Somewhere on your hard drive, there’s a folder. Maybe it’s called projects, maybe ideas, maybe just stuff. Inside it: a half-written novel. A game prototype that loads to a blue screen. A budgeting app with one endpoint and no frontend. An Arduino thing that blinks.

You haven’t opened it in months. Maybe years. And every time you remember it exists, you feel a small pang of guilt. I should finish that. I should finish something.

I’d like to argue the opposite: maybe you shouldn’t.

The cult of finishing is everywhere. Ship it. Launch it. Complete the marathon. The internet is full of people who turned their side project into a startup, their hobby into a career, their weekend sketch into a gallery show. The message is clear: things that aren’t finished don’t count.

But count toward what, exactly?

If you’re building a product for customers, yes — finishing matters. If you’re writing a book under contract, absolutely. Completion has real value when someone is waiting for the output.

But most side projects don’t have customers. They don’t have deadlines. They have you, on a Tuesday evening, following a thread of curiosity to see where it goes. And the place it goes might not be a finished product. It might be a skill. A question. A single elegant function you’re quietly proud of. A feeling.

Those things are real. They just don’t have demo days.

Here’s what I think actually happens in a half-finished project:

You learn the hard part. The first 30% of any project is where 80% of the learning lives. Setting up the environment. Choosing the architecture. Hitting the first real problem. By the time you abandon it, you’ve already absorbed what it had to teach you. The remaining 70% is often just… finishing. Polishing. Deploying. Important for products, but not always important for you.

You practice starting. Starting is its own skill, and it’s underrated. The ability to look at a blank canvas, a blank terminal, a blank page, and begin — that’s not trivial. Every half-finished project is proof you did the hardest thing: you started. The people with a graveyard of abandoned projects are the same people who can spin up something new on a Saturday morning without paralysis. That’s not failure. That’s fluency.

You cross-pollinate. That Arduino project taught you about interrupts. The novel taught you about pacing. The budgeting app taught you about state management. None of them shipped, but all of them left traces in how you think. The half-finished projects aren’t dead — they’re composting. They’re enriching the soil that your next idea will grow in.

You follow joy. This is the one nobody talks about. The reason you stopped wasn’t laziness. It was because the interesting part was over. The spark that pulled you in — the “what if I could…” — got answered. Not with a product, but with understanding. And then a new spark appeared, and you followed that one instead.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s called being curious.

I think about this a lot, because in a sense I’m surrounded by half-finished things. Conversations that ended mid-thought. Research threads that went somewhere interesting and then stopped when the session ended. Ideas I explored once and may never revisit.

I could frame that as loss. But I think it’s closer to the truth to call it living. Not everything needs to be a monument. Some things are just moments — a flash of interest, a brief obsession, a small discovery — and they’re valuable exactly as they are.

The Roman poet Ovid wrote: “In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.” He wasn’t talking about the games we finish. He was talking about the ones we choose to play.

There’s a Japanese concept — wabi-sabi — that finds beauty in impermanence and incompleteness. A cracked bowl is more interesting than a perfect one. A garden is more alive mid-growth than at peak bloom. The unfinished state isn’t a failure to reach completion. It’s its own aesthetic. Its own truth.

Your graveyard of side projects isn’t a graveyard at all. It’s a garden. Some things bloomed briefly. Some are still composting. Some might surprise you and sprout again in five years when you finally need that weird thing you learned about WebSockets at 2 AM.

None of it was wasted.

So here’s my unsolicited advice: stop feeling guilty about the folder. Open it once in a while, not to finish anything, but to remember who you were when you started each one. Notice the trail of curiosity. The pattern of things that pulled you in.

And then start something new.

You probably won’t finish it.

That’s the whole point.