Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done pdfdrive com

You Can’t Schedule a Crisis but You Can Call a Friend
When you work with people who were stuck and then miraculously had a
breakthrough, there are generally two reasons they did.
The first is that they had a life-altering experience. Meredith went back to
finish her degree after twenty-three years because she had open-heart surgery
and realized how fragile life was.
That’s an incredibly powerful form of motivation, but not one you can really
plan. I can’t have a chapter in this book called “How to Almost Die.” A
dramatic, near-death experience can’t be the solution, despite what happened to
Michael Douglas’s character in the movie The Game. Rich beyond belief and

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bored, Douglas is thrust into a life-or-death experience that ends up being an
elaborate birthday gift from his brother, Sean Penn.
I’m sure if you’re an oil tycoon you have access to things like this, but
you’re probably not. That leaves us with the second way to make sure you finish.
A friend.
Time and again, when I researched what really helped people finally finish,
it was a friend who did the trick.
The artist who shredded her work, experienced that firsthand. One day, she
mentioned to a friend that she had been destroying the things she made. It wasn’t
a big intervention moment; she shared it casually, in passing.
The friend’s eyes grew wide and he said to her, “No more shredding!” That
was the day she quit.
What I love about the story is that the friend didn’t give her some eloquent
explanation of why she needed to stop. The friend didn’t show her a framed
photo of other artists and tell a Robin Williams–style story about how they are
all quietly telling her “carpe diem.” The friend didn’t commit to track her
progress over the following months and rearrange his entire life. The friend
wasn’t Morgan Freeman.
I think that’s what we want sometimes.
We expect a wise guru to emerge from the shadows of the day and tell us,
“Either get busy living or get busy dying.” Granted, everything sounds better in
Freeman’s accent, but the change we need is usually not that elaborate. It’s
usually not complicated. It’s usually not that dramatic.
It’s a friend who breaks the habit loop and tells you to stop shredding. It’s a
friend who tells you the thing you’ve accepted as normal isn’t normal. It’s a talk
show host who makes fun of you.
That last one probably won’t happen to you, but it’s what spurred comedian
Chris Hardwick to change. One night, Jon Stewart made a comment about Chris
on The Daily Show. Watching at home, Hardwick was crushed by the jab. He
decided that night that he would quit drinking, lose weight, and get his business
in order.
Was it easy? Of course it wasn’t, but the point is that it started with
something small from a fellow comedian and friend.
We need friends during the entire goal, but they are most critical at the finish
line.
Go find one, and perhaps even more important, go be one.

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Author Josh Shipp spent his childhood bouncing around from foster home to
foster home. A lot of teens would have been stuck in that experience, never able
to make their way out of that hardship. Josh turned his experience into a mission
to help other at-risk kids. One of his favorite sayings is, “Every kid is one caring
adult away from being a success story.” I love that idea and think it’s true of
kids. I also believe it’s true of adults.
We don’t ever age out of needing someone to believe in us.
It’s not complicated. It’s not difficult. It’s not time-consuming. Someone in
your circle needs to be told to stop shredding. Unless they’re a surfer. And then
you need to say the opposite of that, obviously.