Arguably, all I have are a bunch of unfinished projects. Some are just "on hold", the subject still interests me, though the passion has dwindled. Some are ju

Arguably, all I have are a bunch of unfinished projects. Some are just "on hold", the subject still interests me, though the passion has dwindled. Some are just dead, they served their purpose. Some are "in production", in that I use them but don't "work on them". They're good enough. Back in the day, we were using a tool that facilitated rapid iteration and development. The premise (way before any of this stuff became really fad-ish) was to get the customer involved. Fast results, early demonstrations, fast feedback. You know the drill. But the key take away was the analogy he promoted. Simply "it's one thing to have sheet music, it's another to hear it". The premise being you can write the music all you want with notes and staves and what not, but it's not real until you hear it. And, I don't know anything about music, so I can't speak to how actually writing music works for folks. But the point was made. You can make all the slide shows you want, but running code, hands on experience speaks volumes more than shouting at each other in a room with a whiteboard. Of course, like everything, it's nuanced. But the point is made. Recently, my friend had a need, and we came up with a pretty cool database type of system. No reason to go into details, but it was pretty cool, we came up with some great concepts, we thought through some hard problems, we started pounding out code, wrote up a nice rough draft of the query language. In the end though, we felt that we were working on a trap with no mouse. The need wasn't that great. So we shelved it. We were close, but not quite to the most minimal MVP. To prove the core tenet. But, even close we felt it wasn't worth pursuing. So, we stopped, and really haven't looked back. And there's nothing wrong with that. Learn, move on. That said, it behooves to make honest appraisal of why something is being stopped. Sometimes, and it's hard to tell when, but sometimes it's worth pushing through whatever barrier has come up and push on. Maybe with a little more work, you'll find that whatever was stopping you was surpassed and is no longer holding you back. Perhaps some new wind will fill your sails.