The Real Reason I Kept Abandoning My Ideas

I used to think there was something wrong with my follow-through.

I taught myself to sew a while back. I still remember the energy of it: fabric spread out on the table, pattern pieces pinned and cut, that particular excitement of starting something with your hands.

And then, without fail, I would stop.

Not because I got bored, or because life got in the way. Not really. I would just stop somewhere before the finish and move on to something else.

What I didn’t have, apparently, was an ending.

I eventually found the same pattern in other parts of my life.

There was BlueBlocs, a fully thought-through marketing consultancy, mapped out on paper. There was Punch, a social media venture I’d built just as that landscape was emerging, early enough that it could have gone somewhere.

Both were real. Both started with the same gusto as the sewing.

Both were abandoned before they became anything at all.

The Thing I Found in the Hallway Closet

I’d told my coach the story of the felt clown before. In fact, I’d included it in the intake form I’d filled out when she took me on as a client, in response to a question about a formative memory.

I’d known, in some vague way, that the story mattered.

I just didn’t know why.

She had a way of listening that made space for things I hadn’t quite found words for yet. This time, she asked me a simple question.

I’d made the clown. I’d been proud of it. I’d found it later on the floor of a hallway closet.

So she asked:

“Since then, what have you created?”

I sat with the question.

And the honest answer, once I let myself find it, was nothing.

That was the light-bulb moment.

I’d made that clown from pieces of shaped felt in a primary school art class, and I was properly proud of it. I remember presenting it to my parents and them telling me what a good job I’d done.

And then I remember finding it on the floor in the hallway closet.

There is no unkindness anywhere in this story. It just ended up in a closet, on the floor, the way things do in houses with children.

But looking back, I think that ordinary moment landed on something that was already there.

My older brother was the artist in our family. He drew, he painted, and he was good at it. Some of his work still hangs in my mother’s house today.

I was the academic.

That was my role, assigned early and accepted without question, the way roles get handed out in families without anyone sitting down to decide it.

Finding my little piece of art discarded didn’t just feel sad.

It felt like confirmation.

Like proof that I’d been right to believe that art wasn’t really mine.

So I made a decision, the way children do, without knowing they’re making one.

I decided art wasn’t mine. I decided to be the safe one, the reliable one, the one who didn’t put things out into the world and risk finding them, later, on a floor somewhere. I’ve written more about this pattern, and why it shows up for so many of us, in The Permission Problem.

Even though some part of me clearly wanted to create, I had decided it was safer not to.

And I carried that decision for decades.

Not as a thought I could point to, but as a pattern I lived inside.

Every unfinished dress.

Every idea I built halfway and let go of.

BlueBlocs. Punch. And whatever came before them.

I was never short on beginnings.

I just couldn’t let myself arrive anywhere.

Because arriving meant it counted.

And if it counted, it could be discarded too.

I think about that hallway closet often now, and about how ordinary the whole thing was.

No villain. No single terrible moment.

Just a small girl drawing a conclusion nobody meant her to draw, and then living by it for more than thirty years.

And it makes me wonder about the things we carry into adulthood without ever realising we’ve made a decision.

Maybe yours isn’t a felt clown.

Maybe it’s being the sibling who was labelled the sensible one, while someone else was the creative one.

Maybe it’s something you made that got put away somewhere.

Or maybe it’s the thing you’ve started over and over again but never quite allowed yourself to finish.

The course you’ve researched but never created.

The business idea you’ve been carrying for three years.

The book you’ve started six times.

The thing you keep telling yourself you’ll do when work calms down.

Maybe you’re not lazy.

Maybe you don’t have a follow-through problem.

Maybe, somewhere along the way, you learned that starting was safer than finishing.

You don’t need a coach and seven sessions to start looking.

You just need to get curious.

Ask yourself:

When did I first learn that it was safer not to finish?

And then perhaps the more important question:

What might I create if I stopped being afraid of where it might end up?