I've been 🤏 close to abandoning a couple of the projects I've been working on because they got challenging.
But I'm glad I didn't.
I kept powering through and, as a result, I'm a more confident builder. I've even had a couple of people ask me for advice because they know I've figured it out.
Abandoning isn't always bad
Maybe the market has changed. Maybe the technology has changed. Maybe you learned something that made your idea irrelevant. Maybe you realized you were solving a problem nobody actually has.
Those are good reasons to walk away.
But because it's more complex or harder than you thought it was going to be? I think there's a solid argument to keep powering through.
"90% done is not done" -Aaron Francis
When I got about 90% done with my generate art on a tshirt app I was ready to throw in the towel. I'd already spent a lot of time figuring out APIs, webhooks, Stripe, Printful, and it still just wasn't there.
The biggest, scariest, hardest part was the physical print. Because it felt out of my control. Almost out of reach.
So in my head I started to think: why am I even doing this, no one is even going to care. There are about 100 other projects I could do instead.
Then Aaron Francis posted a manifesto in the Laravel Slack that said "90% done is not done." Now, he definitely wasn't talking about this specific project, but this line stood out to me:
Do things with high conviction, high care, and high craft, and mark things as complete.
I thought harder about why I wanted to abandon this project. It wasn't because no one was going to care. That was an excuse for "ok, this is just too hard."
I'm an "expert" now
I pushed through. Printful successfully sent me a shirt with my generated art on it from the app I built. It took weeks to get there, partly because print-on-demand doesn't happen overnight. (not yet anyway)
Then I shared what I made on X. I didn't polish it as much as I would have liked, BUT I pushed past the hard part: getting the app → Stripe → Printful APIs to actually work together.
Pushing through helped me go from "I think I can do this" to "I definitely know I can do this."
The confidence comes from actually having figured it out.
Something else happened that I didn't see coming. People asked me for advice on how I did it. And I could actually answer them.
That's one of the sneaky benefits of finishing hard projects. You don't just finish the project. You also become someone who knows how to do the hard thing. And that knowledge compounds.
You get more ideas because you understand what's possible (and how it's possible). You get better at troubleshooting because you've seen what breaks. You become faster because you don't have to figure everything out from scratch the next time.
And, most importantly, you take on even more ambitious projects that you didn't think were possible before.
So is abandoning a project bad? I don't think so.
But if the reason you're jumping ship is because it's hard, you might be missing an opportunity to really grow.