album, the next one isn’t really a project unless it’s an album that’s completely different from your previous work.

Because projects are the domain of the amateur, they are usually DIY, which means wearing lots of different hats. Both a job and a task typically require doing one thing, more or less, but a project entails doing many things.

While projects require doing many things, they also require doing many things repeatedly. A project, more often than not, requires you to return to it and continue where you left off. In a sense, a project is a series of promises to your future self. If those promises are kept, they strengthen the trust you have in yourself. But if they are broken, that trust cracks and weakens.

If not immediately, then over time, you’ll find yourself butting up against your limits of what you’re capable of doing in some area. At this point, your blind spots emerge—the things you didn’t account for when you were just imagining what it would take for the project to come together. Tiny things that, in hindsight, seem obvious. These tiny things, which seem simple, end up taking a lot of your time because they are beyond your current skill level. As your project progresses, it seems these obstacles keep popping up, and eventually, stress becomes the most familiar feeling.

Being tasked with things that are beyond your skill level leaves you constantly stressed out. As a result, this stress begins to follow you into other areas of your life—it shows up in your personal relationships, your health, and so on. At this point, the project has taken over your life—it has become all-consuming.

Depending on one’s pain tolerance, completing the project is now mostly a mental challenge. It becomes a matter of managing one’s emotions well enough to avoid collapsing and giving up prematurely. By this point, you’ve received enough information to become disillusioned with the reality you once imagined. Looking back at how you started, you can see that the project (even if finished) fails to be exactly as you envisioned it—a little part of you dies tragically. And while there may be a moment of grieving that old self, the catharsis that eventually follows allows you to gain a strength you didn’t have before the project began.